A Picture Worth A Thousand Words – Part 2
I have written about this before, I know but this series of images has got me going again.
The Snapshot Serengeti images are great and they have captured some stunning stuff over the years (melanistic serval, oxpeckers roosting at night on giraffe, a buffalo hunt by lions) and individually they have produced some amazing portraits but every once in a while, the old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ doesn’t quite ring true.
I posted images of a male seemingly strolling through the savannah a while back, musing on what he had been up to. The other day whilst browsing through images I found more parts to the picture. More images of him moving at different times and a female.
I am sure that Snapshot Serengeti followers could add to this series of images if we delve further but I was intrigued.
What’s happening? Is it a male and female spending some days together whilst mating (as happens with lions)? Or are there other pride members around? The female looks as though she has blood staining her face so perhaps, they have been feasting on a kill, alternately moving back and forth to water or shade between snacking.
It is one of those instances when you would like the camera to just swivel a bit to see if we can learn more but technology (or at least affordable tech) has not quite reached that state yet.
So, we will just have to sit back and enjoy what we can see, a pair of very full looking handsome lions and let our imaginations do the rest. Sometimes no knowing is part of the fun.
Cheetah Tactics?
Here at Snapshot Serengeti we are lucky to get regular good images of all the big cats. Lions feature the most frequently followed by cheetah with leopard being the rarest. This is not surprising when you think that lions like to spend the day sleeping and resting after their night-time prowling. This means they make a bee-line for the shade of trees. Cheetah have the same idea, staying out of the sun during the day. Leopard of course tend to be up those trees and so its harder to capture them on camera trap. We are still waiting for the day that we get a capture of a fury belly as a leopard leaps up over the camera on its upward trajectory. Imagine how hard that could be to identify!
Looking through some of the recent images from the most recent batch we came across this series of three images of a cheetah walking right up to the tree the camera-trap was on, presumably to settle down for a nice nap, but is that all there is to this tree/cat relationship?
Cheetah, as I am sure you are aware are at the bottom of the big cat chain. They don’t do well in a fight against lion, leopard or hyena for that matter so they have to stay alert to danger. They need time to slink away or flee at speed.
So now picture this, a cheetah is sleeping in the grass, it wakes up and wants to survey the plains to see if there is either prey or danger about. It sits up and bang! its seen by anything that happens to be near by. Now rewind a bit, the same cheetah has a nap under a tree. This time it sits up to survey and its slender body is masked by the trunk of the tree. Its not nearly so easy to spot from a distance.
Ok so its just a theory and probably cheetah primarily spend time underneath trees from a purely physiological perspective but it would be nice to think they were also using their tree as a point of tactical surveillance. Certainly in the hot shimmering air of the Serengeti it is hard to see a cheetah that is sitting upright under a tree until you are pretty close by. In my experience although lions like a tree too its just as likely that you will find them lounging in the shade of an erosion channel or small bush but cheetah always seem to by in that classic pose under a sturdy tree when resting.
It gets you thinking!
Snapshot Serengeti 