Getting a photo of a leopard in a tree isn’t easy!
By Jon Isaacs
The African leopard is the smallest of the “Big” cats. In terms of survival it is also the most successful. It inhabits a multitude of habitats ranging from forest to savannah to the outskirts of cities like Nairobi. The African leopard, or “Chui” in Swahili, is an ambush predator which tends to attack from within thirty metres of its prey. It is fast, deadly and will hunt in daylight or at night on almost anything that moves. Chui is incredibly strong and a skilled climber as typified by the fact it can carry its prey high up into a tree. The leopard is also the ultimate opportunist. It is solitary, apart from when mating, and the female has sole responsibility for bringing up any cubs. A leopard is cunning, secretive and shuns human beings. Many consider it the most successful cat species on the planet and, in Africa alone, there are reported to be 700,000.
When tourists go on safari for the first time they are often seduced into assuming that they have to see the Big Five consisting of elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard. Some are lucky and achieve the feat within hours of their first game drive. Most visitors however return home having had varying degrees of success. Many achieve four out of five and the one that defeats them is frequently the leopard. For those of us who are fortunate enough to regularly go to Africa the wish to see leopard is also often thwarted. Apart from somewhere like Sabi Sands, where leopard have been studied for nearly fifty years and are habituated to tourists, jeeps and cameras, to see a leopard in the wild is a rarity which is always treasured. There might well be 700,000 somewhere in Africa, but trying to find one is a question of skill, reading the signs, using local knowledge and luck.
Consequently, my hopes of seeing one were not very high when I returned to the Masai Mara in January of this year. I remembered my last visit in 2017, when I had been extremely lucky to see a female called Fig and her cub staring at me from under a bush. She was an incredibly tolerant cat, world famous and adored by many. But, in my absence, she had been killed by a male lion and her territory was now inhabited by at least one of her adult female cubs. To add to the mix of problems, the rains had come three weeks early and the Mara was sodden with rivers at torrent levels. Trying to find a cat in the rain and mud was not going to be easy. As usual we were going to have to rely on communication, the possible sighting of a stashed prey and huge slices of luck
For five days we enjoyed the sights of the Mara. Antelope were dropping calves and the available food for predators was everywhere. We checked the riverines where leopards hang out waiting for prey to come and drink. We searched the suitable trees with binoculars for any tell tale signs. Nothing! On the sixth day our luck changed. The sky was blue, the river levels were slightly down and the land cruiser seemed to have enough strength to negotiate the glutinous mud which had frequently trapped us and others in the previous days. A radio message alerted us to the fact that a Thompson gazelle had been stashed high in a tree, a half an hour from where we were. No trace of the leopard though. We drove and slid towards the spot. Sure enough, the corpse could be seen wedged high in a fork of the tree. Now the waiting game could commence because the leopard would return to the tree at some stage to feed. We were also hungry so drove a mile away to a safe, open spot to have a bush breakfast.
With sustenance taken in it was time to return to the kill and wait. As we approached the tree again there were three other vehicles already positioned on one side of it. The leopard was back, had moved the prey to a spot less visible and was lying there surveying the long lenses pointed in her direction. For years, I had been trying to photograph a leopard in a tree. The opportunity was now there but all I could see through the foliage was one eye, a nostril and part of a leg hanging down in typical leopard pose. We rolled back the canvas roof, tried shooting from a low and high angle, moved the land cruiser but achieved little. The other vehicles appeared to be in a similar situation. Worse, our sister vehicle, in trying to take a short cut to reach us had sunk into the mud a couple of hundred metres away and was completely stuck. So close and yet so far. How frustrating was that!
Eventually, partly through boredom, we carefully moved our vehicle to the other side of the tree. The ground seemed slightly firmer and the branches and foliage were more widely spaced but Faulu, a daughter of Fig as we learned, seemed happy to eat her gazelle and stay largely out of view. That was until three young male Topi became our angels of salvation. They came bouncing and snorting down towards the tree. Faulu changed her position to stand and watch the three antelope showing off to each other, affording shots of her entire body, almost devoid of branches and foliage, on our side of the tree. The dappled light was tricky and, photographically, had to be compensated for, but she just stood or sat and looked at them and us for minutes on end. It was almost perfect.
Eventually, she couldn’t resist the opportunity! Turning on her slender branch, she carefully and silently made her way down the tree, affording us memorable action shots. Upon reaching the ground she adopted her stealth frame, low to the ground with tail down. With gaze firmly on the cavorting topi she slunk past us and disappeared into the long grass to set up her ambush. We watched her in awe and wished her success on her hunt.
I’ll never know if she was successful. However, in our lounge I now have a large canvas photo of Faulu, in the tree, looking out at the topi. It will forever provide a memory of an amazing encounter with a beautiful cat that, after years of trying, finally provided me with my photo of a leopard in a tree.
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