24 hours on safari is not a lot of time. With some luck, you’ll see good general game and perhaps a predator. Well, that’s what we thought too. Nature thought differently for the guest who landed in Tau Pan this month to find six lions waiting at the end of the airstrip. A short drive (carefully avoiding luggage confusion with the lions) to the camp, quick afternoon tea, then out for a game drive and six different lions coming back from the camp. Whilst on drive, they had had a great sighting of a cheetah, so things were going really well. A short walk in the morning before departure and add two more cheetah to the list, before getting on the plane to fly out to the next destination. This is NOT normal, please remember!
The first week of the month was slightly challenging for the staff (and guests) of the camp. When a coalition of six males and two lionesses decide that the best location for mating is just on the outskirts of the camp, everyone has to be on their most careful behavior. The early morning team that goes in to set up the breakfast and get the fire started were extra careful, and sure enough, discovered that one feline couple were having a romantic interlude under the main deck, looking down onto the waterhole. Now, we appreciate that everyone wants a bit of privacy in these moments, but timing is everything. Luckily, the noise of the set up by the staff was enough to encourage the happy couple to move a little further away, to somewhere more secluded.
Other good sightings this month included a lovely relaxed male leopard walking along the road, in hunting mood, a female leopard seen the same day close to camp, three cheetahs near Sunday Pan having killed a springbok.
There was one sighting of a cheetah mother with three cubs in Deception valley. We think they might stay on that area, because there are not that many competing predators there.
Birders and twitchers also had a very unusual sighting. They observed ten ground hornbills together, and when a flock of Kalahari scrub robins landed in the middle of them, the ground hornbills killed and fed on them.
The coalition of 6 male lions was seen again several times in the last week of the month. It is common to see two or three males holding a territory together, but six is very unusual. From a male lion’s point of view, there is one clear advantage to group together with some mates. The more you are the easier it becomes to overpower other males with an established territory and take it over from them, including the harem of females. Second advantage is, once you are holding a territory, it is easier to defend it against other intruding males, and it lessens your individual risk of injuries in doing so. So far so good. The challenges however are these: six hungry guys need a lot of food. Hunting is done mostly by the females (males help take down big prey sometimes, and they kill for themselves while they are patrolling and marking the territory, but during the time they are joined up with the females they don’t actively hunt), and the males mostly take the kills away from them, feeding on it first. You can imagine after six males have eaten, there is nothing left. That puts enormous pressure on the pride’s females. They will have to make a lot of kills to sustain these six males, themselves and the cubs. We used to have a coalition of the “magnificent” seven in Kwara for several years. It worked ok there, but we have to consider that the density of large prey is much bigger in the delta than it is in the Central Kalahri Game Reserve, so it was somewhat easier for the females there to find enough prey to kill. The other challenge is the personal fitness of these males. In this context, personal fitness doesn’t mean how fast or how far you can run, but rates your chances to spread your genes. In other words how many offspring can you produce. Obviously the more males that are together decreases your individual chance to mate with a female, since they all have to be shared, hence your personal fitness goes down. It is likely that these six males will split up in the future. Hopefully they will hang around Tau Pan for a while, so we can observe what develops. We’ll keep you posted!
The Kalahari is known for its lions (proof enough above), good cheetah sightings, and also brown hyenas and lobsters. Er, probably not the last one? Call it a misadventure with google translate, but on seeing what our unsuspecting German visitors were being advised by one website, we found a new understanding of why some guests had complained about not having enough fish on the menu. There is a member of the arachnid family that is variously known as a red roman, a solifuge, or a Kalahari Ferrari, that does have a passing resemblance to a lobster, but this is not something you would want to end up on your dinner plate.
