Family Captures Rare Encounter With Mama Leopard Showing Her Cubs How To Cross The Road (video)

It’s one thing to see exotic animals in a zoo, but it’s a whole other experience to see them up close in their native habitat. That was the case for some tourists in Africa, who got a rare up-close encounter with a mother and her cubs at an especially precious moment. Most drivers have had to break to let animals like deer and ducks cross the road, but imagine having to stop for a leopard.

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The encounter happened at the Kruger National Park in South Africa. A 64-year-old visitor named Thinus Delport was there with his daughters and caught the whole thing on camera.

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"We hit a traffic jam where a few cars were stationary," he told Latest Sightings. "It seemed like visitors were looking at a pride of lions." They soon realized they had stopped for a leopard… and soon realized she wasn't alone. "My daughter noticed that in the thicket behind our vehicle, there was a mother leopard trying to move her cubs!"

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It was an adorable sight: the leopard mama was helping her precious cubs cross the road. At one point, one of the rambunctious cubs gets out of her sight and starts to turn back, and his brother follows—but mom quickly goes back to get them.

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It was an incredibly lucky sighting. Even within the park, something like this was very rare—the family had never even seen a leopard there. "This was an extremely rare sighting, and you don't often get to see a leopard mother relocate her cubs when they are still so young," Thinus said. "We've been visiting the Kruger for over 50 years, and not once have we seen something like this. This just came to show that patience really does pay off."