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Alex Van Den Heever

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Alex spent his formative years growing up on a cattle farm in the Western Cape, South Africa. After completing his studies in Marketing and Business Management, he joined world-renowned Londolozi game reserve in 1995 as a game ranger. Alex’s greatest fascination during his ...

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on How to Track a Lion

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Thank you. Great information to have.

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Love this post, such a wealth of knowledge and truly outlines what a craft it is.

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Thanks for your information, very useful.

What I would welcome is a comparison between Leopard spoor, and Lion spoor – with particular differences especially with lone sub-adult lion/ness tracks and large leopard ? Cheers

Nice idea and definitely something which we will talk about in the comings weeks with this tracking series. Thanks for your interest, stay tuned! rich

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Hi Gavin,

Thank you for the question. I am working on such a comparison.

Alex

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Mapogos are back in Sabi Sabi. Hope you guys track them in Londolozi.

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Hi Viper, we track them as often as we can. They are great for teaching novice trackers the art of following (or trailing) an animal’s tracks, as they often walk such massive distances!

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Why have you specified the measurements to lions at Londolozi? Does it mean the tracks of lions in other areas are of different sizes? Are they a different sub-species?

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Hi Sidney,

We do find small differences in the size of lion (and leopard) tracks, from individual to individual, and from area to area. The Camp Pan male leopard’s hind feet tracks, for example, are a full centimetre longer (10cm) than the average male leopard. I state the measurement and where it was measured purely to remain objective in my data collection. Secondly, a novice tracker may be able to use the measurements when trying to identify species and sexes.

The lions in the Kalahari are on average larger than those in the southern Kruger. Whether they have bigger tracks I am not entirely sure?

Hope that helps?
Alex

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