Tanzania Carnivores

It’s not that often that an adult cheetah unknown to the Cheetah Project suddenly appears in our study area, but that was exactly what happened on 3rd September.  Sarah Durant, the Cheetah Project Coordinator, was out looking for cheetahs when she saw a young female near Maasai Kopjes.  As this particular youngster was so tame we assumed she was a newly independent cub of one of the project’s known females – imagine our surprise when, after comparing her to all our known cheetahs we found that she was a new one!  But then, just to make things even more note worthy, after never having been seen before, this cheetah was then seen on another three occasions within a week of her first sighting! 

What makes this young female really unusual is just how habituated she is, normally new cheetahs are a little wary at first as they tend to come from the further reaches of the park, where there are fewer cars.  To give an example of how not shy this female is, on one of the sightings she was seen eating a freshly killed Thomson’s gazelle whilst just metres from a wall of tour cars.  During the hour and a half she was observed by the project there were at all times between 6 and 25 cars full of people watching her!  She didn’t seem bothered by them at all despite the cars almost constantly moving and people talking, she eventually left her meal and walked straight past the cars to go and lie down in the long grass, again just metres away from lots of excited tourists! 

Later that day she was seen again, once more on a kill and once more surrounded by tourists – she’s definitely not shy this particular cheetah!  It was noted that she only ate the hind legs of both the gazelles she had killed leading those of us on the project to speculate whether gazelle legs might be a delicacy in the cheetah world?!  Either way, her love of food has, for the moment, earnt her the nickname Canapé!