Locating lions
A few days ago I went on an epic adventure to track lions with Seamus. Finding lions is not an easy task, even when they have radio collars, and we had some difficult incidents during our 14 hour day of lion tracking. I particularly didn’t like the drive through an area of spiky Acacia trees covered with huge thorns and biting ants, with the massive, yellow, unbelievably strong webs of Golden Orb-weaver spiders stretched between them. On a number of occasions these giant spiders were left crawling up the windscreen towards us after we destroyed their webs, making me more than a little uneasy!
After getting through this we managed to finally find a male lion – Kesayio, who was lying in some thick bush, seemingly on his own, but very near to a herd of cows who also seemed to be on their own with no herder in sight.
We were also able to track Lentim, another male, but he was extremely good at hiding and we didn’t catch a glimpse of him, even though we were very close.
We also found 2 collared females. First we found Nemasi – who had small cubs with her and was very shy. This is the only photo I was able to take, of one of her cubs.
Later in the day we found Nempakai, who was in a pride of 10. Her pride was much more relaxed around us, and I was able to take a lot more photos of the sleepy cats. Here is Nempakai..
And here are five members of her pride.
Great post Antony…you know, I never noticed that the lions have spots…they look a bit like cheetah markings! Terrific pictures…the ears on that cub are marvelous! As for tracking, I totally understand — believe it or not. Several months ago I went with a guide to track wolves in Yellowstone National Park…even though many of the wolves are collared, the signals only give you a very general sense of their locations….and of course, half the time they are hiding in thickets or dense forest. I was fortunate to see a few before I left though!
Lovely pictures Amy. Did you see how many small cubs Nemasi had?
Hi Christine, yes the spots are very obvious on these cubs aren’t they?
And Pauline, we couldn’t see how many cubs she had. Last time she was spotted with three cubs, but we only saw one, perhaps two – they were in very thick bush.
Oops, sorry Amy…thought you were Antony!!
where was the herder ? what on earth was he thinking or doing? was he trying to turn his cows into burgers for lions? and that would have been a tragedy for the cows, the owner and definitely and unfairly the lions.
does this pride have a male or males?
Great pics! They’re all so beautiful. I was also curious about the cows. Did the herder turn up?
Hi sauwah and Lisa, thanks for your comments. We drove to the nearest boma, and let them know that we had found some cows without a herder, but they didn’t seem to be very worried, saying there were many murrans out in the bush looking after livestock. The next day we saw about 10 cows, again unattended, and Ernest (Seamus’s assistant) said that this kind of small herd would usually be looked after by a child, and as children were now going to school more, there was nobody to look after the cows. A difficult problem to solve..
A number of the young lions in Nempakai’s pride seem to be males, yes.