Blog #34 – Going On A Lion Hunt

I slept in this morning – apparently 8:30AM counts as sleeping-in here in the bush! That wasn’t the most shocking part of the morning though. I always knew that I was a deep sleeper, but apparently I missed some great excitement. There were some jackals that had come right through camp, and therefore right by my tent! In addition, there was also a pack of hyenas that made quite the racquet at six in the morning – yelping and howling just outside of camp!

Regardless of all of the commotion last night –which is classified by the people who stay here year round as ‘normal’ – we had an exciting day ahead of us! Some hunters had killed an elephant yesterday and we were going to see the carcus. In case you didn’t know hunting them here can be legal is you get a permit and permission. The hunters here generally take the head, trunk, tusks, feet and skin and leave the rest for the animals. While that sounds gruesome, they are using as much as they can – and the rest is eaten by the animals, so it isn’t ‘just going to waste’. The sight of the carcus is not as horrific as it might sound – after a day you can’t even discern the parts of the body – just flesh and the huge rib cage. But the smell makes up for – we could smell the carcus before we even came close to seeing it.

We weren’t really coming to see the carcus so much as what was feeding off of it! There had been two lions feeding on the elephant yesterday and that is who we wanted to see! Tracking them was more difficult and peculiar that expected though. The researchers have collared different animals over time – each with a VHF and a GPS (more recently) tag. Then each morning they ‘spin the mast’, which is a tall receiving tower. This lets them know what animals are within up to ten kilometers of the research camp and in what general direction. The more recent GPS are obviously far superior to the VHF, but the availability of them has only become feasible recently.

We headed out in a truck – we were four, just sitting in the open back of the pick-up with some welded on bar frame to hold onto. With us we had a little radio that contained all of the tracking info and frequencies of all of the animals. It could be connected to a small antenna to give a range of what animals were within two kilometers of us. However, when we were tracking the lions they weren’t anywhere close to the carcass – we couldn’t even find them at all. It was off that they would have left –as there was still so much to eat, this wasn’t normal. The researchers were all up in arms about what was going on – and had no idea. They did a general scan of the area for all of the animals. Two brother lions were close within 50 meters! Yesterday they weren’t even close to here. The idea was that they must have come and fought off the other lions during the night, or really early this morning.

Regardless of what happened, I was more concerned with the present. We were in the middle of the bush and couldn’t see them, but they were REALLY close to us. A male adult lion could easily destroy us if they wanted – and there was two! We drove around and used the radio antenna to get closer. Eventually we spotted one of them. What a gorgeous creature – male lions are just so picturesque! They are huge and their mane only makes them look larger. This one had a bloody mouth and we knew immediately that it was FULL of elephant. It was so lazy and tired looking – it didn’t even get up when we got close (probably 15 meters away), it barely managed to raise its head to look at us. We were of no concern to it! We spent some time watching him lounge in the sun, though we never spotted his brother. It was really cool and I had never seen a male lion in nature before, so it was another first for me!

We came back to camp for lunch and had another delicious meal. I spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on a hammock and reading my book while everyone got ready to leave. We packed up the car and drove back to Maun for the evening. It was a great one-night stay at the dog camp and I am looking forward to going there again! Tonight at home we also had the home reunited. Camello, Phillipa’s husband, had returned over the weekend from his Masters degree at University of Cape Town. It was nice to meet him – and we had a fabulous dinner, as he is also an amazing cook! There is definitely some amazing meals to come for sure – and as he was born and bread in Botswana, we are going to get a nice mixture between local and foreign foods!