You know, the bush tells you stories when you look closely. Everything tells a story when you take the time to look closer. You’ll hear it whisper in your ears when you take just a moment to notice the broken branch and the chipped bark. You’ll watch the bush write a story for you, when you look at the dirt wallow, at the nearby smoothed-out tree bark. It all makes sense when you piece it together. Like a good story, nothing in nature works in isolation. But, together, it is so perfect and that’s the power of it. A leopard is a good story. A leopard does not want to be seen. And so I learnt how to read their signs. I learnt to look and wait. The one thing we will never be able to take from nature, is its own time. In the rainforest, a strangler fig tree stranges other trees. We don’t see that enstranglement because the spectrum we see time on is too limited; just like the miniscule electromagnetic light spectrum that is visible to us. In our laughably limited understanding of time, light, smell, sound, we think we trumph all other species and natural processess. Even a hyeana would cackle at that arrogance. Learning nature’s time and senses, is like immersing yourself in a new culture that you have to morph into like molded clay. You need to start functioning by its unspoken rules and allow your mind to work by its time and language. In our time spectrum, tracking a leopard is a relatively slow process. When a leopard was captured on camera overnight, we would go out to check for spoor. I measured and labeled it — 12 measurements for each spoor. Imagine the leopard knew how much attention it was getting, I thought. With a ranger, I would follow leopard tracks, tracing its path until the softness or overgrown-ness of the ground gave in. The reserve I was doing research on, was surrounded by crop farms, that are all too eager to sell a dead leopard’s hide. By compiling a portfolio of evidence for each leopard on the reserve, we would be able to apply for GPS collaring the leopards – this would not only open new research avenues, but most importantly, increase the leopards’ safety. We set up ten infrared camera traps, documented over fifty spoor, followed tracks up into the mountains and hung up leopard bait. Look at the story from all angles. Then tear it apart, thread by thread. Field Notes. 21st June – Went out at 5:30 to track leopards. Flew thermal drone. Found only one leopard spoor - around 2 days old. 24th June – Two giraffes outside the lodge today, staring in on me eating breakfast. Finished building the leopard hide and raked the sand in case the leopard passes. Went out twice today. Tommy wanted to shoot an injured warthog for leopard baiting at the leopard hide. He had seen it two days prior, with an open back and teeth marks on the neck. It must have been from a leopard attack. Why had the leopard not caught it? After 1 hour of driving, we still did not find it. Again, we went out in the afternoon for 2 hours, driving around with the rifle - nothing. A jackal probably caught it before us. Nature is teaching me its way and its rhythm. Everything is slower here. I forget the day of the week and I read the hour of the day by the height of the sun. Just how artificial is the urban drive of ‘fastness’ that we have created? 26th June → Found fresh leopard spoor this morning, along West Fence. Male spoor (A=9.4 cm). 27th June → Went out early to set up the cameras where we suspect the leopards to be. This afternoon, rhinos were grazing in front of the main lodge – 3 meters from us. It was beautiful, I mean, how many people get to see that? 29th June → Went out this afternoon to take 3 plaster paris prints of leopard spoor. There was brown hyena and black back jackal spoor as well. Side note. Brown hyeana spoor is hard to differentiate from leopard spoor, but I am starting to see the differences within a matter of seconds now. Brown Hyeana: slanted, angled pad. Pad not as wide as a leopard’s. Only two pad indents rather than three. Toes are longer and sharper. Claws are often visible.
African Leopard: straight pad, three pad indents, as all big cats. Front and back pad differentiate in size; the front being the bigger one. No claws visible in the tracks, as they are retracted when walking. The lead ranger showed us tire tracks from this morning and our fresh tire tracks. The old ones – from this morning– were clearly defined and hardened from the morning dew. Our fresh ones were soft and not clearly visible. That’s what I love. Everything here makes complete sense through the eyes of logic – just look closely enough. So unlike the doings of man, driven by greed, lust, want, driven by motives that are riddles, nature lays all its motives, all its clues out before us. Our only job is to logically piece them together.
