Sometimes a message comes through, and before you have even finished reading it, there is already a sinking feeling telling you it is not going to be good. You read it a second time anyway. Last night, a message like that came from our eastern neighbours. A female leopard had been found dead on the banks of the Sand River, near where the Gijima Males were seen.
It is a feeling we know. The same one that arrived when we heard about the Plaque Rock Female.
The Three Rivers Female rests peacefully in THE Natal Mahogany off the Sand River. I’ve been wanting to see a leopard in this tree for some time, so this was an incredible moment!
The body was in a condition that made identification difficult — the lions and hyenas had been there first. But careful analysis of her teeth, specifically a chipped lower left canine, matched what we know of the Three Rivers Female.
It is difficult to see it clearly in this photo but her lower left canine was chipped.
The Tinxiya Female was seen on Londolozi this morning. The Nkoveni Female had tracks confirmed on our property, so it definitely was neither of those two. We are working with what we know right now, and if anything changes, we will update you. But as things stand, everything seems to confirm that we have lost her.
This stretch of the Sand River is prime real estate, in what we already know to be one of the highest leopard density areas in the world. It also sits right alongside where two of the Kambula Lionesses are currently raising eight tiny cubs. Lions and leopards share this landscape, and that tension almost always plays out somewhere where we are not watching. Nobody saw what happened. All that was found was a dead leopard on the riverbank.
But the Three Rivers Female’s story was not insignificant. Her mother died when she was still young. Too young, most would have said, to have any realistic chance of going on alone. She proved them wrong, and then just kept going. She raised the Nsuku Male to independence. She raised the Tinxiya Female, who was out and about in Londolozi this very morning. And somewhere along the way, in between all of that surviving and raising and hunting and holding territory, she gave us some of the most extraordinary wildlife viewing this reserve has ever produced.
We got to watch all of it. The lean times when we barely found her, the periods when she seemed to be everywhere at once, the sightings that made you reach for your camera before your brain had caught up with what you were seeing. We followed her story from well before many of you found Londolozi, and we were still following it this week.
That is what sits with us most. Not that she is gone — she was a wild leopard living a wild life, and a wild life out here has never come with guarantees. But we got to watch the whole thing. The whole arc of it. That is something.
On top of the tragedy of losing her, she is believed to have two cubs, around eight to ten weeks old. We knew where she was denning them, but she had moved them in the last week — we think to put some distance between them and the Shingi Male, who had been moving through that area. Tracks of her and both cubs had been seen about 1.5 kilometres from the original den. We have not been able to locate the new den, and we do not yet know whether the cubs are still alive.
That stretch of southeastern Londolozi along the Sand River will not stay vacant for long. Her scent markings will fade. Her territorial vocalisations will stop. Other leopards will register the absence before we have finished processing it. Who moves in, and when, is something we will be watching closely.
A glimpse into the Sand River. This is one of my favourite parts of the river, where it is tucked away by Riparian forest and flows over rocks, creating a waterfall.
The Tinxiya Female is newly independent and needs somewhere to settle. Leopard mothers sometimes pass part of their territory to their daughters, a kind of inheritance. Nobody could have scripted the circumstances of this one. But it is not impossible that the territory the Three Rivers Female spent her whole life building becomes the ground her daughter starts from.
We do not know how it plays out from here. There is a lot we do not know.
What we know is that she lived well, and that we were lucky to be watching.
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on Goodbye To The Three Rivers Female Leopard