At the beginning of the season we noticed The Offbeat Pride were very dispersed. And we hadn’t seen any of our females or their cubs for a while. This being, because two new young males have kicked out our older two and taken over the pride.
During dinner one evening in camp, we were alerted by Ken, the waiter that there was a lion sitting in the bushes behind the car, 30 metres or so behind us. The night watchman led us out to where we could watch it and work out what was going on!
With the roaring of lions getting closer and closer, the little thing was terrified; enough to come into camp and seek safety. We knew it was fleeing from the new males who were on a mission to get rid of the previous blood line and to make the females come back into aestrous.
We returned to our dinner discussing this predicament and the cruel realities of nature. During pudding, one of the Males came in to camp looking for the escapee, but the watchman managed to scare him away with the torch.
We had to let nature take its course and leave them be. When we woke the next morning, the spot the cub had been laying in clearly showed it was in no good way. We heard from the watchman that the lions had come back into camp a few more times and the cub moved off into the bushes behind camp. We found its little body. It had bite marks along its back and a pierced lung. Its mother hung around for the next two days and the males came back in a number of times as well, to check that it was dead.
We started to worry about what had happened to the prides other cubs. After talking to guides from other camps about it, we heard that some other females with cubs, the right sort of age as ours, have been seen in other parts if the conservancy.
About 4 days later another unexpected thing happened, our old males made an appearance again! Along with them, our females with their cubs! So as you can imagine the roaring at night is pretty cool!
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