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.
Born 2020 during lockdown to Piccadilly Female. Once skittish, now confident mother denning her first litter in Marthly's rocky terrain.
Ngungwe 3:3 Female | Born 2020 | Alive | Sunset Bend Lineage
The northern reaches of Londolozi are a landscape apart, quite unlike anywhere else on the reserve. Rocky outcrops, boulder-strewn slopes, dense Combretum thickets, and the magnificent Manyelethi Riverbed carving its way through it all. It is rich, varied ground, and it hides a leopard well. For the first year of her life it hid this one almost completely. The Ngungwe Female was born into that terrain in April 2020, in a season when the roads carried very few vehicles. The world had gone into lockdown, and for close to eight months the reserve stood closed and quiet.
That coincidental timing shaped her. Leopard cubs raised at Londolozi usually grow up alongside a careful daily passage of Land Rovers, learning early that the vehicles are neither threat nor prey and can be safely ignored. She had no such introduction. She spent her first months with almost no vehicles in her world, and when the reserve reopened, she was slow to accept these unusual objects that moved through her mother’s territory. And it is in these formative months that the foundation of her temperament around vehicles was set. For years she was one of the most difficult leopards on Londolozi to find, glimpsed briefly and at a distance before she slipped away.
She is a daughter of the Piccadilly Female, which places her within the golden-coated Sunset Bend lineage that traces back to the iconic Sunset Bend Female. Her presumed father is the Flat Rock Male, long territorial across much of Marthly. She carries her mother’s richly marked coat and bright eyes, the clear stamp of the Sunset Bend line. She was the only cub the Piccadilly Female raised to independence on Londolozi, which she reached toward the end of 2021.
In early 2023 she was given a name of her own, drawn from a small track on Marthly that runs close to the Sand River. ‘Ngungwe’ is the Shangaan word for the African fish eagle, the bird whose call carries over the water she lives beside.
As is often the case with mother leopards ceding territory to their daughters, her mother eventually shifted further east leaving this prime territory around Marthly Pools, the Manyelethi Riverbed and the marula-studded crests surrounding it to the Ngungwe Female.
The Ngungwe female descending the Marula tree off Ximpalapala crest. A sighting and back drop that I have personally dreamed of photographing during my time at Londolozi.
After a thrilling morning with the Ngungwe Female (stay tuned for more on this next weekend), she settles down on a boulder close to Marthly Pools.
Her first litter came in the early days of December 2024. She denned in the koppies at Marthly Pools, and was found moving two small cubs between the crevices in the rock when they were no more than a week old. One of the two was lost before its first year. The other, a female, she raised alone all the way to independence at an age a little ahead of when young females usually part from their mothers. It was her first successful litter after a quiet and uncertain start.
The daughter she raised inherited more than the edge of her territory. Seen only seldom through her early life, as her mother once was, she too moves warily and shows herself rarely, the same reticence carried down a single generation.
The Ngungwe Female has grown easier over the years. She is seen more often now, and more calmly, coming down a marula on the crest in the low morning light or crossing the open sand of the Manyelethi Riverbed without hurry. The wariness that once defined her has largely fallen away. What remains is the country itself, the granite outcrops and the thick green along the river, and a leopard moving through it the way she always has, mostly out of sight, exactly where she belongs.
To recap the previous leopards, follow the links below:
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on Leopards Of Londolozi — The Ngungwe Female