Kenya 2019: Maasai Mara Part 2 - The Wild Safari

Warning: This post contains graphic images of natural predator behavior. Viewer discretion advised.

Recap

That’s the thing about safari. You can easily go several hours without seeing anything. Your best bet is early morning and late afternoon. Mid-day doesn’t usually bring much excitement as the larger predators are usually hunkered down...usually. It was 1:30 pm and after a long, disappointing search, we decided to have some lunch. Lenny pulled up on a hillside near a herd of wildebeest and David laid out a blanket. Our boxed lunches were chicken wings, some chips, a cookie, an apple, and a small juice box. We talked about how they spend their time off with their families. David has two children just entering their teenage years and Lenny has a 4-year old, like me, so we traded some dad stories under the shade of a tall tree as wildebeest wandered by. I don’t think I’ve ever had a better picnic.

And now...

As we neared the end of our repast, I noticed a dust cloud kick up down near the river. Lenny ran to grab the binoculars from the truck.

“Wildebeest are crossing. Oh! Wait! There are lions down there!”, he exclaimed.

It. Was. On.

We threw the blanket and food into the truck and tore off down the hill. We could now see wildebeest emerging from the river and there seemed to be chaos down there. Greg and I locked and loaded. All cameras were turned on and settings adjusted.

Lenny pulled through the herd of wildebeest. There was a blaring of guttural cries as animals scattered. There in a small clearing in front of us were two lions, a male and a female. The male was guarding an adult wildebeest that was already dead. The female had a juvenile in the clutches of her jaws, still alive. The sounds of shutters firing joined the din along the south bank of the Talek River as Greg and I set to work.

We grew up on Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and Planet Earth. We’d seen dozens or hundreds of documentaries about African wildlife eating, being eaten, and beating the odds in the last wild places on the planet. None of that prepared us for what was twenty feet in front of us.

The juvenile had been wounded in the neck. Blood was covering the animal. The lioness was calm and collected, also covered in blood. The juvenile struggled, calling out, gasping for air. A steady stream of obscenities fell from our lips in amazement. The wildebeest were still lingering, unsure of how to rescue the fallen. From the brush behind us, another lioness emerged. She had been waiting in ambush and walked through the herd of wildebeest completely uninterested. She was solely focused on that which had already been caught.

I turned my attention to her as Greg continued to shoot the juvenile which was still crying out and gasping. After a moment, he stopped.

“What’s wrong?”, I asked.

“I just... I need a second.”, he replied, looking away.

“You gonna be sick?”

“No,” he said, “it’s just a lot, listening to this thing die.” Lenny chuckled and prodded Greg for turning away.

“I hear ya. This is the shit they don’t show on Nat Geo.”

“Nope,” he said. “I’ll be ok. As mom always said, ‘the lion’s gotta eat too’”. He took a deep breath, collected himself, set the lens on the truck again, and got back to shooting.

A second lioness came out from the brush. There were now four lions there: three females and one male. Like any cats, they toyed with their food. It was tough to watch, but this was one of the things we wanted to see on safari. Watch lions hunt: check.

The wildebeest wandered off, two less in the herd. It was now the four of us in the truck, the lions, and one wildebeest on the edge of death. And no one else.

It seemed that the male was teaching the younger females how to kill the wildebeest. They pawed at it, they bit it, they clawed it. The juvenile wildebeest bleated and gasped for air, it’s calls more desperate. At one point it nearly stood up, but was immediately taken down again. Blood covered the sandy soil next to the truck.

The male and one of the females set to work on the back end of the dead adult, ripping intestines and entrails from its body. The other two females continued to assault the juvenile, biting it in the neck and legs, pulling it in all directions. The male joined the fray.

The other female abandoned her meal and walked over to the others. The time had come to end their play. A scrap broke out between the lions as they attempted to take the wildebeest down. The juvenile was pulled from both sides and twisted around as it was dragged under a small tree. At last, the male grabbed hold of the wildebeests neck, bit down, and held on.

“Ahhhh...the kiss. Of death”, Lenny whispered from the front seat.

We were silent as the juvenile stopped breathing.

There was a calmness in the eyes of the lions. They had no remorse or malice. This is the way of nature in its most raw, unfiltered form. I’ll never be able to go to a zoo again and see a lion there and not think that underneath that well-groomed exterior is an innate desire to hunt and the ability to brutally kill and eat another animal.

The lions set to work on the freshly dead wildebeest. Another fight broke out amongst them as they started in on the legs. One of the females draped herself over the middle of the animal in an attempt to lay claim. The haunches and legs were first. We repositioned the truck to get a better angle, but the lions paid no attention to us.

We took a break from shooting. This was a moment that we needed to take in and not see through the viewfinder. Lenny and David commented on our continuing luck.

“This is the first kill I’ve seen in a year”, Lenny said.

We sat in silence for a few minutes longer, the only sound was the grunting of the lions, and the slick sound of flesh being torn from bones. They lased open the stomach. Partially eaten grass erupted out over the lion's face and the rest of the carcass. The wind drifted the rank smell of rotting vegetation towards the truck and between the sight and smell of it, I retched.

“Uh-oh”, Greg said as I gagged. “You gonna be ok?” Lenny and David laughed at my weak stomach.

I breathed heavily into my shirt to remove the smell from my nose. I nodded and collected myself.

“Yep. Just took me off guard. Was not expecting that”.

The carcass was nearly done. The only thing left was the head and a good chunk of the spine. The lions, sated, retreated to the shade near their other kill. We could hear the bellowing of hippos in the river below and moved to get some shots there, but the angle wasn’t very good, so we returned to the lions.

Another truck finally came along and we spent a few minutes chatting with a guy from Ohio who had a 150-600 mm lens like us and was admiring the 600 mm. We had been there for an hour. Just us and the lions. With the increased popularity of ecotourism, it was incredible to be able to witness such an event without anyone else. It’s truly special. The male lion wandered off, and we did too.

It was 3 pm and Lenny asked “Well, what do you guys want to do?”

“Honestly, I think we should just head back. There’s literally nothing else I can see today that will be as cool as that”, I replied. We had just shot about 2,500 frames in the span of an hour and downloading and backing them up would be a monumental task. I also wanted to lounge around, get some beers, and enjoy that aspect of the camp. Greg correctly noted that we had paid to be on safari, so we should maximize our time and I reluctantly agreed.

Lenny stopped to see some mongooses, but we weren’t even really interested in them after what we had just seen. We lapsed into a sullen state of reflection and silence. We worked our way back along the creek we had scoped in the morning and found a handful of sleepy lions. We pulled up close and they didn’t seem to care at first, but got spooked when another truck came barreling up on us. I broke out the big lens to oohs and aahs from the others.

There wasn’t much else to see except a happy hyena basking in the late afternoon sun. I was starting to recognize and get familiar with the terrain and some of the roads at this point. A key piece of being a field geologist is knowing where you are and recognizing landmarks in an otherwise unrecognizable area. We were back near where we had seen the Fast Five just a few hours prior, although at this point it felt like it had been days before.

The remaining brother of the Fast Five had been spotted on a hill nearby and we headed there. Clouds were starting to build a little and the cheetah made himself comfortable on the hillside, looking for the rest of his coalition.

We wandered the Mara for another hour, heading south towards some hills where rhinos had been spotted a few days prior. We rolled through thick scrub and dead trees, but didn’t see anything other than a sausage tree and some birds of prey so we returned to camp.

Greg: We returned to our room. Ed went to the bathroom as I began to unpack and do a quick cleaning of the gear. We left the door open and I opened the windows to let the warm evening air flow through the room. As I laid the gear out on the bed, a small grey mass moved into the room in the corner of my eye. I quickly whipped around to find myself staring at a vervet monkey staring at me inside the door to our room. My mouth fell open. No one had warned us that the monkeys were on the property and that they were audacious in their pursuit of a quick meal. I called out to Ed and told him to get his ass out of the bathroom because there was a monkey in the room. I did not want the monkey to advance any further so I approached and stomped my foot and yelled “Hey!”, confident that my larger size and aggression would be enough to scare it off. The monkey took a step back and looked me dead in the eyes, bared its teeth, and advanced quickly and stomped back at me. I was shocked. Now what? I stomped again and yelled louder. The monkey returned stomps once again. A standoff. I had never met an animal so bold. I could see him looking the room over for snacks. As Ed exited, the monkey was now outnumbered and retreated with a third stomp from me. We shut the door and watched as the monkey and its friends sat outside our room staring at us. We came out of the room a little later and sat in the chairs on our porch and watched the Vervets accost other guests' rooms and play in the trees.

After the monkeys dispersed, we headed down to the Hippo bar for a bit with the big lens. At this point, we were legends toting that 600 mm around. We had dinner and then met Lenny and David in the Tembo Bar for some beers. Baada ya kazi, Tusker! Translation: After work, Tusker! Drinks were on us and we toasted the lions. “Kwa simba!”

For our first full day in the Mara, it had been pretty damn good. We snagged 7 new species of animals, shot 4,000 pictures, and watched lions kill and eat a wildebeest. We still had a day and a half to go.

-Ed & Greg

Kenya 2019: Maasai Mara Part 2 - The Wild Safari

Kenya 2019: The Mara Triangle

Kenya 2019: Maasai Mara Part 1 – First Impressions

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