Rare Leopard Sighting and More!
- Samih Taylor, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania
- Apr 29, 2016
- 2 min read
Hi everyone from the African Ecology and Conservation program!
Skukuza is pretty awesome. I’ve seen a menagerie of animals and I’m learning something new just about every day.
In rural South Africa, because of the extreme terrain, heat and danger of wild animal contact, most people here, from what I’ve seen, drive trucks, which they call buggies. If you don’t drive a truck, you get from place to place in a quantum, which is a big van or a GDV which stands for Game Drive Vehicle. This what a GDV looks like:
So that’s just a normal big truck with this extra seating appendage on the back as you can see.
On the way here we passed the Tropic of Cancer, which is cool too.
Remember, I was coming from Punda Maria which is higher than Shingwedzi and going towards Skukuza.
One day we had all gotten out of class and people had started dispersing, our teacher gets a call from his co-worker’s wife that there is a leopard in a tree!
So a few of us were still in class and he’s like “There’s a leopard, do you guys wanna see?” And we were all like “Yea!” So a few of us hopped in the GDV and hurried there and got to see a leopard in a tree with an impala he had just killed. Which is very rare.
Our teacher had only seen it four times in his entire life. THEN the leopard got down, went into the bush and brought his mate so she could eat. It was so cool and super rare.
We had all just gotten out of class so no one had a real camera…But I took a pair of binoculars and put my ipod camera to it and got the first picture:
More cool animals I was able to see:
This is an Impala, the South Africa popular culture has a funny name for them. If you look at their behinds, the black markings kind of form an “M” so many people here call them McDonalds because they are eaten by virtually everything in the wild. They are “fast food”.
More to come soon about my Capstone Research Project!
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