Earth Touch Wildlife Podcast Week 42 2009

While the herd is moving through, two of the young bulls began to tustle and play fight. Not very dangerous play at all. What started out as a very, sort of, passive game started to become quite intense very, very quickly. These two continued to fight and the older guy just continued to chase the smaller one around. The older bulls began the same scenario, except with a little bit more, almost discipline. It's much more of a gentleman's combat than it is anything else. Maybe they know not to expend so much energy. In this overcast weather we were led in by a few vultures to a kill. It was a buffalo bull that had been pulled down. Not far off we found our two males, they'd managed to kill this buffalo bull on their own. There was no sign of the pride anywhere. It was only so long before the male lion had to run in and chase them off. Lions never like vultures. There's a theory that their faeces sour the meat. Think it's more basic than that, more about just competition. It's their kill and only they should eat on it. We've come across some really, really bizarre creatures On every dive we discover something we've never seen before. Some of the animals that stood out for us were the small sea horses, we came across a really bizarre looking nudibranch and a lot of different creatures that just make their home on the bottom of this estuary. It wasn't long before we realised what his calling was all about. A female leopard came out of the sedge grass and went straight up into the same tree he was in. And this is where these two began the first mating that we saw. It's an incredibly aggressive, very loud display and totally initiated by the female. It's typical for leopards to mate, probably, every half hour in the first several days of their mating. You could just see the female keeps coming back and harassing the male and just presenting herself to him. The next day we found them further across from Dead Tree onto Sedulu Island. Once again the female was coming up to him and displaying in front of him. The branches just didn't quite present a perfect place for them to copulate at all. It wasn't long before they both came down the tree. Cats have serrations on their penises and apparently it's a painful ordeal for the female. The male, having done his bit he thought for the day, moved up onto the termite mound and promptly went to sleep. It was just an incredible piece of behaviour to witness.