We were six days into the Central Kalahari. No lions. No leopards. No cheetahs. Just the wide-open silence of the greenest bush I’d ever seen here.

After weeks of obsessively scanning for predators, hearing them every night but with zero sightings, I had almost accepted that this trip would be a different kind of story. Then, just like that, nature reminded me she doesn’t follow scripts.

It was late afternoon. The light was dropping fast, that golden hue rolling in soft and low over the edge of Passarge Valley. We had stopped to watch a small herd of springbok, beautifully backlit, casually grazing.

And then something shifted.

The herd stiffened. Heads popped up. In the far distance, two black-backed jackals were weaving through the tall grass.

Now, I’ve watched jackals for years. Scavenging, mostly. Occasionally, bold enough to steal from a cheetah. But this time, they weren’t scavenging. They were hunting.

At first, I thought they might just be taking a chance. But the coordination was uncanny. One jackal circled upwind, low and slow, while the other sprinted out wide—cutting off the escape path. The springbok panicked.

One young antelope tripped. That was all it took.

In less than ten seconds, the two jackals were on it. Dust flying. Hooves thrashing. And then… silence. It was brutal. Raw. And, weirdly, beautiful.

From a photography perspective, the whole thing was a chaotic mess. The action was far, probably 80 to 100 meters out. My tracking autofocus would have gone wild trying to follow the erratic movement through shimmering heat and swaying grass. So, I made a snap decision.

I switched to One-Shot AF with Spot AF area.

Why? Because the jackals were relatively small in the frame, the chaos made it impossible for subject tracking to hold. The camera would've locked on to anything but the target: grass, shadows, other springboks.

I also decided not to zoom in all the way. I kept the composition a little wider than usual. Not only to provide context to the scene, but also—and this is important—because I didn’t want to move the vehicle any closer.

See, vultures were already circling. Dozens. And I knew that if I got too close, I might spook the jackals or trigger a premature ambush from above. They had earned this meal. It wasn’t my place to interfere.

This is something I say often in my workshops: our presence matters. Sometimes the best decision we can make is not to get the shot.

Still, I managed to capture a few images. I was shooting with the Canon R3, 600mm f/4 lens paired with a 1.4x teleconverter. That gave me an effective reach of 840mm—precisely what I needed in that moment: just a few frames, no burst.

Then I stopped.

Want to learn how I set up my camera for these situations?

A springbok being herded by two silver-backed jackals

I picked up my binoculars and watched.

The jackals tugged and tore at the carcass, panting hard, constantly looking up. Their entire bodies were braced for an incoming fight. And soon enough, the vultures started descending.

First one. Then five. Then thirty.

I didn’t take another photo.

It’s a weird thing to admit as a wildlife photographer, but that was the right call. I wanted to be present. To absorb what I had just seen—a scene so rare, so intimate, and so easily lost in the rush of trying to document everything.

That was the only kill I witnessed on this trip. No big cats. No textbook predator drama. Just two jackals working in sync under golden light.

And it was unforgettable.