The lions may have be lying low in the past week, but the cheetahs more than made up for it on Wednesday morning. We came across them just after they had made a kill. The mother has five cubs who are about three months old. All of them were busy eating their way through an impala for breakfast.
The cubs will be kept on the reserve until they are about six months old so their mother can teach them to hunt. They will then be sold to other reserves to ensure there is no cross-breeding and to maintain a healthy genetic pool. Moreover, the reserve wouldn't be able to support seven adult cheetahs with enough prey to sustain them. They need to kill every single day and young cubs will sometimes kill just for the fun of it and to hone their skills.
As they polished off their first kill, they started to move off and we followed them. One cub didn't want to leave anything behind and took one of the impala's legs with it, even through there didn't look to be much meat on it. A couple of the other cubs stopped off to climb a tree and sharpen their claws. Once we had found them all again a short distance away, we realised that they had already made another kill. The mother and all five cubs were busy eating again and the amount of blood on their faces indicated that it could not have been the remnants of the first impala. In the space of only five minutes since they moved off, they had killed yet another.
We moved in fairly close - around ten metres away - to identify their prey. We had an amazing view of them chowing down and having a tug of war over a leg.
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| Not leaving anything behind |
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| I could be a leopard if I wanted to |
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| Okay, this is a bit high |
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| Chow-down no. 2 |
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| Share nicely |
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| Finger-licking good |
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| Slinky mama |
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