Peter Neville recalls his first sighting of an African Leopard.
I first came on safari several times in Africa in the early 1980s and quickly saw all the famous big game species, and many smaller gorgeous creatures too. I even learned the names of a myriad of bird species as well during a three-month nationwide tour of Kenya when I was lucky enough to safari through nearly all of the major nature reserves there, and became something of a birder, in East Africa at least! And then I came to South Africa in 1991 on a national veterinary lecture tour and journeyed through the Kruger Park as my pay; unfortunately, missing the birth of my daughter Sinead back in the UK while I was first lecturing and then rekindling my love for this vivid continent and its astonishing, enthralling wildlife and nature, (she was born two weeks premature, and I was scheduled to home in time so I didn’t miss the great event deliberately!).
It all came to the point where I felt that Africa become like a malaria infection to me… once caught, never lost, with the almost clinical condition of needing to visit Africa that flares up very severely every so often. I never caught malaria, it is one part of the African natural arena that I have managed to avoid, but then, for the first 20 years and more of going to countries all over the continent, often with Sinead and then my son Leo in tow, I, indeed we, on several occasions, somehow also amazingly managed to avoid seeing a whole leopard. All I ever caught anywhere was a very occasional glimpse of a bit of one, just a few spots on a tail disappearing into the bush, a rear end tantalisingly caught for a second or two in the headlights at night, or a very distant single spot on the horizon, so small that all the spots of this elusive, glorious creature merged into a mere leopard-shaped outline silhouetted tantalisingly against an evening sky, and melting into the darkness long before I could get near enough to “join the dots”.
The more I didn’t see one, the more I yearned and the more I tried to find one. Friends and nature guides tried so hard to “put me on one”, and we waited patiently at waterholes and on game trails by the spoor of recent leopard tracks in the sand long into the night where it was allowed, and also in a few places where it isn’t, but all to no avail. Everyone else saw them, or so it seemed. I’d listen to “first timers” in safari lodge bars recount how wonderful it was that a leopard mother had paraded her cubs in front of them as soon as they had driven into a park, how others had seen a powerful, lar
