BOTSWANA: Leopard Hunt Report

[PARA45]

Oh man, this report is going to be a nail biter. I can't wait. Good luck visiting the Rinos in your new farm. Please take lots of pictures.

 

[Sourdough]

I’ve been trying to post a picture for a couple of days but it times out at 80%. I’m aboard my SwissAir flight now, maybe once we are in the air the WiFi onboard will make it happen. I’m in business class and I’m going to say it again but with more emphasis. United Airlines Polaris is a POS. Do you hear that United? You should be ashamed for charging the same price as Delta One and Swiss Air Business class. United Airlines you are no where near their equal. Okay, I’m off my soapbox.

 

[Sourdough]

Alright. The leopard. First I owe you guys a picture so hopefully here it is. Cat weighed 69kg and that was not a guess but on a scale.

 

[CamoManJ]

Congrats on the TOAD of leopard!
I also can’t wait to read your report…
Thanks for posting.

 

[MontanaPat]

Congratulations on a nice cat, look forward to hearing more

 

[375 Ruger Fan]

Congratulations! 69kg or 152 lbs, quite a cat.

 

[Sourdough]

The Set Up
The Kalahari in Botswana. I had the only permit to hunt an area of somewhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000 acres made up of huge farms (cattle ranches) and communal lands. Low fence perimeter on the farms (I’m going to call them ranches from now on as that’s what we’d call them in the U.S.).

Base Camp
A 100,000 acre ranch with a farm house style lodge, a couple of farm house style chalets, and a couple of canvas tents (not luxury).

The Team
Five hunting Land Cruisers. Three Professional Hunters (one a lady), each in a separate Land Cruiser with their trackers. One driver with trackers. The young owner of the ranch with his trackers. The lady PH also had the dogs.

The Hounds
Fourteen of them from a much larger pack of over 50. If I remember correctly fourteen is the maximum allowed on a hunt. About a third of them were scent hounds, the remainder chasers of which the biggest were also fighters. Interesting thing about the hounds, they are all coon hounds yet some will be scent hounds and some chase hounds. As an example I was told that with two sisters one was a scenter and the other a chaser, a choice the hounds make.

The Terrain
Flat to hilly Kalahari scrub lands. Mostly Black Thorn bushes with an occasional Camel Thorn three. Normally between these would be sand. But with very rainy conditions since December grasses had grown thick and two to three feet high. There was one area where a leopard had just killed a calf in a cattle pen but we couldn’t track it because the cattle obliterated the tracks and the entire area was surrounded by dense daisy like plants/flowers.

The Weather
Beautiful sunny, dry days. Hot during the day, cold at night. We did get rain at the end which proved crucial to the success of the hunt.

The Moon
New moon so dark at night other then the stars.

My Firearm
1910 WJ Jeffery Double in 475 No 2 Jeffery.

My Ammo
Hand loaded, Woodleigh 500 grain Soft Point bullets.

The Warning (from the houndsmen PHs)
This is an incredibly boring type of hunting. Hours and hours and days and days of driving the dirt roads looking for tracks.

For us that meant driving from 6am to 6pm with a couple of days where we started at 3am.

I day time Swordfish so I thought I knew what boring looked like, watching the rod tip every second for hours and days on end for a subtle tap of the rod tip. But when the days roll by without seeing a fresh leopard tracks, well that’s what boring really looks like.

 

[Sourdough]

Tracking Total Distance
You will find this hard to believe, but we all did the math. Five Land Cruisers driving the distance of a full tank of fuel each day for seven days, at least twelve hours a day.

The total distance? Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 miles. Not kilometers but miles. Imagine driving from California to Maine or Texas to Alaska in search of just one set of shootable leopard tracks. And for six of those seven days not finding a track.

 

[Sourdough]

I had hoped that I would have had seven days of cool stories to tell you guys but the truth of it is for six days we’d get up at 5am (or 2am), have some coffee and a simple breakfast, and hit the road. Drive on dirt roads to a new location, then slow down to about 10 kilometers per hour. Take some pee breaks, take a lunch break, and head back at dusk.

Then rinse and repeat the next day.

 

[Sourdough]

We did see a lot of excellent Kudu.

On day 2 my PH spotted a bull that was maybe 55 inches. He asked if I wanted to shoot it. I said “Nope”. He asked if he could shoot it. “Sure thing” I said. Measured 54/53.

 

[Angelo_orygun]

Congrats on a successful hunt, especially with a daily grind like that.

Agree on Polaris, the only thing worse than the seat (and lack of storage) is the service that comes from the United FAs that fly those routes!!!

 

[Sourdough]

Hopefully in another 5 hours when I’m in a lounge in Zurich for a six hour layover I have better Internet connection so I can upload a bunch of more pictures and continue the story.

 

[BRICKBURN]

Boring, Boring, Boring and then Chaos.
You would have a trending video of you captured the chaos.
I've seen one a Jeff Rands hunts. Pretty amazing video.

 

[Sourdough]

Okay, after the most bizarre, annoying experience getting into the Zurich Airport and getting to my gate, which I will talk about later, I’m in a Swiss Air lounge on their WiFi so let’s see if I can continue the story and include some pictures.

So, Day ends like all the previous days, lots of driving but no fresh, shootable Leopard tracks. After dinner and a shower I head to bed. And it starts raining. This make me happy because it will wash all the old tracks away meaning anything we see will be fresh.

It rains hard for a couple of hours and I fall asleep.

 

[Sourdough]

I wake. Midnight has come and gone. It’s now Day 7, the final day of the hunt. The rain has stopped. I fall back asleep.

I wake again at 4am. It’s raining. Whatever tracks there were since the earlier rain are gone now. An hour later the rain quits for the remainder of the day. Well any tracks we might find now will be smoking hot.

We decide not to leave until 7am the give the wet grass a chance to dry. Leopards don’t like walking in wet grass.

 

[Sourdough]

6:30am and we all gather at the five Land Cruisers. I ask that all the trackers be gathered so I can talk to them.

“I know it’s been tough the last six days. You’ve all worked hard looking for a fresh track and I’m sure you are as frustrated as me. So let’s have some fun. A contest. Whoever finds the track the we end up hunting will get a $100 U.S. from me.”

That seems to lift and lighten the mood. The rancher with his trackers is the first to leave. Five or ten minutes later the rest of us leave.

When the four vehicles get to the entrance of today’s block that we will hunt we all take off on different sand roads.

The final hunt is on.

 

[Sourdough]

It doesn’t take long and we receive a radio call from the rancher. “You must come here and see this track”.

We respond “Is it a good one? How fresh is it?”

He just says “You must come now”.

All four vehicles head his way.

We arrive and there he stands next to the track he spotted first.

It’s 3 1/2 fingers wide, a very good male leopard.

 

[Sourdough]

The tracks are very fresh.

The rancher grabs his 12 gauge Remington pump shotgun and his trackers and gets on the track.

The hounds receive the gps tracking collars and the howling begins as they clearly know their fun will start soon. For seven days they too have traveled day after day without ever being let out.

But we are not ready to release them yet. First we drive the road to see if the Leopard has come back across. He hasn’t.

The rancher radios us to tell us the Leopard is running. The track is red hot. Two of the scent dogs are released.

 

[Sourdough]

My Houndswoman PH tells me what to expect when we finally get to the Leopard and the hounds are on him. Utter chaos. The hounds howling and barking and moving around, the trackers and PHs yelling. But I must ignore all this and focus on the Leopard. And please don’t shoot any of the hounds. Apparently it’s happened a few times before.

 

[Sourdough]

As you can imagine the excitement was very high. All except me. I wasn’t going to let my emotions get ahead of the game. And then just as quickly as that the cat eluded the dogs and trackers. Seems he ran around in a bunch of circles creating a track with a heavy scent and then peeled off and went elsewhere. From a high to a low in emotion, glad I was staying tempered.

Two more scent hounds were released and more trackers sent out to find the Leopard’s track again.

Once the trackers had the track they ran like olympians on the track while the scent hounds were all over the place.

This scenario played out three or four times. Emotions up the emotions down. But the Leopard was beginning to wear out. He started laying down until either the hounds or the trackers were close.