Mababe mopane forests

This painting of a leopard clambering down the dead limb of a mopane tree is of an individual I glimpsed one morning in the Mababe Depression in Northern Botswana. This part of the Chobe National Park has vast forests of mopane on the flat bed of what was once an ancient lake. Leopards love resting in trees so that's where you looked when in search of these elusive cats. In the 1970s leopards were very rarely seen in any part of the Botswana wilderness. They were very common, but also very shy as tourism had not yet taken off. Nowadays leopards are quite easy to find because exposure to mass tourism has desensitized their natural instincts to remain hidden. By the 1990s habituated leopards occurred everywhere tourist traffic occurred in Botswana. However back in the 1970s I nearly drove myself mad trying to find leopards to photograph and sketch even though at night their loud saw-like calls echoed through the trees surrounding my camp and they left their tracks around my fire. So when you did sight one it was always a surprise, and usually just a glimpse. I was never ready and very frustrated when they slid off and out of sight through the bush. This particular leopard is burnt into my memory because it was a silhouette against a dazzling October, mid-day sky. I can still feel the intense mid-day heat and sense the tsetse flies wafting about near my bare feet. A mental cat 'shape file' alerted me to an unusual 'something' in the trees above the sandy track ahead of me, and a second or two later, when the leopard moved again, it popped into focus. It had been hidden in plain view, a perfectly aligned extension of the weirdly shaped branches that it was climbing down - each limb appearing to take on the orientation of the branch it was on. Only when it moved was it obvious that it was a leopard!