By RUPI MANGAT
Posted Friday, June 14 2013
Posted Friday, June 14 2013
- Our gaze moves to where she is staring and we see a herd of Thomson gazelle with their foals. The mother-and-cub duo makes for the tall grass, where they are perfectly camouflaged. The aim is to get as close as possibly to the quarry, then sprint for the kill.
The sheen of the rising sun spreads over the long grasses of the great savannah plains.
In a few weeks the great migration of the
wildebeest and the zebra will begin and by the time the herbivores leave
the Maasai Mara to return to the Serengeti, the grass will have bowed
to their stampede.
A male Jackson’s widowbird in full breeding
plumage of a long black tail and a scarlet chest hops above the grass
stalks while the yellow wattle stands out on the beak of a wattle plover
a few feet from our car. With me are the Maliks, who are are enjoying
the last day of their safari in Kenya and their first visit to Africa.
They have seen a cheetah on previous game drives
and, speaking of beginner’s luck, the family watched a leopard hunt down
an impala from start to finish — a hunt few are lucky to see. Suddenly,
the grass levels to the ground and Joseph Gichuki, a driver-guide at
the Mara Intrepids Camp, points to a cheetah couple.
“It’s Malaika and her cub,” he whispers, excited. I
have met Malaika before on several visits and she is a real survivor —
and a famous star in BBC’s Big Cat Diary — with a penchant for climbing
on top of cars. Jonathan Scott, the host of the wildlife documentary,
estimates her to be around six to eight years old.
“A cheetah that lives to be 10 years in the wild,
is old,” Jonathan and Angie Scott tell me. The husband-and-wife team has
spent more than three decades documenting the cats of the Mara in their
trilogy of Big Cat Diary books featuring lions, leopards, and cheetahs
accompanying the long-running BBC TV series Big Cat Diary and
the collection of their best African wildlife images in Mara-Serengeti: A
Photographer’s Paradise and Jonathan Scott’s Safari Guides to East
African Animals and Birds.
Sprint for the kill
Scanning the horizon, the spotted feline and her
cub, named Lucky Boy, look healthy. Suddenly alert, she rises on her
forelegs and her cub imitates her every move.
Our gaze moves to where she is staring and we see a
herd of Thomson gazelle with their foals. The mother-and-cub duo makes
for the tall grass, where they are perfectly camouflaged. The aim is to
get as close as possibly to the quarry, then sprint for the kill.
“She looks too well-fed to hunt,” remarks Gichuki,
a little puzzled. The cheetahs stealthily close in and a few seconds
later bring down a tiny foal as the rest of the herd runs for safety.
With heaving chests, the cats lie down by their
kill, then suddenly “the kill” jumps up and makes a dash for its life.
We jump up too at the unexpected sequence. It is Lucky Boy who chases
after the foal this time and trips it. We think the foal has had it this
time.
But no — Lucky Boy is more interested in “playing”
with his new toy. Every few seconds the foal lets out a plaintiff cry
while Lucky Boy plays cat-and-mouse with it. His mother, Malaika,
watches calmly.
“She’s teaching him to hunt,” reveals Gichuki. A
martial eagle glides over them, but not interested in the small prey,
moves on. An hour later the cat-and-mouse game is still on.
“Lions and hyenas are a major threat to cheetah
cubs,” say Jonathan and Angie. “Too many of them in a place poses a
threat to cheetah numbers. In the old days, before the concept of
wildlife conservancies was introduced, areas outside the Mara Reserve
were often good for cheetahs with cubs because Maasai warriors kept lion
and hyena numbers in check.
“The other major impact on cheetahs is the change
in habitat. Cheetah mothers need safe hiding places for young cubs —
clumps of tall grass or patches of bush. The Mara has become much more
open in recent years — the trees and acacia thickets within the reserve
are disappearing and some open plains areas now resemble the Serengeti
Plains, where cheetah cub survival has been shown to be very poor as it
is easier for lions and hyenas to spot a cheetah with cubs and to steal
their food and kill their cubs.”
The Mara is one of the last strongholds of the cheetah, but nobody knows the number of the current population.
However, global cheetah population in the wild is
estimated to be less than 10,000. A new project called The Mara
Ecosystem Cheetah Project, in collaboration with Oxford WildCRU, aims to
find the current status of cheetahs in the greater Mara ecosystem and
identify the major threats that could be causing decline in their
population.
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