Enormous, intense, savage, these are some of the endless descriptors that can be used to describe this hulking beast of a leopard.Not only is he nearly the size of a small lioness, but he breaks the mold of what I have always thought a leopard should be. I always thought of leopards as immensely strong yet graceful creatures, that exude beauty and danger. But this guy….. is different.
One look at him and you realize that he is all about brutality and power. When we found him, he was in a tree with half of a rather unfortunate warthog trapped between his teeth. Licking his lips in-between wrenching sizable chunks of flesh off the carcass. Pausing only to check his surroundings and shoot incredibly intimidating looks at anything that dared to make a noise.
To those who know him and his reign as the unofficial largest leopard ever in the Sabi Sands, he is known by one name…… The Anderson Male.
Before we knew what weight that name carried, our driver John turned to us and informed us that he had been spotted about a half a mile away in a tree with a kill, to which we all excitedly agreed we had to see. On the drive there, John and our tracker Euce asked if we had seen or heard of this leopard before, when we said that we had not John said
“ Well this guy is a REAL leopard .”
To my self I thought, we have seen around 10 different leopards in the wild at this point. Including a couple of big beautiful males such as the Camp Pan Male, Hosana, and Camp Pan’s equally impressive son the Makhotini Male. So how impressive could this Anderson Male really be?
But when we rolled up to the tree and could hear the unmistakable scraping of teeth on bone, the crunch of cartilage, and finally caught a glimpse of him through the branches, I repeated what John said….
“ Yep….. that is a real leopard.”
He was unlike any other leopard I had seen before. The golden coat of the Hosana male was nowhere to be found on this guy, but in its place a muted color of almost beige or white. Nose and ears ripped apart from years of fighting and hunting. His eyes a pale yellowish brown as opposed to the neon green of Queen Jayne, or the Golden yellow of Hosana. The graceful effortless movement of most others was replaced with a gate where each step could be felt in your chest. Like i said before…. this guy was different. To see for your selves follow the instructions below the video.
The Anderson Male Appears in the Cover of this Video, and at 2:29, and finally at 2:53
We have seen a few other leopards on kills, and they tend to always be violent scenes with lots of blood and rancid smells, but other leopards at least seemed to have some table manners. But this guy tore off slabs of meat as if he was pissed that this poor warthog wasn’t already served on a silver platter. The level of intensity was at a level I had never felt before at other leopard sightings . As we sat there watching him, every now and then he would look up and do a classic leopard roar, which sounds like someone sawing wood, then shoot us one of his now iconic glares as if saying…
“ Your lucky I just ate.”
He had a savageness to his eyes that I hadn’t seen in any other leopard outside of a hunt. He ALWAYS seems switched on, even when he was just relaxing. It was not until he jumped down from the tree and lied down at the bottom of a dry river bed, and heard a squirrel make a noise that we saw just a glimpse of how locked on he could get. The last shot of the trailer for Safari Stories (Above) shows the ending of that exact moment as he loses interest in the squirrel, and he turns and shoots a hair raising look right through my lens.
After I had a chance to look at the shots from that sighting, I realized that the focus on my favorite shot was slightly off. So, something I usually do to compensate for that is I turn the shot into a high contrast black and white with lots of clarity. This decision led to one of the more unique leopard shots in my portfolio, that i am not only very proud of, but think its one of the best I took on the 2018 safari trip.
A couple of weeks after we had returned home to California, we were on Londolozi Game Reserve’s (where we saw him) online blog, which is linked below, where we spotted a post about him. At the time the rangers found him again it appeared that he had lost an eye. This update distressed us, because leopards and other predators rely on their depth perception in order to hunt and survive. But thankfully a couple of worrying weeks later, they found him again and it turned out that the injury was actually just a cut that had swollen so badly that it shut his eye. Now he has another impressive scar to add the his ever growing collection. If you ask me this most recent scar only adds to his intimidation factor.
You would think that after such a potentially horrific injury, the Anderson male would just take it easy and relax. But no, that is not his style. In the following weeks a new blog post by James Tyrrell, stated that the Anderson male was attacked and almost killed by a lioness (video linked below). Not exactly what I would call R&R, but it seems to fit the Anderson male too a tee.
Everyone who sees this guy is blown away by his intense energy and shear size. But while he isn’t the most beautiful leopard I’ve ever seen, he is certainly THE most impressive.
Anderson Loses his eye: https://blog.londolozi.com/2018/07/17/male-leopard-loses-an-eye/
Anderson Still has his Eye: https://blog.londolozi.com/2018/08/13/male-leopard-almost-blinded/
Lioness almost kills TWO leopards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwxukOXPNUg
