Baboons chase off dozing leopard

07 Jan, 2010


The peaceful slumbers of a young leopard in Botswana's Moremi Game Reserve are interrupted by the arrival of not one, but two troops of marauding monkeys. Boris von Schoenebeck captures the confrontations on film.

We usually spend our Thursdays compiling footage filmed during the week, but we changed our plans on this particular Thursday because of the recent rains in Moremi. The week had been quieter than usual and we decided to head out for a couple of hours to see what we could find. This turned out to be a good decision as we soon located a leopard (Panthera pardus). In fact, it was the alarm calls of vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) that made us stop and search the surrounding forest.

The vervets were looking down from the high branches of a mopane tree (Colophospermum mopane). I initially thought they had seen a snake, but eventually I spotted the leopard in a fork lower down in the tree. We had seen this young male on several previous occasions he was fast becoming our most frequently sighted leopard. A very relaxed individual, he often spent hours in our presence. The last time this leopard was harassed by vervet monkeys he became agitated and quickly moved off into thicker bush. On this particular day, he seemed far more tolerant, watching the vervets calmly before falling asleep. The agitated monkeys soon moved on and it looked as if we would be spending a long day watching a sleeping leopard.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Baboon
• Leopard
• Moremi
• africa
• earth

[Tressco]

If he'd only finished high school... :(

I guess, some creatures are born beasts.