August 17th 2017

After a short cof­fee ️und some cook­ies we left at 6:15am in the morn­ing as we do every morn­ing to watch the sun­rise. Today our guide Eric had found a very spe­cial posi­tion for us: Sun­rise with giraffe!

Giraffe bei Sonnenaufgang 2

Among oth­er things we also saw chee­tahs today, includ­ing the chee­tah Malei­ka with her two now larg­er cubs. A film by Mat­to Bar­fuss (Malei­ka) about them is just start­ing in the cin­e­mas. We have seen it mean­while with a lot of trav­el­lust and can rec­om­mend it very much.

When Malei­ka was younger, she was injured while hunt­ing… which is usu­al­ly fatal for a chee­tah, as it can nei­ther hunt nor defend its prey. But the rangers helped her by giv­ing her some food and pro­tect­ing her while feed­ing with the cars, so she was safe. But the con­se­quence is that she still likes the jeeps and there­fore likes to climb on the hood… …and her cubs learned this behav­ior as well. But they were not inter­est­ed in our jeep and quick­ly dis­ap­peared again.

We lat­er found a group of 5 male chee­tahs who joined togeth­er to hunt more suc­cess­ful­ly. They are called the “fast five”.

Fünf Geparden

In the after­noon we found the 5 chee­tahs again and could hard­ly believe our luck, when they lat­er start­ed to hunt. It was impres­sive to see how they pro­ceed­ed coor­di­nat­ed and what breath­tak­ing speed they reached. The hunt­ing tar­get was a group of wilde­beests. We were able to fol­low two hunt­ing attempts direct­ly one after the oth­er. The first with­out, the sec­ond with success.

Gnu von Geparden umzingelt

More pic­tures of the hunt can be found in the gallery and in my sep­a­rate report - just click on the pic­ture above.