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every cloud has a silver lining

on Oct 30, 2011

Waking up for a morning game drive has never been a problem for me. The excitement of the unknown day ahead and the possible magic to be seen in the bush just seems to give me the extra boost I need to get going when my alarm goes off just before 5am. There are however days where you wish you could just roll over and go back to sleep. This morning was one of those.

As I woke the normal first light as the sun creeps closer to the horizon was nowhere to be seen and I could hear the rain drumming a sleepy tune on my roof. After hitting the snooze button a few times I eventually crawled out of bed to a hot shower to wake up. With my 6 nighters on their last drive we left the lodge to go see if we could find anything.

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We went to see the Southern Pride huddled and sleeping looking as wet and miserable as some of the guests but it was still amazing to see the beautiful cats all huddled close to keep warm, occasionally standing up to shake the water of their now shaggy coats.

To my surprise we saw quite a bit with great elephant, rhino and zebra sightings before the rain stopped and we decided to warm up with a cup of coffee. Whilst enjoying the coffee I heard Jonas, one of our rangers call in that the lions were up and moving. Due to the fact that my guests had seen so much in their 6 nights we decided that we would follow the lions around and see what they got up to. We ended up being the only vehicle with them as many of the other guests had run to the cover of the lodges.

As we followed them the cubs ran around tackling each other as if they were after a buffalo. Suddenly the whole prides body language changed. In an instant the females stalked forward, cubs moving back to get out of the way and us all trying to peer through the trees to see what had caught their interest. We could see 3 zebra through the brush and we knew that it was on. We held back and watched as the lions set up an ambush. One female went all the way round the back as the other 7 females spread out so as to ensure the most effective ambush. What we didn’t see was that there was a much larger herd of zebra and wildebeest just behind the 3 zebra we had been watching. After about a half an hour of waiting we suddenly herd the echoing of a stampede as the lioness that had gone round the back launched her attack.

The huge herd of 50 plus animals came thundering straight towards where the cubs were watching the proceedings. They all ducked for cover in bushes and under stumps as the stampede went hurtling through them. We then saw the cubs all get up and start running towards one of the females that had pulled down a female wildebeest. She fought hard but all 17 lions were on her so quickly that her suffering did not last long.

We sat and watched for the next hour as they devoured the wildebeest, fighting amongst each other for a place at the breakfast table. At one stage one of the females suddenly pulled a nearly fully grown foetus out of the female and went off to enjoy her little prize on her own. In that hour they had finished what I would guess would have been about 90% of the meat and as they consumed the meat it looked as if someone was inflating a beach ball inside of their stomachs. The rain had cleared and the sun even decided to show its glorious face whilst we enjoyed this wondrous spectacle of nature.

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  • by: Richard de Gouveia (Little Bush Camp ranger)
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