Cheetah Tracking Adventures, Part B

DAY TWO
Waking up at 5am is not high on my favorite list (it’s not on the list at all!), but the fact that I was waking up to track cheetahs made it SO much better! It had rained all night, so we couldn’t get the car out of the lot, so we tracked them on foot. They weren’t so far away and when we found them, they were hunting again! We heard an oryx death cry and Ryan took off at a run! I was VERY hard pressed to keep up and I pretty much failed. I mean, from when we first saw them trot off to the kill spot, it was over 300 meters! Luckily, Ryan was wearing a bright red beanie that was easy to follow.

When we got there, the boys were already on their kill: an oryx calf. I was so proud of them! Omadillo was holding it down while Anakin went for the throat bite (classic cheetah kill which strangles prey pretty quickly) and Obi-Wan protected them from… well us. He was very weary of Ryan for a bit. But then it started getting very sad… and gory. Since these boys are still learning, they couldn’t quite get the neck bite right and kept getting startled by the oryx’s little horns… so they eventually gave up on the neck bite and Omadillo started eating the hindquarters… while it was still alive. It took the poor thing 35 minutes to die. Ryan and I were so angry at them when Obi-Wan and Anakin just laid in the grass instead of helping with the kill, but they are LEARNING and apparently Chester usually does the neck bite. It was pretty horrific and so sad because the little oryx was fighting the whole time. When it finally died, Obi-Wan and Anakin started eating, too. Moral of the story is that it was hard to watch and very sad, but I am glad the boys are hunting and getting their own food successfully. They will learn to kill properly with time.

The rest of the day they were pretty lazy. They were so full of food that they looked pregnant! Ryan and I actually sat down and did data entry/ read a book respectively. They were just flopped on the ground, so we didn’t have to record much. It was VERY surreal to be sitting 10 meters from 3 technically WILD cheetahs reading a book about dragons… but there you have it. It didn’t rain ALL DAY so we got a fire when we got back to camp! Dinner of leftover mystery meat (possibly goat we decided), garlic bread, and pasta was awesome! (BUSH FOOD TOUR!)