Not all our drives around the reserve happened to be on tourists game drives. Some were just part of getting from point A to B, or tracking leopards or something, and on some of these drives we got some more cool sightings. I even got to see an African Wild cat running around the reserve which is a very unusual sighting. And I got to see more Aardvarks - they seemed to be coming out of the woodwork at Kapama and I saw another 3 while there, with the other students seeing 2 more. So much for them being infrequently seen. One of the early drives took me near the dammed off part of the river which still contained a fair bit of water. There we saw a reasonably large group of hippos, both in and out of the water, as well as a water monitor lying on a rock in the sun. As always, the drives let you see some cool stuff, which you'd never otherwise come across.
Another day we went looking for two lions which the game drives had called in on a buffalo kill earlier that morning. We weren't sure exactly where it was and drove around a bit, and just as we were about to head back off after the leopards, we found them. Right near the house we'd driven past earlier. Just need to be looking the opposite way for a few seconds and you miss stuff so easily. This is when you kick yourself for missing something that seems so obvious when you finally see it. The male was sitting in a clearing away from the road a bit, but the female was about 3m from the road, eating a buffalo. A really good sighting.
Many of the drives we had through the reserve were after the two collared leopards that had been released onto the reserve proper. The staff were monitoring the leopards to see where the established territories and how well they did out there. In the first couple of days there, we went in search of one on the airport grounds and ended up finding her up in a tree. Took me ages to try and pick her out as her camouflage was so good that it wasn't until she moved that I could get a proper fix on her. Another time we went up to her again, though this time she had made it back onto Kapama itself. It was the first time the other students had seen a leopard, and we walked up to her (walking up to a leopard was not something I thought I would have done, but she is fairly good about it). With the telemetry I knew she was right nearby, but she was incredibly hard to spot in the grass, and it wasn't until she made a noise that we could work out exactly where she was. Again a wonderful example of why they are rarely seen.
Other occasions we tracked the leopards but didn't actually get a visual of them, just a general area they were in. It came in very useful that I had spent the time at Karongwe doing a lot of telemetry, as Thys went away for a week, and he was the one who knew how the telemetry worked. So one of the other staff had been out trying to find the animals, but couldn't work out how to get a proper fix on them, so I gave a telemetry lesson and led us to the cheetahs (on a kill which is always good).
We also took the telemetry on another trip and got an example of the type of range the telemetry can have, especially when high spots are utilised. We went up to the mountains to Mariskopfield where the radio relay station was for a check on the batteries, etc and while up there used the telemetry. Despite us being ~40km away from the reserve we could still pick up their signal. Amazing what height can do, as the range is much more restricted on level ground, several km is much more like it.
The trip to Mariskopfield gave us a view of all the pine and gum plantations that have been put in on the mountain side, and also views over the canyon and lowveld. On a clear day you would be able to see for miles as we were standing on the edge of a steep drop after which it was just flat as far as the eye could see. That was when the others realised how big the country was - doing that back in Britain they'd be seeing the ocean if they could see the same distance.
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