Best Place to find Cheetah in the Wild
Cheetahs are the rarest of all the big cats in Africa. According the the Cheetah Outreach in South Africa, there are an estimated 7,100 cheetahs left in the wild. Even more disturbing is that this beautiful cat is now restricted to a meager 9% of its historic range. So as you can imagine tracking one down while on a safari in Africa can be one of the major highlights of the trip.
Cheetah carcass in a tree
These beautiful cats are built for speed. They are capable of reaching speeds of 100km (68mph), over short distances. Because of this it is often referred to as the greyhound of cats. It uses this speed and acceleration to hunt in the open grasslands and woodlands for small gazelles. However some times cheetahs will work together to take down bigger game like a wildebeest.
Cheetah brothers with a fresh kill
Wildebeest down
In my travels around Africa I found myself always trying to track down a sighting of one of these rare cats. Most of the populations that do still exist are separated and small in numbers. So I was blown away by the amount of cheetah encounters we had on this latest trip into the southern Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. In three days we saw mother with two older cubs stalking gazelles in the woods, a lone cheetah way out in the plains, two brothers who took down a wildebeest, and even a cheetah carcass that had been pulled up into a tree by a leopard a week earlier.
Now get out there and find some cheetahs!
-Dai Mar
Check it out on pinmapple here: [//]:# (!pinmapple -2.18967 lat 34.99413 long Cheetah Tracking d3scr)