Even in the South African summer, when midday temperatures hit 95F (35C), the lowveld mornings can be sharp and cool. The dew has not yet dried and the sky above is a faultless blue, filled with the shrill cries of migrating bee-eaters bound for the distant shores of Europe.
We bump down a game trail in our open Land Rover, past leadwood trees with trunks rubbed smooth by passing elephants, and the dried-up bed of a seasonal watercourse called Manyaleti — the Place of Stars. Our tyres swish over fresh lion tracks in the sand. “That’ll be the Sparta Pride,” says Dave Varty, my guide.
Varty, lean and tanned after a lifetime in the wilds, is the owner of Londolozi, the private fiefdom whose fathomless sweeps of guinea grass and tamboti trees we are now traversing. This is where, at the age of six, he used to clean his father’s precious 416 Rigby hunting rifle, and where — as a bush-wise 12-year-old — he tracked his first lion.
By now the sun is up, the air as clear as liquid amber, the bushveld echoing to a dawn chorus of francolins, shrikes and Heuglin's robins.
All around us impala, their coats still fluffed up against the chill, are snorting in alarm, but it is not the distant roaring of the Sparta lions that is giving them the jitters. Deep in the surrounding thorn thickets, two young leopards — a brother and sister — are crouching in the shadows.
Varty has the lowdown on this pair. “They are just over a year old,” he whispers. “We call their mother the Vomba Female.” And as soon as he mentions her name I feel a stab of recognition. She was a leopard I saw here seven years ago. I’d seen her during a night drive, a gorgeous three-year-old, stalking a civet cat under the stars. Now it’s her offspring I am watching as they loll in the bushes only yards from our vehicle.
In many ways the lives of these two families — one feline and the other human — have become inextricably entwined here at Londolozi in the game-rich Sabi Sand reserve. The human family goes back to 1926 when a bankrupted cattle farm was bought, sight unseen, by two big game hunters, Charles Varty and his friend Frank Unger.
Together with Winnis Mathebula, an expert lion-tracker, they arrived on foot and set up camp in a jackalberry tree grove on the banks of the Sand River. Their original hunting camp is long gone, but a campfire is lit every night near the spot where Charles Varty pitched his tent all those years ago.
By the 1970s tourism was the new buzzword. Out went the old long-drop loos and the bush showers with a canvas bucket dangling from a tree — replaced by air-conditioned suites with luxurious bathrooms, teak decks and private plunge pools.
Providing the impetus for these dramatic changes were Charles Varty’s two grandsons, Dave and John. Dave is a conservationist, John a wildlife film-maker . Together they set about transforming Londolozi into a big game sanctuary.
During the 1970s and 1980s the Vartys’ guiding principle for Londolozi was to demonstrate the economic viability of wildlife in a land torn apart by racism, fences and division. To this end a share of all the profits still goes every year towards improving the lives of the Shangaan people who live and work around the reserve.
In 1994, around the time Nelson Mandela came to power, the game fences that had separated the state-owned Kruger National Park from the private reserves on its western border were removed, allowing wildlife to follow the old migration routes denied to them for so long.
The dropping of the fence lines was a powerful metaphor for the political changes taking place in South Africa at that time. Mandela himself became a regular visitor to Londolozi, describing it as “the dream I cherish for the future of nature preservation in our country”.
For the past 14 years Londolozi has been leased to CCAfrica, an eco-safari corporation the Vartys created that now owns a string of five-star lodges all over the continent. But this year, in a move that surprised the safari industry, the lease was not renewed. Instead, the Vartys decided to take back their flagship property and run it themselves.
And what of the leopards that are Londolozi’s greatest luxury of all? Established more than half a century ago, the 155,000-acre Sabi Sand reserve is sub-divided into a handful of smaller sanctuaries and now boasts more lodges per square mile than anywhere else in Africa. Among them are MalaMala, Singita and Richard Branson’s Ulusaba. All promise close encounters with the Big Five (elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard); but Londolozi is the best of all for watching leopards round the clock.
On safari, the leopard is the animal that everybody wants to see. Leopards have charisma. They exude an aura of magic and mystery in the way they can suddenly materialise and then just as silently melt into the shadows. Of all big cats they are the most beautiful, the most cat-like in their movements and behaviour. But they are also notoriously elusive. Except at Londolozi.
Leopards are plentiful all over the Sabi Sand lowveld and Londolozi, with its abundance of cover, is leopard heaven. Here are dense riverine forests, shady dongas (gullies) and marula trees with mottled trunks into whose lofty canopies a leopard can safely hoist its kill out of reach of lions and hyenas.
Yet leopards were seldom seen. Their private lives remained a secret, even to the scientists who had tried to study them; and only once in a while would a tracker, perched in his jump seat on the bonnet of a game-drive vehicle, excitedly whisper the magic word ingwe — Shangaan for leopard – as a spotted cat streaked for cover.
Then, one day in 1979, a mother with two small cubs was found near her den. Slowly, and with infinite patience, the Londolozi rangers established a relationship with her. Day after day they returned and soon began to get regular sightings. At first she was incredibly shy; but the rangers were always at pains not to frighten her; and whenever she and her cubs seemed agitated, the Land Rovers would withdraw and leave them alone.
Within six months, mother and cubs had become so completely at ease in the presence of vehicles that they would play in the open in broad daylight. And so began the remarkable bonding between the leopards of Londolozi and its rangers — a process that continues to this day.
Before she died in 1991 “The Mother”, as she was known, produced nine litters, and among them was another exceptional leopard, called the Tugwaan Female.
Born in 1984, she survived for nearly 17 years — an incredible age for a leopard — giving birth to a whole dynasty of cubs whose lineage has been painstakingly recorded by Natasha de Woronin, a former Londolozi ranger.
Which brings me back to the here and now, to the early morning standoff between the nervous impalas and the two yearling cubs.
This time their cover has been blown; but in a couple of months or so their hunting skills will be honed to perfection. By then they will be fully independent — the fifth generation of leopards in the Londolozi saga — and next time the impala may not be so lucky.
Credits :
South Africa's Elusive Leopards
By Brian Jackman
The Telegraph, The United Kingdom
