Today was another great day at Mala Mala. And, to top it off, at the end of the evening drive we saw quite the scene with leopards and hyenas. But first, let’s get on the road…

Immediately after we exited through the gates, we saw a herd of elephants. They were munching away on the brush, grass and trees.

These two each are each putting food in their mouths.

I like how you can see the trunk curling around the little branch in this photo…

There was a youngster with this small herd.

We hung out with the elephants for a while, then moved along. Right out here, we could see solar panels for the lodge.

We drove past the airstrip that we had flown in on. There was a larger herd of impalas all over the runway, and a small group of zebras.

Apparently, any time they are using the airstrip, they need to go out and chase the animals away.

We crossed this small bridge over the water.

The surrounding water was pretty with the reeds.

Then, surprise! We saw our one and only crocodile for this trip. We could see his body, but his head was stuck into the reeds. You can juuuuussst barely see the tip of his snout and a couple of teeth all the way to the right side of the photo.

Here, a male warthog was out grazing on his own.

Around the corner, we saw a pair of Egyptian geese up on the bank. It’s funny how one had his (or her?) foot up. For these birds, the males and females look the same.

Around the corner, we suddenly had a small herd of elephants grazing on the brush. They didn’t seem bothered by us at all.

By now, the sun was starting to set. And around the next corner, we saw 3 white rhinos! Two adults and a baby. Even with less light, this is a great photo of mom and baby.

Note that mom doesn’t have horns in this photo. To stop poachers, Mala Mala Game Reserve de-horns their rhinos. It’s really sad that they have to do that.😢 But, given the poaching problem, it’s their last-ditch effort to save the rhinos. Since the horns grow back, they have to do it every year or two.

After watching the rhinos for a while, the sun was really starting to set. So we started meandering our way back to the lodge. Out of the blue, a female leopard came striding out of the brush and across the road right in front of us dragging a dead impala. 😲

Note all the photos after this are in very low light and darkness. So the ISO is up very high (meaning grainy photos). I did a lot of editing for them, and they look better than they were… you’ll see why these photos are worth it!

She dragged the impala quite a long way. We followed her into the brush to see where she was going. We finally figured out she was heading towards the one tall tree in the area. But, wow, that was a distance. She had to stop every so often to rest.

Unfortunately, she never made it to the tree. Out of the blue, we heard snarling and – you guessed it – a hyena came shooting out of the brush towards her and the impala. It happened so fast! I was taking pictures of her with the impala and got some action shots of the hyena rushing towards her. Sadly, she had to leave the impala and run away. No way could she fight off a hyena.

Jeff took videos of all this, so it will be great when I move on to editing videos of our trip later.

The leopard moved off a ways but stayed in the area watching the hyena. Boy, that hyena tore into that impala very quickly. We were only about 5 feet away from this scene (as you can see by part of the truck in the lower left of the photo).

It was getting darker, so Jacques decided to shine the spotlight on the hyena. That helped the photos quite a bit.

We were watching the hyena eat the impala – with all the gross sounds that go along with it – when we heard more snarling and growling. Whoosh! Another hyena came out of the brush and barrelled into this one. In the end, they snarled at each other but didn’t fight. Instead, they both ate the impala.

Meanwhile, our female leopard was lying over on the side watching all of this.

No surprise, there were more hyenas in the area. So a third one appeared and joined in the feast.

What did surprise us is that another leopard appeared! This one was a large male. He came in pretty close to the hyenas, but they ignored him and kept eating. The male wasn’t dumb enough to try to take the kill from three hyenas.

He didn’t care about our truck at all. Here he is right next to us.

He also stayed in the area to watch the hyenas eat. I assume both the leopards were hoping the hyenas would leave some scraps. I doubt they did. We really felt sorry for the female leopard who had done the work of hunting and killing the impala.

We watched for a bit but then decided we’d leave them all to their dinner and watching. So we headed on back to the lodge for our dinner.