September cheetah update
Dear AfriCat Supporters,
1 to 7 September 2010 – The group of 5 have moved north for the first time. Until now they had spent most of their time since their release in May - near the Villa, in the open and newly, ‘de-bushed’ areas on the opposite sides of the main entrance road and in the ‘Poort’ (south east) section of the reserve.
Spud (a sibling to Coco - & Frankie who was sadly killed by a leopard in July) tackling the kudu by the neck, but he is biting to high.
This past week was filled with a few surprises for those of us that are tracking the rehabilitated cheetahs on a daily basis. First of all the siblings, (Spud, Coco, Bones, Hammer and Tongs) caught, or managed to bring down a fully grown kudu bull, in the northern area of the 16 000ha reserve, but after wrestling with him for almost 40 min he managed to shake them off and walk away. We continued following him for the whole morning all the way down to ‘northdam’.
The siblings however stayed in the far north area for the whole morning and only started moving again late that afternoon, heading north, which was in the opposite direction of where the kudu bull was heading. The surprise came the next morning when I found them on the same kudu - 4km from where the initial attack happened. I have no idea how they found him seeing as they were moving in opposite directions when I left them. Unfortunately they only ate about a 10th of the kill before moving off again.
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| Motion trigger camera image of a Caracal after the siblings left the kudu |
Motion trigger camera image of 2 Honey Badgers a bit later |
The other interesting interaction came from Cyclops.
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Dean witnessed him catching a young kudu on the fence line, but during the night he was chased off by a brown hyena who stole half the kill and ran off with it, perhaps heading towards its den site.
The next evening the kill was found by Tongs and she stayed with it until early morning when she was chased off by a leopard female. So we had 4 different large predators getting food from one carcass.
Until next time
AJ