Lion Guardians

Category: Community work, lion research fieldwork | Date: May 26 2008 | By: amy howard

Antony, Ernest and our new Lion Guardian volunteer Solonka, along with Lion Guardians Mokoi and Lenkina have been out all day helping to reinforce a boma that has been repeatedly attacked by a hyena over the last few days. The livestock owner, whose animals have been attacked was threatening to kill the hyena. I hope they manage to make it predator-proof, and will bring back some photos of their achievements!

In the meantime, here are some photos of Nempakai’s pride, which we located yesterday on the boundary of Amboseli National Park.

We only saw 9 of the lions, but the grass makes a perfect hiding place for them, so its likely that lion number 10 was just hiding somewhere nearby.

One of the cubs managed to squeeze into this group below, which didn’t look very comfortable for the others! The one it was squashing promptly got up and moved away..

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Tags: Kenya, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, Maasai, masai

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Category: lion research fieldwork | Date: May 19 2008 | By: amy howard

A few days ago I went on an epic adventure to track lions with Seamus. Finding lions is not an easy task, even when they have radio collars, and we had some difficult incidents during our 14 hour day of lion tracking. I particularly didn’t like the drive through an area of spiky Acacia trees covered with huge thorns and biting ants, with the massive, yellow, unbelievably strong webs of Golden Orb-weaver spiders stretched between them. On a number of occasions these giant spiders were left crawling up the windscreen towards us after we destroyed their webs, making me more than a little uneasy!

After getting through this we managed to finally find a male lion - Kesayio, who was lying in some thick bush, seemingly on his own, but very near to a herd of cows who also seemed to be on their own with no herder in sight.

We were also able to track Lentim, another male, but he was extremely good at hiding and we didn’t catch a glimpse of him, even though we were very close.

We also found 2 collared females. First we found Nemasi - who had small cubs with her and was very shy. This is the only photo I was able to take, of one of her cubs.

Later in the day we found Nempakai, who was in a pride of 10. Her pride was much more relaxed around us, and I was able to take a lot more photos of the sleepy cats. Here is Nempakai..

And here are five members of her pride.

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Tags: fieldwork, Kenya, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, lions

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