Leopard eating its kill

[Dhiraj Kapoor]

Spotted this Leopard in the wild near by Jaipur. It was feeding on its kill and continued to do so for a few more minutes and then disappeared.

FLASH : Did not fire
FOCAL LENGTH : 250 mm
EXPOSURE TIME : 1/6s
APERTURE : F5.6
ISO : 800

[Mrudul Godbole]

Nice to see a leopard with a kill. Was this photographed in some reserve? Please post the equipment details. Thanks for sharing.

[Dhiraj Kapoor]

Thanks!!

No its not a reserve, its just a protected forest that has about 10-12 leopards (or maybe more)

I clicked this pic using my Sony A Dslr 200 camera with 70-300mm Minolta lens

[Roopak Gangadharan]

Nice . are they spotted often here???

TFS
Roopak

[Dhiraj Kapoor]

Nice . are they spotted often here???

TFS
Roopak

Well, if you ask the villages on the periphery, yes, they say that they see them every day. But I dont think thats the case. Definitely there are leopards in the jungle's around but as we all know, leopard is a very shy animal and in thick dry jungles it gets very easily camoflauged. So spotting is very difficult.

I must have only seen the Leopard 4 times over a period of 50 visits. So its not that easy.

The day we captured this we were pretty sure (as in like 80% sure) that a leopard will come to that point as during the day a villager had informed us that a female blue bull has been killed over night by a leopard, so it will come to feed in the evening/night.

We patiently waited in our car by road side. That road is a village road and is empty after dark. We waited for over an hour and there was no movement at all, we started to get some eerie feeling and decided to leave. As soon as we switched on the car lights we saw a figure moving towards the kill.

Sure enough it was a Leopard. As soon as I saw it I realised that all my camera settings had gone hay wire by now

Following is the sequence of events...

[Dhiraj Kapoor]

The leopard was vary of our presence, so it was very frisky, plus getting the right camera setting from within the car was also proving difficult

[Dhiraj Kapoor]

The Leopard got busy eating its kill and finally I also got my settings right, but again the leopard was moving continuously. But I did manage to capture its body in one frame

And then it sat down and continued to feed and I managed the pic posted in the first post. After I was happy with the photograph, I put my camera away and watched the magnificent animal devour its prey. The scene continued for another 15 minutes and the leopard after that disappeared.

[Abhirup Dutta Gupta]

great shot.