Still searching for lion cubs

The story of finding our collared lion Nemasi has been going on for some time now. We are desperate to see whether she still has all three of her cubs with her. A young lion was found dead close to the area she has been residing in recently and we haven’t managed to see any of her cubs since then. Here is Nemasi and one of her cubs when they were a lot younger.

Nemasi has been hiding out in a thick forest which is impossible to drive into, so our search has so far been very difficult. Finally we managed to track her to an open area outside the forest. At night we tied some bait to a tree and played sounds of a dyeing buffalo through a loud speaker to attract her towards it. Our first visitor to the bait was a striped hyena.

After a while the hyena moved off and to our delight we could just make out Nemasi in the distance walking around the side of the forest through the darkness and towards the bait. Once she was eating, we drove closer to get a good look and see whether she had any companions. She looked well, but unfortunately she was feeding on her own. Here’s another photo of Nemasi (we couldn’t take any this time, as it was night and the flash might have scared her).

We waited in the area for some time, hoping her cubs might appear. We did see a young sub-adult in the darkness but it disappeared as quickly as we could get our binoculars out to get a closer look. We also picked up the signal of Lentim, our collared male in that area, and were pleased to get a good look at him too. However, for the moment our search for the cubs continues.