After our usual light breakfast, we headed out to the west, soon encountering fresh leopard tracks, apparently belonging to a young male, usually still seen in the company of his mother. This led to a prolonged search for him, with a second vehicle eventually joining in the search, but with no success.
We tried photographing birds, but also with limited success, since the wind direction was not favourable. I did manage to get a nice shot of a Broad-billed Roller in flight.
Eventually we decided to head back to camp a little earlier than usual. Along the way, James spotted the elusive young male leopard lying at the base of a tree. The leopard was quite curious, giving us ample opportunity to photograph him and eventually approaching and inspecting the vehicle, before moving into a bush where we could no longer see him well enough to photograph.
Back at camp we went through our usual routine of brunch, followed by downloading photos and videos, backing up, clearing memory cards and charging camera batteries. By this time we were exhausted from lack of sleep and extreme daytime heat and tried to get a brief afternoon nap, before setting out for our afternoon drive. I did find that the advice given to us, to lie under the fan under a wet kikoi, was quite an effective way of cooling down in the extreme heat.
In the afternoon we headed out in the direction where a group of lionesses had been spotted the previous day, two of them with cubs. We had been informed that they had left their cubs somewhere they considered safe, in order to go hunting. This was also the direction where we could possibly expect to find Wild Dogs, but these had not been seen at 4 Rivers for quite some time.
Along the way, we spotted two Red Lechwe males, having a bit of a tussle, but soon deciding to go their different ways.
A lone lioness was seen approaching in our direction. Clifford was of the opinion that she was part of the group previously seen, but this was obviously not one of those with cubs.
She was clearly feeling the heat, since she was walking from one shady spot to the next, eventually approaching our vehicle and lying down in the shade, looking quite aggrieved when we decided to drive off, taking our shade with us.
One of the other vehicles had found the cubs and we drove to their location, where we found some forlorn looking cubs, clearly pining for their mothers to return.
The sun was setting and we left the cubs to drive back to camp, the end of another stunning day in the Okavango.
Etienne's Camera 