For the past few months, the Ximungwe Female has kept us all guessing.
After returning from leave earlier in the year, I was fortunate to see her on a couple of occasions, and each sighting gave us reassuring signs. She looked to be in good condition, and the very clear suckle marks told us she was nursing cubs somewhere within her territory.
Based on her movements and behaviour, we believed she had given birth at the beginning of January. What followed was a patient and often challenging search for her den. The central parts of her territory are incredibly thick in places, and with limited access to some areas of the reserve, locating a den site there is never easy.
For weeks, we drove through the areas she frequents, looking for any clue that might lead us to where she had hidden her cubs. She continued to move through familiar sections of her territory, but finding the exact location of the den proved far more difficult than we had hoped.
If you look closely, lying on the boulders there is a leopard, the Ximungwe Female at her den.
Eventually, after a long and careful search, we were able to locate the den and confirm that the Ximungwe female has two cubs. Our views of them so far have been extremely limited, and unfortunately we don’t yet have any photographs of them, but simply confirming their presence was an incredibly exciting moment for all of us.
If you’d like to see the moment we discovered the den, Sean featured it in last week’s Virtual Safari, where we managed to capture some incredible aerial footage of the Ximungwe Female and her cubs.
Since then, she has already moved the cubs to a new den site, which is very normal behaviour for a leopard with young cubs. Moving them regularly helps keep them safe from predators and other threats in the area.
For now, we’re hopeful that this new den will give us better opportunities to see them in the coming weeks. Watching leopard cubs grow up in the wild is always something special, and the first clear sighting when they begin exploring outside the den is a moment every ranger remembers.
What we do know is that the Ximungwe Female is doing exactly what she needs to be doing. She’s hunting successfully, caring for her cubs, and once again proving what a capable mother she is, something we’ve seen before, having already raised cubs to independence in the past.
So while she kept us guessing for a while, the mystery has finally been solved. Now we wait patiently for those first proper views of the cubs as they begin to explore their world.
Stay tuned and hopefully it won’t be long before we can share them with you.
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on An update on the Ximungwe Female