How opspoor's Sighting Data Actually Works
Most wildlife travel content is written once and never updated — a guidebook estimate, a single trip's impressions, copied across a dozen sites. opspoor works differently: every "best time to see" claim on this site traces back to a real sighting, logged by a real person, in the park, at the time it happened.
Here's exactly how that works, and why some pages on this site deliberately don't make a claim yet.
Every number starts with someone on the ground
The opspoor app is built for people actually out in South Africa's parks — rangers, guides, and visitors — to log what they see as they see it. A sighting isn't just "there was a leopard here": it captures the species, the exact location, the time, and often the behaviour observed. That's the raw material behind every park and species page on this site.
What "verified" means
Sightings go through review before they factor into any public statistic. That review process is what separates opspoor's numbers from an anonymous crowdsourced list — a sighting on a species page here isn't just "someone said so," it's been checked.
Why some pages say "not enough data yet"
You'll notice some park-and-species pages on opspoor don't make a "best time to see" claim at all. That's deliberate. When the number of verified sightings for a species in a park is still too small to mean anything statistically, the site holds back rather than dressing up a guess as a pattern.
Our Pilanesberg elephants, lions & leopards post is a good example of this in practice — it shows real, current numbers (some of them still single digits) and says so plainly, rather than presenting an early read as a settled answer.
Protecting sensitive species
Not every sighting is safe to show at its exact location — for species at risk from poaching, showing a precise GPS point publicly could do real harm. For those sightings, opspoor shifts the shown location by several hundred metres before it's ever displayed publicly, so you still get a useful sense of where and when a species was seen, without exposing an animal to unnecessary risk. Read more about that approach on our ethics page.
How the picture gets sharper
Right now, some of opspoor's park-and-species data is genuinely thin — a handful of sightings, not hundreds. That's the honest state of a young, real dataset, not a flaw to hide. Every sighting logged from here adds another real data point, and the "best time to see" pages update as that volume grows — no manual rewrite needed, no stale guidebook text.
If you're heading out to any of the parks opspoor covers, download the app and log what you see. You're not just tracking your own trip — you're improving the picture for the next person planning theirs.
More from the blog
opspoor tracks real, verified wildlife sightings across South Africa's parks — logged by people on the ground, not guesswork.