Lions of Timbavati

[Potato]

Tanda Tula update

For the lions, it was a week of feasting. The River Pride made a return after a few absent months, but there were only six of the seven members present; when they got chased around by the Birmingham Breakaway males that night, I did wonder if their attention was not the reason that one of the young males was missing. The next day a few members of the Birmingham Breakaways were found with a large buffalo kill in the Zebenine Riverbed. I headed into the area the next day and we found that the majority of the Mayambula Pride had pitched up and stolen the buffalo kill from the Birminghams and were now feasting on it. Four of the six Birmingham Breakaways were resting at a nearby waterhole, but we caught up with them later in the morning sneaking up to the carcass to see if they could get it back, but upon seeing that the seventeen members of the Mayambula Pride were still there, they gave up. That evening the four males did get a chance to finish off the kill, but with the scent of the Mayambula Pride hanging in the air, the males were very nervous and moved off at the slightest disturbance.

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The Mayambula Pride had a good week too and although we didn’t see them feeding on anything other than the buffalo, the pride walked around with full tummies for most of the week. They also spent the majority of the week within the concession which was a return to the norm. The two mothers of the youngest cubs moved their six cubs to the northern part of our concession and we were treated to a sighting of these bundles of joy on a couple of occasions. One morning we followed the two mothers back to the den, and the sounds of joy emanating from the cubs upon reuniting with their moms was just too cute for words.

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Even the Giraffe Pride got in on the action this week, and after a couple of tracking efforts that saw their movements returning to the south of our concession, the pride was eventually found with a wildebeest kill on our boundary. Interestingly the pride had killed the wildebeest but had not yet begun feeding; instead, they were lying about 100m from it just watching. Later in the morning the nine members that were present eventually made their way to the kill, but even then there wasn’t the feeding frenzy one would expect from so many lions, with a few of the adults simply laying to the side resting. The Sark lioness also made one brief appearance this week.

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