Rocktails pug marks...

Location:  Rocktail Beach Camp, Maputaland, South Africa
Date:  15 July 2009
Observer:  Simon Stobbs
Photographs:  Simon Stobbs

On a recent trip that I guided, we spent a few nights at Rocktail Beach Camp in the pristine iSimangaliso Wetland Park. This is a truly unique wilderness area with one of the most remote stretches of coastline in South Africa. For me, one of the key attributes of a true wilderness area is that it must have the ability to turn up the unexpected. This is exactly what happened on our visit.

I had heard that members of the Rocktail Dive Team had seen leopard tracks on the beach close to Island Rock. This was something that I really needed to see. Heading down onto the beach in the late afternoon I walked and searched along the high water line to see what I could find. And there they were. The clear pug marks of a leopard that had walked along the water's edge the previous night!

Seeing these tracks indicates just how elusive these creatures are. Chatting to some of our guides who have been in the area for 20 years, none of them had seen leopard tracks on the beach before. Leopards are extremely resourceful and opportunistic predators and in an area like Rocktail would be able to survive by feeding on the likes of red duiker, bushbuck, birds such as Crested Guineafowl and a host of other small prey items such as rodents. They have even been recorded catching fish - when Lake Kariba was flooded.

As wonderful as it was to see the leopard tracks, perhaps one day a guest will be fortunate enough to actually see firsthand a leopard casually sauntering along the beach....