Rangers Journal February 2020

Fantastic February

Welcome to our February Rangers blog, hope you guys will enjoy the news and photos that are posted here today for you.

We had our last big beautiful rains for the year, and it was great! I will never complain about rain again as we have been in severe droughts in the past and this year was exceptionally good, and you ca see it in All new newbies that has arrived, and even with all the fabulous plant and flower growth that we got this year. Even some of our old creepy crawlies that was absent came back in full force.

In the wet times we were a bit struggling finding our favourite lion pride in the south as many roads were inaccessible due to the rain …… but when we did find them, they gave us some memorable times. Monomoholo will always give a great show when he not with his beautiful girls by signing that real African theme song of his that will always stay with you and long you back to this Magic place and Africa, we call home.

We have some exciting news! The Matlapa female from the south have produced new cubs! Three beautiful youngsters. Unfortunately, we could not get any photos of them yet, only had a quick glimpse of them as she moved them to a new hiding spot.

There are lots of water around after these good rains and have brought back some of the big buffalo herds back down in the south where grazing are also very good, not just for them but a variety of great plains animals like zebra, wildebeest, impala, red hartebeest, gemsbuck and even some eland.

The two male cheetahs have been seen very often and has given us some good sightings. The yellow tag female that lost her cubs should be coming back into heat very soon, so we are holding big thumbs. But in other news with the cheetahs is that the red tag female that is roaming more of the east of the reserve has produced 4 cubs! FIRST TIME IN 15 YEARS that Madikwe produced cheetah cubs!

The two boys seem to have a lion magnet attached to them as they are constantly running into the northern pride – luckily, they have their wits about them and avoided bad conflict with them.

We also had some great interactions with various animals like lions and elephants, which is always very interesting to watch.

We had ones again had some GREAT black rhino sightings, a lot more than we had in the past as this is a good thing that our numbers are climbing – Big up for conservation here and our Anti – Poaching

Team.

The wild dogs have been sighted quite a bit this month and gave us some great sighting of the youngsters playing around and having some fun.

Munye our resident male leopard has been spotted a few times but a little more difficult this time as the grass are extremely long – unless he climbs in a tree and make our job a little easier to spot him.

He has sometimes been like Houdini as we only find his tracks coming past the lodge and only find him on camera as he walks past our waterhole (thank you for technology).

I wish you all were here to hear Monomolo give us his best song and have the great sounds of the Madikwe bush around you.

I which you a lovely month and don’t forget to catch our next big newsletter.

Bush Regards

Ruan and The T-TEAM