We know many of the leopards in our surrounding area, and we often refer to them by the name of the area in which they live. One male leopard has no need of such descriptions since he’s very distinctive – he’s huge (I once briefly mistook him for a lion in the distance on a night drive!) and he missing one of his eyes.
I found him two nights ago right in the centre of his range, scent marking and patrolling. I left him heading south and beginning to hunt. The following morning, I heard from guides in the southern area of the park that he had covered around 10kms from where I’d seen him, and then got into a fight with another male. The fight was so severe (presumably about territory since leopards are fiercely territorial) that the smaller male was killed! The one-eyed male then began to feed on the impala that the other male had killed which led me to think that the dispute had been partly over food too.
Leopards are generally solitary, only coming into contact with one another to mate, or when a mother is rearing cubs. So to see an interaction was unusual, and to see one leopard fighting with another was extremely unusual. I went there the following afternoon and found the large male descending from a tree and pacing across a sandy pan.
