The Nduna got a really good hiding.
With much effort Manyari managed to rally the troops at dusk to head out hunting. They headed west going deeper out of their ‘territory’. But there was prey around and Manyari wasn’t about to leave them.
Having eyed out some zebra they made their advance. At first it was a slow crouched walked but at about 50m the chase was on. In the relatively thick mopanie bush we lost the lions but heard when they caught a young zebra. The high pitched squeal was unmistakable.
Nduna arrived on the scene once all the hard work had been done, as usual. He tried to commandeer the kill but he had competition from the rest of the pride and ended up settling in to feed alongside them.
But then out of nowhere 2 huge adult male lions arrived on the scene. Nduna was the first to see them. In his brave state he ran at the intruders. They took off initially, but soon realising they had better odds than Nduna, they turned on him. He managed to get away and briefly watched while the one male stood next to the carcass (the other young males were still feeding).
Now what was he to do? After all as a pride male you don’t have to hunt yet still get to eat first. The payoff for this easy life is you have to protect the pride. Realising he had arrived, his moment had come, Nduna took the fight to the intruders again. But he was outnumbered. They caught him about 50m and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him. Our vehicles moving in to film the action was too much for the two, who took flight. By default we had saved Nduna from what could quite easily have been his last hours.
So, lucky for him and unlucky for us. He got away, but we missed the action.
Surprisingly the youngsters kept feeding on the carcass all the time only ducking when the 2 males returned.
Manyari had done her best to help Nduna is his unfair challenge, but the 2 males were too much for her and she disappeared into the darkness.
Who were these males? I haven’t seen them before.
All lions disappeared from the scene of the crime and so did we.
We called it an early night as that would be the end of the lions action for the night. Also Darryl is going on his couple of weeks time off, so for that period I’ll be working daytime again following elephants.
I did get out early at dawn and spent a wonderful hour or more with these elephant at Chekwa. I wasn’t stressing about filming anything and just sat on the ground against my car tyre with the elephant drinking and wallowing about 10m away. Just so awesome to spend time like this with these huge animals.
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