Rhino Carcass

As we were driving around the park one afternoon, word got out that a female rhino has been injured. She was badly wounded in a fight with a male rhino who wanted to mate with her. The female was fairly young and did not want to mate with the male so he attacked her. A capture team was called in to dart the female and move her into a boma where she could be closely monitored. After treating her wounds and keeping a close watch on the female, she was released into the park again a couple of days later, seeming to be recovering well. On Sunday afternoon, Nyiko one of our team of rangers, reported a dead rhino on Mankwe way. The dead rhino turned out to be the same rhino that was injured by the rhino bull. The female suffered severe internal injuries from several stab wounds from the male rhino’s horn.

The death of one however creates food for another. The first predators to arrive were the 2 sub-adult male lions of the central pride. These two youngsters stayed at the carcass alone for the first night and ignored the calls from the rest of the pride. Two days later, the two youngsters were joined at the carcass by the rest of the pride. The central pride of lions in Pilanesberg consists of two adult males, two adult females and the two youngsters. Lion social structure calls for the adult males to have the first share of the kill or carcass. After the adult males have finished feeding, the females get a turn and then only the younger lions. It was thus interesting to see the interaction between the 2 adult males and the 2 sub-adults. The females did not stay at the carcass for very long and only made their appearance once or twice. The males however stayed for another 3 days of which the last ones to leave were the two youngsters who only left on the saturday.

After having a meal of about 2 tonnes, the lions disappeared for about two days to go and digest the meat somewhere under a tree and went back to just being normal lions, for whom a nap can never be too short!!!

Story and photo’s by Alisha
Ranger
Ivory Tree Game lodge

A Pilanesberg Story

It is Easter, the school holidays are near and the park is humming with visitors. It is at this time of year that these giant beasts, the elephants also seem to pack up and leave for greener pastures. We know this, that year after year these gentle giants of the Pilanesberg migrate to the wilderness area of the park. There is only one road leading into it, and there is only one road out of it. It is situated in the North-western side of the park.

It is not open to the public, and game-viewers may only skirt the section by driving along Moloto Road. At this time of year, as in years gone by you need some luck to see these elephants, and your best chance is along this road. This is the beauty of the Pilanesberg, the anticipation and build up of what is to be seen over the next rise and around the next corner.

Time will need to play out this game called game viewing. For these mountains and valleys where here a long time ago and with the park and it’s animals they will be here for a long time to come. All we need to do is wait, wait like the rangers and guests before us and in the months to come the Pilanesberg elephants will be sure to come back…

M. Malan

My Lucky Couple

I thought it was going to be an ordinary drive as always, just my two guests and I….

As we departed from the lodge at 4:30 for the evening drive we saw the usual as we see every time- white Rhino, Zebra, Wildebeest and Impala. As the guests were here for their first safari they were very interested in every single thing they saw, but after an hours drive of just seeing the same we stopped stopping for every single plains game.

As I was driving towards fish eagle picnic spot, just before the access, I got a radio in that one of the other rangers had spotted a leopard on Red Syanite Hill… and that is were our real drive began.

It was 6pm and so I informed my guests that we will go for our sundowners later, but now we will go see the leopard.I did warn them that we were not going to stop for any animal till we get to the leopard-as it is very rare to see one.

As luck may have it on the way we spotted a Kori Bustard-one of the heaviest birds in South Africa that is capable of flight- about 8 metres of the road, and of course we had to stop for that. It was quite a nice view of the bird walking around in the plains.

A minute or so of admiring it went, time was ticking, for the leopard was lying at that moment but as soon as it would get up it would walk behind the mountain and it would disappear for good. On the way I had a few obstacles such as Zebra crossing and Impala deciding to feed right on the road sides making it impossible to pass them and the problem was that we still had quite a road bit to travel to get there. Finally we arrived at the sight with only one other Ivory Tree Vehicle there. I positioned the vehicle to have a clear view of this leopard (which was a good 500m away) and switched of the engine. Just 30 seconds after switching of the engine the leopard got up looked at us for few seconds and walked slowly down and behind the mountain with flashes going of left, right and centre. My guests absolutely loved it, and so we drove of satisfied.

As we drove I though luckily if we only see plains game all the way home, we at least had one satisfying sighting.

Then suddenly out of the blue some image caught my eye. Two rock looking things in the distance on the foot of a mountain a road away. Looking through the binoculars I spotted to rhinos and to my delight they were two Black Rhinos. I hurried up to the spot and called it in. We sat there looking at the rhino -that were about 300m of the road-that were looking at us. This was only my second time that I had been lucky enough to see Black Rhino in this park, so I was pretty excited to find it.

Finally we had time to go for our sundowners. Now it was getting quite dark. Just a half a kilometre before the hide we found a lovely hippo out of water that is quiet rare to find. As we were admiring him I got a call that there was an elephant on one of the roads close by…so of we went for another hunt down for the next great animal. As we got to the road the bull elephant just started to cross in front of us and the other vehicles that were there. He was a nice big bull and it was excellent to watch him walk past and start feeding. As we got closer he got abit agitated so we completely stopped and carried on watching him as he munched away. All one could hear is the munching. Finally we decided to get one drink in so we made a U-turn and went back to the road that would lead us to our hide.

At the exact spot where I got the call about the elephant, I got another call saying that they found some Lions. This time they were abit further than the elephant. I asked my guest if they don’t mind skipping sundowners and just going to see the lions. They were more than happy to do so.This time as we got to the spot were they were seen, they had disappeared into the thickets. The other two guides and I search around the area for a good 15 minutes, I thought that my luck had changed and that I was about to doubt seeing them….
Then we got a good call, the two sub-adult males of the central pride were walking on a road not to far from us. As we got there they just walked past my vehicle went abit of the road and just lay down. We stood there watching them for about 10 minutes as they lazed around, before they got up and walked off.

By now we were running quiet late to get to the lodge. With a quick haste we started our satisfied journey back home. As we went past we just saw herds of glowing eyes close and far from the road, almost as if someone lit amber coals along the way.
As we started dinner we enjoyed talking about our 4 out of 5 big five sighting and were convinced that we will find the Buffalo the next day…. sadly my luck ran out… At least we had a great encounter with some breeding herd of elephants-which is a story all on its own.

Monika Bydlinski- Guide

Leopard Story

We were watching the sun set when we heard lions roaring from a thicket about a hundred meters from the road.

We all got excited at the prospect of seeing them and were about to wait patiently for them to appear when I heard on the radio that a leopard had just been spotted just round the corner from where we were. I talked it over with my guests, we decided to try and find the leopard since no one had seen one before.

However, when we got there we just got a glimpse of her disappearing into some bushes surrounded by an open plain. We waited for about 5 minutes and decided to go round to the other side of the plain to try a different angle. When we got there it was dark so I was using the spotlight to search the plain, we could see a couple of springbok grazing ignorantly about 10 meters from the road. The beam of the spotlight spun round the plain behind them and we saw the leopard lying flat staring intently at the springbok. I quickly switched of the spotlight as to not ruin her camouflage. In the moonlight you could see the outline of the springbok standing completely unaware just a few meters from us and the light patch in the grass which marked the stalking leopard.

Everybody was totally silent as to not alert either of them. In a flash of movement the leopard ran and pounced on the springbok pulling it down. I quickly put the spotlight back on the pair, I was expecting noise but there was no sound at all. She was only a young female, the springbok looked bigger then she was, she lay there for a few minutes holding it by the throat in her jaws. There was a long pause before the other springbok realized what was happening.

At this point the other plains game became alert, and started to snort along with the whistling springbok, and then we could hear the two lions from earlier roaring in the background. Finally she let go of the lifeless body and was panting to get her strength back, she did this for about ten minutes whilst licking her prize and grunting.

A couple of jackals appeared on the scene and were sniffing around and wailing to each other. None of us in the car could believe what we were experiencing. As we discussed the sighting she stood up and started looking around. We all realized that she was probably going to move her kill as she was out in the open being pestered by the jackals and the lions were so close.

She picked it up by the throat and started dragging it beneath her, away from us across the plain, making load grunts of exertion. It was quite a slow progress and she stopped every ten meters or so to breath and look around her. When she was in the middle of the plain we drove round to the other side this was about 300meters from where she had originally killed.

We could see her coming so we sat near her path and waited watching her laborious journey. Eventually she pulled it on the road in front of us dropping it to study her surroundings, she was tired but the lions were still roaring close by so she needed to get it to relative safety of the deep thicket on the other side of the road. She bent down and finished dragging it across the road and started to disappear into the vegetation beside us.

Eventually we could no longer see her, we could just hear the rustling as she was moving away, leaving us completely overwhelmed.

Becca

Male Lion on Wilderbeest Carcass

It was one of the coldest mornings we had, think it went down to about -4 round about 6 o clock in the morning. As we departed the lodge all the rangers discussed where they were going to go some said west others said they would stay around close to the lodge.

Game drive started and I wanted the four male lions, they are always close to the lodge or at Malatse Dam and that’s not to far away either.

As went down moraleng we came close to our bush braai access road and that’s where I saw 2 young females eating away on the wilderbeest. They must have just caught it cause there was still a lot of meat on them.

Was very exciting to see this and what made it better a big male lion came and started to feed as well. There were vocalizations in the back round lions everywhere so it was a great morning and I think the guests forgot about the cold for awhile.

Ranger Yolande

White Rhino In The Pilanesberg

If you ever wanted a very good chance of seeing white rhino then the Pilanesberg is the place to be.

Nobody knows the actual amount of white rhino there is in this beautiful mountain terrain, but we know this amazing mammal does well and is well looked after.

The white rhino can weigh up to two tons making it the second biggest land mammal in the world, the horn of a rhino grows about 8 cm a year and contains mostly of a hair like fiber just like our own nails on a human body. The female rhino can live in crashes of about 6 to 14 at a time while your adult bulls are solitary.

The female rhino will reach sexual maturity when they are about 6 or 7 years old, a single calf is born and can weigh up to 40 to 65 kg. The mother rhino is very protective over her calf and will defend it no matter what

Fire Bombing On Hippo Loops

On Thursday the 12th May the Pilanesberg looked as if it was under attack! The distant drone of 6 Huey helicopters and 4 bomber aircraft signaled the beginning of the end.

The area of Hippo Loops had been set alight some 20 minutes before. The whole operation was organized by North West Parks and Tourism Board and Working on Fire for an International Conference on Fire which was being held for that week at Sun City.

With the approaching aircraft and the impressive sound that comes with it, one could not help but become a child again.

With the 6 choppers landing and preparing their monsoon buckets (capacity of 1 250 litres) for filling there were still the bombers flying overhead. In no time the choppers were up and off to Mankwe Dam some 100 meters away, we were right in the middle of it!

After a few onslaughts from the helicopters the bombers were called into action. With a payload of 1000 litres they lined up and came in low, really low, each bomber only having one chance to maximize its water bombing before heading back to Pilanesberg International Airport. Within 2 minutes the fire had been cut to half, the rest was now up to the helicopters. With the dying fire and the helicopters flying overhead we were again reminded how close we were to the action by the spray of water being released from the monsoon buckets.

The fire had been doused in just over an hour, very impressive stuff taking the terrain into account. It was off home after the display and as it has been said many times before, just another day in the office.

Mike Malan