This has been said at the start of every entry in this series, and it stays true. There is a weird kind of obsession that takes hold of people who spend any considerable time with leopards at Londolozi. Rangers who have been here for decades will still sit in complete silence, fixated on an animal in the tree above them, long after the guests have stopped asking questions. This series attempts to honour that obsession and the animals who caused it.

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12

Senegal Bush 3:3 Male

2012 - 2024

Dominant from 2019-2024, transformed from cautious visitor to powerful territorial force. Mastered central Londolozi until his final days.

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Senegal Bush 3:3 Male

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Senegal Bush 3:3 Male | Born 2012 | Died 2024 | Unknown Lineage

In his first few years on Londolozi, finding the Senegal Bush Male was rarely the difficulty. Getting near him was. A vehicle easing toward him would be met with a low growl, and more than once he would come off a mound and charge, running hard at the Land Rover before pulling up a few metres short, shying away, and settling again nearby to stare at it, unblinking. He was never hard to find. He was simply hard to get close to.

What made this strange was his history. He was no wild stranger to vehicles. He had been born and raised in the north of the Sabi Sand, in the country around Djuma, which is, if anything, busier with Land Rovers than Londolozi. By every expectation, a leopard who grew up there should have been one of the easiest males on the reserve to view. For a while he was one of the hardest.

He first appeared on Londolozi in 2016, a young male of around four, and he came back to set up territory in the second half of 2019, by then fully mature. Through that first year or so, the whole challenge lay in holding your nerve as you brought the vehicle closer. The mock-charges became almost a routine. Rangers came to suspect he was most uneasy when the driver’s side was turned toward him, as though the sight of a person’s legs where a door should be was the thing that set him off, though no one ever proved it. For a time, he was a leopard best watched from a distance.

And then, by degrees, he changed. The growling eased. The charges stopped. The leopard who had met every approach with bared teeth became, over the course of a few years, one of the most relaxed and dependable males on Londolozi. It was a lesson in something easily forgotten: that a leopard’s temperament is not fixed, and not simply a product of where it grew up. His comfort around vehicles shifted, and it shifted as his hold on his own ground grew certain. Security, more than upbringing, seemed to be what finally settled him.

Settled, he became a ranger’s idea of the perfect male to have on the reserve. He held a large, prime territory through the centre of Londolozi, broadly between the Tugwaan Riverbed and the Sand River, and he held every corner of it. He was a big, powerfully built cat with a heavy, deep-set stare that no one could mistake. Best of all, he was predictable. He walked the same game paths, marked the same posts, and called at first light and again in the evening, so reliably that a ranger could usually say where he would be before setting out. That kind of dependability is rare in a leopard, and it made him one of the most viewed and most photographed leopards at the time.

The most striking demonstration of his power came in a single kill. He brought down a young giraffe, an animal several times his own weight and a size leopards rarely attempt. Then came the harder part. The mother came in again and again to drive him off the carcass, and each time he gave ground and slipped back to it once she had passed. To pull down a giraffe is rare enough for a leopard. To hold it against a defending adult is rarer still. It was the kind of sighting a ranger might wait an entire career to witness, and it said everything about the confidence of the animal.

The Senegal Bush Male is an unusual name for a leopard. If we unpack it, though, it turns out to be a simple one, given to him in exactly the way every Londolozi leopard earns its name. Leopards here are named after a place, feature or distinctive behaviour as they start to show signs of becoming territorial. His was a corner of neighbouring Mala Mala called Senegal Bush, after a prominent Senegalia that grew there, and it was in that spot, as a young male, that he first began to rasp and attempt to hold his ground.

For a male whose own maternal line was never formally traced at Londolozi, he left a conspicuous one of his own. Several of his offspring reached independence, among them his son the Ntomi Male, who went on to hold territory in the western Sabi Sands. His bond with the Ntomi Male was itself unusual. Rather than drive the young male out, as most dominant fathers do, he tolerated his son within his range far longer than the textbooks would have you believe possible.

His reign held until the Maxim’s Male began pushing west, younger and more formidable; the Senegal Bush Male couldn’t hold for long. Under that pressure, he did what ageing males are eventually forced to do. He shifted west, and the dependable routines fell away with the territory he had lost. Sightings of him grew scarce, and then they stopped. He was last recorded in the middle of 2024, and was not seen again.

He is remembered, fittingly, as two leopards. The snarling stranger who charged the vehicles in those first few years, and the composed, utterly reliable male who would later walk the roads at dawn unbothered by the sound of an engine. That he became the second leopard without ever having stopped being the first. Few leopards have shown so plainly that an animal can change. Fewer still were as good to be around while they did it.

To recap the previous leopards, follow the links below:

The Mother Leopard
The Camp Pan Male
The Ngungwe Female