It was a dark-maned male, elaborately sprawled, as if it had fallen from a great height. Its sides heaved with shallow pants. Its mane was full of leaves. From a distance it looked like a deposed lord, grand and pitiable. The Serengeti usually dazzles first-time visitors, Packer had warned, making us giddy with an abundance of idyllic wildlife straight out of a Disney song-and-dance number.
The sublime brute only 15 feet away was my first wild Panthera leo. Male African lions can be ten feet long and weigh pounds or more, and this one appeared to be pushing the limits of its species.
I was glad to be inside a truck. Packer, though, opened the door and hopped out. Packer threw another stone. Unimpressed, the lion briefly turned its back, showing hindquarters as smooth as cast bronze. The beast yawned and, nestling its tremendous head on its paws, shifted its gaze to us for the first time.
Its eyes were yellow and cold like new doubloons. Packer, 59, is tall, skinny and sharply angular, like a Serengeti thorn tree. It is furnished with a faux leopard-skin couch and supplied only sporadically with electricity the researchers turn it off during the day to save energy and fresh water elephants dug up the pipelines years ago.
Packer has been running the Serengeti Lion Project for 31 of its 43 years. It is the most extensive carnivore study ever conducted. He has collected lion blood, milk, feces and semen. He has learned to lob a defrosted ox heart full of medicine toward a hungry lion for a study of intestinal parasites.
Over the decades there have been plagues, births, invasions, feuds and dynasties. When the lions went to war, as they are inclined to do, he was their Homer. But because lions are the only social felines, Packer thought manes were more likely a message or a status symbol. He asked a Dutch toy company to craft four plush, life-size lions with light and dark manes of different lengths.
He attracted lions to the dolls using calls of scavenging hyenas. When they encountered the dummies, female lions almost invariably attempted to seduce the dark-maned ones, while males avoided them, preferring to attack the blonds, particularly those with shorter manes. Consulting their field data, Packer and his colleagues noticed that many males with short manes had suffered from injury or sickness. By contrast, dark-maned males tended to be older than the others, have higher testosterone levels, heal well after wounding and sire more surviving cubs—all of which made them more desirable mates and formidable foes.
Newspapers across the globe picked up the finding. In Tanzania, home to as many as half of all the wild lions on earth, the population is in free fall, having dropped by half since the mids, to fewer than 10, The reason for the decline of the king of beasts can be summed up in one word: people. As more Tanzanians take up farming and ranching, they push farther into lion country. Now and then a lion kills a person or livestock; villagers—who once shot only nuisance lions—have started using poisons to wipe out whole prides.
It is not a new problem, this interspecies competition for an increasingly scarce resource, but neither is it a simple one. Among other things, Packer and his students are studying how Tanzanians can change their animal husbandry and farming practices to ward off ravenous felines. Scientists used to believe that prides—groups of a few to more than a dozen related females typically guarded by two or more males—were organized for hunting. The Jua Kali pride lives far out on the Serengeti plains, where the land is the dull color of burlap, and termite mounds rise like small volcanoes.
Early one morning last August, Serengeti Lion Project researchers found Hildur, a Herculean male with a blond mane, limping around near a grassy ditch. He was roaring softly, possibly in an effort to contact his darker-maned co-leader. But C-Boy, the researchers saw, had been cornered on the crest of a nearby hill by a fearsome trio of snarling males whom Packer and colleagues call The Killers.
Resident males may be mortally wounded in the fighting. Females sometimes die fighting to defend their cubs. The researchers suspected that The Killers, who normally live near a river 12 miles away, had already dispatched two females from a different pride—thus The Killers earned their names.
C-Boy, surrounded, gave a strangled growl. The Killers fell on him, first two, then all three, slashing and biting as he swerved, their blows falling on his vulnerable hindquarters. None of the Jua Kali lions had been spotted since the fight, but we kept riding out to their territory to look for them. Finally, one afternoon we found JKM, the mother of the Jua Kali litter, lolling atop a termite mound as large and intricate as a pipe organ.
JKM had her eye on a kongoni antelope a few miles away; unfortunately, it was watching her, too. She was also scanning the sky for vultures, perhaps in the hopes of scavenging a hyena kill. She stood up and ambled off into the hip-high grass. We could see dark circles around her nipples: she was still lactating. Against the odds, her cubs seemed to have survived.
The cubs were panting and mewling pitifully, clearly in distress; normally cubs stay in their den during the heat of the day. The Killers might have forsaken the Jua Kali females to take over the Mukoma Hill pride, which inhabits richer territory near river confluences to the north. Packer recalled a similar pattern of invasion in the early s by the Seven Samurai, a coalition of males, several with spectacular black manes, who had once brought down two adult, 1,pound Cape buffaloes and a calf in a single day.
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