Start of the rainy season, test of our new electric wire around the lodge, a roaring leopard, and the most important: very high chances for our guests to see a lot of animals even in a short stay. Welcome to our October report from the bush.

First of all we would like to thank very much our amazing field guides Alasdair, Riaan and Sean. In the last twelve months they have not only gone out into the bush every day looking for wild animals, but they also meticulously recorded all sightings in an excel file so that we can get a good idea of how often the wild animals are to see and in what situations we find them.

But now to our summary of the month of October: We received the first rain, and as expected, it came with a storm, lightning and thunder, so we also suffered our usual challenges with power supply and internet access. Nevertheless, there was not much rain yet, and we hope that we will get more during the now beginning summer and rainy season.

October was also a first test for our all-new electric wire, which hopefully protects us from the naughty elephants. The electric wires runs along the ground so that our guests have a wonderful, unobstructed view of our waterhole, where we regularly receive the visit of different animal species.

And what are the news from our game drives? The traditionally high frequencies were even increased a bit. On every game drive we could find an elephant with 90% probability, followed by lion (84%), buffalo (79%) and white rhino (66%), with all three of them achieving record levels. This will surely delight safari enthusiasts who have little time and want to see as much as possible on a single drive.

We saw cheetahs (28%) again with increased probability. However, it is somewhat more difficult to find a leopard (18%), a black rhino (3%) or the wild dogs (7%), which is the feature animal of the reserve.

At Rhulani we are glad that we can often see our majestic lion "Pretty Boy" in old strength. We saw him as he roared loudly, as he hunted, and when he ate a buffalo, which is his favorite food. Pretty Boy, however, was once again involved in a fight with the "Pilansberg Lions", but he luckily escaped unharmed.

Interestingly, we found a roaring leopard, which was very special for our guests. A cute discovery was a lion mother who had two little cubs of about 2 months. Also a black-backed jackal we observed with a tiny baby. This is the only species of jackal to be seen in Madikwe. In October, we found it with 39% probability per drive.