A video of the Pondoro male leopard drinking at Coert’s Bush camp during evening safari on the 17th of March 2016. This young male is becoming a regular during drives and has been honored by our guides and trackers with receiving the name “Pondoro Madoda” meaning Pondoro male. Leopards become independent from their mothers when they are about 18 – 24 months old. The carefree protective life offered by their mothers are now over and this must be a reality check. Finding and hunting your own food is difficult and male leopards have extra pressure of trying to avoid the attention of the territorial male leopards while buying time to get big enough to eventually fight and compete for their own territory.
The Pondoro Madoda’s father is a huge male called Watsakile who seem to be leaving his young teenage son alone and allow him a bit of space to find his feet. The aging Watsakile also has other problems in the form of his problematic son called Chavaluthu who is now a fully grown territorial leopard occupying part of his territory to the south. Not content with the size of his territory Chavaluthu has taken the role of Don Juan to heart and is trying really hard to expand his territory in order to acquire more females and this means stealing land from his father. This wandering ways has brought Chavaluthu in contact with the Pondoro Madoda and he obviously does not like the new competition. The guides have witnessed several clashes where Chavaluthu has chased his younger rival. I really hope that the young male can avoid serious confrontation and injury as he seems to want to settle on Pondoro Game Lodge land and it would be great to have a young male make Pondoro part of his core territory.
I hope that guests and guides will be able to take many more photos and videos of this young male leopard drinking at Coert’s Bush camp inside Pondoro’s traversing safari lodge area.
