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About 9 lions, females and young, watches as two other females tried and failed to corner a group of zebras. From the lackluster effort, these lions are clearly well fed.
African Elephant. Elephants at the Sabie River. The African elephant is one of "The Big Five," the five animals considered the most dangerous and difficult to hunt. The others are the Cape Buffalo, rhino, lion and leopard.
A female leopard stares at the camera. It has a brown, spotted coat, whiskers and a green eye. Shot with a Nikon D850 and an 800mm lens in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya in June 2019.
ISO 3200, 800mm, f/5.6, 1/250, 0 EV
A 12-year-old male lion seen just after sunset in the Timbavati Private Game Reserve, part of the Greater Kruger Park, South Africa
Aquila private game reserve is located about 2 hours drive from Cape Town, making it one of the closest places to the city to see the "big five". These traditionally included lions, rhinos, buffalo, elephant and leopard for their difficulty to hunt and kill with older rifle and bow technology. Sadly nowadays rifle and bullet tech makes this too easy, and gives rise to "canned hunting" for tourism. Here at the Aquila reserve they also run a resuce and rehabilitation programme for "canned animals" including one leopard rescued from such a scheme.
This lion had just been evicted from his pride by another male pair. His brother was killed in the proceses.
Poaching is a massive problem in the Kruger National Park. Every year hundred of rhino are being killed for their horn.
Wikipedia: Historically the major factor in the decline of white rhinos was uncontrolled hunting in the colonial era, but now poaching for their horn is the primary threat. The white rhino is particularly vulnerable to hunting, because it is a large and relatively unaggressive animal and generally occurs in herds.
Despite the lack of scientific evidence, the rhino horn is highly prized in traditional Asian medicine, where it is ground into a fine powder or manufactured into tablets to be used as a treatment for a variety of illnesses such as nosebleeds, strokes, convulsions, and fevers. Due to this demand, several highly organized and very profitable international poaching syndicates came into being and would carry out their poaching missions with advanced technologies ranging from night vision scopes, silenced weapons, darting equipment and even helicopters. The ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and incursions by poachers primarily coming from Sudan have further disrupted efforts to protect the few remaining northern rhino.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rhinoceros : "In 2013, poaching rates for white rhinos nearly doubled from the previous year. As a result, the white rhino has now received Near Threatened status as its total population tops out at 20,000 members. Hunting of the animal has gone virtually unchecked in most of Africa, and the non-violent nature of the rhinoceros makes it susceptible to poaching. Mozambique, one of the four main countries the white rhino occupies, is used by poachers as a passageway to South Africa, which holds a fairly large number of white rhinos. Here, rhinos are regularly killed and their horns are smuggled out of the country. As of 2014, Mozambique labels white rhino poaching as a misdemeanor".
Bull Elephant, Zambezi Escarpment, Mashonaland West Oils on stretched canvas.
This Elephant Bull stands against a background of the magnificent Zambezi Valley Escarpment.. This terrain is wild and rugged and remote, where the big game of Africa is still present in surprisingly good wildlife populations.
African Elephant. The African elephant is one of "The Big Five," the five animals considered the most dangerous and difficult to hunt. The others are the Cape Buffalo, rhino, lion and leopard.
White Rhino. White and Black Rhino are both the same color. The names are misnomers. There are two species of rhinos. One species are grazers that eat grasses and ground plants. The other are browsers that eat leaves from trees and bushes. The grazers have a broad face with a wide mouth to take in as much grass as possible.The browsers have a narrow pointed face in order to reach between the branches of bushes to get to the leaves. The name given to the grazers, White Rhino, is actually a corruption of the Dutch word for "wide." To distinguish the two, the browser species became known as Black Rhinos.