Sun Destinations

We promised you a lion update of what was happening in and around the nThambo and Africa on Foot territory. It appears that this trilogy of lions we spoke about in a previous blog post are here to stay. Mike and Fiona, our repeat guests at nThambo, captured unbelievable photos of these three big beasts. You can see from the photos just how tough, rugged and magnificent these lions are.  Are these boys still posing a threat to the Ross Males? Let’s find out what has happened in the past few days at camp with regards to lion activity.

“Well the last few days here at nThambo have continued to give us excellent sightings on game drive. We are continuing to see several breeding herds of elephants, many with very young calves. It’s so great to see the young ones trying to use their trunks, and running around on wobbly legs – one little elephant tripped over and landed on his face right in front of our vehicle. We have also seen large herds of buffalo, the last one we saw was being followed closely by a large lioness. We also saw several rhino and a relaxed female leopard in a Marula tree.

But our main aim was to see some male lions. Luckily we heard some roaring on evening game drive, but they were deep in the Timbavati (the neighbouring reserve), we listed and they were heading our way. During the night we heard lions roaring, what seemed to be very close – we’d say they were walking straight through nThambo!

Just before wake-up we also heard the ‘coughing’ of a leopard, also very close by, in the open area just in front of camp. Therefore we set off with high expectations. Unfortunately, after following the leopard tracks, it seemed he was being elusive once again. We also tried to follow the male lion tracks, which indeed had been through camp during the night. Matt thought they were still not far from camp, probably within 300 metres or so, but they too didn’t want to be found at first.

So we sent Isaac, our tracker, on the search for them, and sure enough he found them about 200 metres from nThambo. It was two large males – but who would it be – The Ross pride males or someone new? When we found them we saw it was two of the new boys on the block, from ‘the Trilogy’ – 3 males who had been seen a couple of times on game drives over the previous few weeks. They were magnificent looking lions, even with their battle scars – showing they had been through a lot to make it here. Are these the new rulers of the territory? ”