Caracals

When I moved to live most of my time in Kenya’s Maasai Mara in 2007 there was one animal that was a sort of unreachable holy grail, an invisible creature that very few people had seen in the wild and even less had photographed. The few reported sightings were of mostly fleeting cats dashing across the road and then melting away in the plains. Then one day in October of 2009 I was driving on the plains of the Mara and I saw a creature jump up on a termite mound quite far away. Immediately after a second one followed. I couldn’t fully make out what I was looking at until I picked my binoculars and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Two Caracals. Immediately they jumped off into the grass and disappeared. It was the beginning of my love story with these amazing phantoms of the savannah. That day I spent the whole afternoon with mother Caracal and her almost full grown cub, photographing them in intimate behaviors that had never been photographed in the wild before. I followed that female for three consecutive litters, and then another female with two more litters. A gift from nature that I had never even dared to dream of.