The 2025 Botswana Journals, Ch. 6: Hard-WIred Guides

African game guides are hard-wired to find leopards.  Or so Marg Wood told me some years ago when we were in Kenya.

It was near sundown back then, and Marg and I were almost ready setting up to photograph elephants on a near horizon against a, Marg Wood told me some years ago when we were in Kenya, beautiful sunset.  We were slightly below the beasts, enough to see the light below their bellies.   This would be awesome.

Suddenly, without a word, our driver whipped the vehicle around and smashed through the riverine vegetation nearby.

And there was the leopard, all right, winding her way right through a scrum of a dozen or more safari vehicles, and too dark for any decent photo.   It was the beloved leopard called Fig, she of the blue eyes.   To see her alive and safe was rewarding, but by the time we extricated ourselves from the scrum, it was too late for anything but heading back to camp.

 

That hard-wired thing is true with all the big cats—lions, leopards, cheetahs.   That’s what the tourists and photographers want to see so that's what the guides try to provide.

 

Today, our guides hear of lions in an area accessible by the safari vehicles, so off we dash over the bumpy, rutted dirt and rock roads on what we call a “Ferrari Safari.”

Eventually, they find them, and there were only a few vehicles there.   Marg asks the driver to pull off the road and into a sandy area that was below the road.  The vehicles are supposed to remain on the roads, but this small bit of sand obviously had seen traffic before.

Besides, the lions had possession of the road!

The first thing I notice, after a rather impressive lioness above me, is a small pond in front of us.   I can guarantee you that every photographer there that day was hoping for the same thing—that the lions would gather to drink at the far edge of the pond and we could photograph them with their reflections in the water.

 

Of course, they do not.

Instead, the ones that did drink did so out of a small hole near the water.  Plus, they have their backsides to us.

The lionesses, says our guide, are watching a small herd of Cape buffalo in the distance and were sizing them up.   One look at the lions’ bellies tells us they weren’t in a hurry to find food.

Young male just beginning to grow a mane.

Eventually, the younger lions get bored and begin chasing each other.   Some short videos:

 

More and more vehicles arrive, and soon the place resembles a parking lot.   Some drivers pull their vehicles right in the line of sight of big camera lenses, something you rarely see in Kenya.   However, we are the ones off-road, so there’s that.

I take a shot of a lioness that is in front of a dark green Land Cruiser, using the dark paint to get a dark background, thereby making lemonade from lemons.

Eventually, all the lions wander off into the brush to rest, and we go on our way.

 

The next day, we saw the rib cage of a Cape buffalo that the lions had killed.

 

Some other photos from this outing:

White-fronted bee eaters

The gorgeous carmine bee-eater.

The Little bee-eater.

Beautiful young female leopard.

Collared pratincole.

Collared pratincole.

Coffee break spot.

A magnificent male kudu.

Female wattled starling.

A chacma baboon watching the world go by.