Impala Take-down

It's not often that you see how nature can work on the African plain. Today we saw a solitary cheetah a kilometre or so from Savanna Lodge where we are staying. The guide was excited because cheetahs were not common in this area - they tend to move about a lot, ranging over a huge geographical area so a cheetah sighting was quite special. We decided to wait to see what might happen and soon enough the cat went on the move towards a sizeable herd of impala bunched up in the morning coolness about half a kilometre away.

A two year-old female cheetah on the lookout for a meal

We waited for maybe 20 minutes, not quite knowing what was about to happen and when - the guides thought she was going for the impala herd. Suddenly the herd scattered in every direction and we could see the cheetah moving fast just on the horizon probably 250 metres away. It's a hard trick to capture the action with a camera when you don't know where the action was going to kick off.

While lions typically hunt in a pride, cheetahs hunt alone. And, as they don't have retractable claws, they can't hang onto their prey like a lion. Instead they clamp their jaws around the prey's throat - which brings it to the ground then they basically throttle it. It takes some time. We had front row seats for the whole process.

Once the impala was dead, she started to eat - this is also a dangerous part of the hunt because the cheetah can't fight off any other predators that might have got wind of what was happening: lions, wild dogs and hyenas.

We left the cheetah as she quickly munched as much as she could before some other hungry beast came strolling by looking for an effortless meal - like this grinning hyena.