If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#11
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
On 3 May 2006 02:11:08 -0700, VK wrote:
Hans-Georg, that's what I thought Bill had mentioned in his article (link in his first post in this thread) - that the pride males had abandoned the kill and the 2 nomads had taken it over. Given that 2 females and a sub-adult were hanging around, I was quite surprised as well. If I misunderstood/misread, mea culpa. Vandit, no big deal. We're all learning. I only wanted to say that lions of one pride never tolerate lions of another or nomads in their vicinity. Either they know each other or they avoid or fight each other. There are always some unusual exceptions, but they are rare. Hans-Georg -- No mail, please. |
#12
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
I replied to your earlier post but I think the server ate it, or at
least I don't see it ... if this is a rehas of the same ideas I apologize ... Hans-Georg Michna writes ... I only wanted to say that lions of one pride never tolerate lions of another or nomads in their vicinity. Sorry Hans-Georg, you are wrong about this, at least for the Serengeti lions. It may be true for smaller areas where prides are more separated and strangers are rare (like Nairobi National Park) but it's not true for the Serengeti prides. These lions have been studied continuously since George Schaller's work in 1969 and one of the "myths" they discounted was the one you just repeated ... basically in the woodlands these lions have fairly large territories (the Sereonera pride had 210 sq-km for example at the time of Schaller's study) and the territories actually overlap with other prides at the edges (four different prides overlapped part of the Seronera pride's turf, for example). Also, typically 20-33% of the adult lions are nomads at any given time (lower % in wet season when many nomads temporarily follow the wildebeest to the short grass plains) ... so you have up to 1/3 the lions unattached to prides yet living in areas owned by prides ... they are "tolerated" (to use your word) so long as they don't try to kill the small cubs or mate with the in-heat females, or fight over kills. This included feeding on kills and in some cases even sharing kills. The exception is when a group of nomads attempts a take-over, which often means a fight to the death. Schaller spends most of a chapter in his book discussing the nomad-pride interactions, based on many hours of observation. This and much more is covered in detail in Schaller's book "The Serengeti Lion" and also 20 years later in Craig Packer's book "Into Africa" ... Packer is still the director of the Lion Research Project ongoing at the Serengeti Wildlife Research Center, about 4 miles from where the fight I photographed occurred. These are probably the most well-researched wild lions in the world. All that being said, it wasn't clear what the social status of the lions I photographed was ... even Schaller said he sometimes needed to watch lions for several weeks to be sure whether they were nomads or in a pride ... our driver hadn't seen these males before but he thought they might be new pride males that recently took over a pride. I was skeptical (realizing the driver usually knows more than the client because one of them was in very bad physical shape, they looked too young with patchy incomplete manes in an area where all the boss lions had rock-star hairdos, and in that area you usually needed at least three males in an alliance to defeat the residents and take over a pride. The guy I met on the plane had photographed 8 lions the day before on this buffalo kill and said one looked like a pride male, with seven females ... he said they ate and then abandoned the carcass and these two younger more-desperate males claimed it. He thought for sure they were nomads (he works for the Tz gov't and takes four safaris a year to Serengeti and seemed very credible to me). But we could be wrong. Also, the status of the other three lions wasn't clear ... it almost looked like a mature female with two nearly-adult cubs ... when there's a take-over (per Packer's research) the new males kill all the cubs to force the females into estrous so when the cubs are almost grown the female will often split off from the pride for a while to finish raising them. Given the stubble of a mane on the young male I think this might have occurred here. Another possibility is that this female simply dispersed from the pride during the rainy season ... when the zebra and wildebeest and most gazelles have left the woodlands for the plains the females often have trouble getting enough to eat unless they are in a group killing buffalo. If females are in a good-sized group and are mostly killing small stuff like impala the cubs never get a bite to eat and there isn't enough for the adults either, so according to Packer's research the females will often disperse and kill smaller animals for just themselves and their cubs. I got the impression this was what was happening here but the only way to know is to follow them for a week, I guess. At any rate, the lion society in the Serengeti is pretty complex and it's worth reading the research of Schaller and Packer to get a better feel for it, I think. Bill |
#13
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
Interesting stuff Bill.
Once again you have taken some sensational photos and I'm envious of your equipment - but the equipment is only half the battle and you use it with great skill. I'm off for a week in Tanzania at the end of June, then 10 days in Sth Africa on the way home. Your posts have got me more enthusiastic than I already was. I'll be hoping to at least come close to matching your sightings of the big cats. Regards Michael |
#14
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
On 4 May 2006 13:47:08 -0700, Bill wrote:
Hans-Georg Michna wrote: I only wanted to say that lions of one pride never tolerate lions of another or nomads in their vicinity. Sorry Hans-Georg, you are wrong about this, at least for the Serengeti lions. It may be true for smaller areas where prides are more separated and strangers are rare (like Nairobi National Park) but it's not true for the Serengeti prides. Bill, thanks for the interesting information! I guess I have some reading to do. One reason for my belief is that I have seen lions very often over many years, and I have always seen lions that were very clearly one pride. I have also seen very small prides, typically one male, one female, and one to three cubs. These small prides always moved carefully ("with their heads down") and usually moved out of the way of a big nearby pride whose location I knew. I once observed such a small one-family pride in Amboseli when I heard a nearby call from another pride. They listened, then immediately moved away, very obviously fearful of the other pride. But then this was always in Kenya where the lion density may be lower and the areas more restricted. Most of my other observations were in Masai Mara, where the local territorial prides are usually known and easy to recognize. It is also possible that small family prides with cubs are more fearful of other prides and behave differently, because their cubs are vulnerable and might get killed. Thanks again, I love to assimilate new information. And I admire your photos, I almost forgot to say. Hans-Georg -- No mail, please. |
#15
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
Hans-Georg Michna writes ...
Bill, thanks for the interesting information! One reason for my belief is that I have seen lions very often over many years, and I have always seen lions that were very clearly one pride. I have also seen very small prides, typically one male, one female, and one to three cubs. ... These small prides always moved carefully Hans-Georg, I realize you have more experience in Africa and with lions than I do and I respect that (I read your Kenya web pages carefully before going ... my experience agrees with most of what you wrote but the one thing that I was disagreeing with was when you said "Pride males never tolerate any stranger males within their territory" because it didn't agree with the research of Schaller for the Serengeti. Schaller takes pains to make it clear the behavior he observed was for the Serengeti lions and that research in other areas like Lake Manyara and Nairobi National Parks and Ngorongoro Crater lions showed different behaviors because of their different environments (typically less space and fewer 'new' lions wandering by). While he agrees with you that pride males are 'antagonistic' toward other pride males and nomads he also writes "Nomads sometimes lived for weeks or months within a pride area, and prides wandered with impunity around areas usually occupied by others" (pg 62 in the paperback edition of "The Serengeti Lion"). He seems to feel this is partly because the pride territories are larger than in other areas and partly because with the wildebeest migration you have large numbers of nomads drifting thru pride turf several times a year following the migration, so the pride males will aggressively defend if a stranger seems to challenge them but will let them pass if there is no challenge ... otherwise they'd spend too much time fighting, given that up to 1/3 the adult lions in the area are nomads in the dry season. I have also seen very small prides, typically one male, one female, and one to three cubs It's interesting to compare this to the Serengeti ... Schaller lists the pride sizes for the 14 main prides they studied for the first three years before he wrote his book ... none of these prides had a single male because there were so many nomads willing to challenge for leadership ( all prides were controlled by 2-4 males in coalitions) and none had a single female (one pride had two females and two males, a few had 3-4 females, the rest up to 11 adult females) ... this is in Table 2, pg 415 in case you can find this book at the library. The nomad females were studied in more detail for Craig Packer's book and of course most of these would be single mothers ... IIRC none of these nomad females were able to raise a single cub because the cubs were always killed when she would have to leave to hunt, either by hyenas or other lions. So a pride with a single female would I assume also have a tough time since the males don't help with feeding or babysitting the cubs. I might also point out that Schaller had a hard time distinguishing nomads from pride members. I would think it would be easy (when I first went I assumed groups of females with cubs were in a pride, for example) but the more he studied the lions the more subtle the interactions. As an example of this he mentions that the nomads would often join together peacefully for a while (few hours, few days, occasionally a few weeks on the plains during the wet season) and it can be hard to tell whether they are a pride or not ... from page 65 .... "Some large groups {of nomads} may persist in one locality for months and give the appearance of a pride before sudddenly splitting. The compositions of three such large groups we 2 males, 7 females, and 2 cubs; 5 males and 7 females; 2 males, 3 females, and 8 cubs." Had I seen one of these groups I would have immediately thought it was a pride, but this would be incorrect. He also mentions how hard it was to ID all the members of a pride because all members were rarely together and he felt it took several months of observation to be certain lions were members of a given pride .... "On one occasion I located several lionesses and cubs of the Masai pride. Eleven kilometers away were several others belonging to the same pride, and 5 km further on were the rest. The casual observer would have no intimation that these animals belonged in fact to the same pride. Not once in over three years of observation did I see all the members of the Seronera pride together." I found that last statement surprising given that for most of the study there were only 8 adult lions in this pride and it's the pride located closest to the Serengeti Research Institute headquarters, so the most easily observed. In reading this I remember a post from last fall where the guy was surprised to see two groups of lions not too far apart ... from Schaller's work you could reasonably infer they were likely members of the same pride, though at least in the Serengeti you couldn't be sure without observing both groups for quite a while. Interesting stuff ... Bill |
#16
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
Bill,
thanks for all the interesting information again! The thought occurred to me that perhaps some lions that are occasionally together actually know each other or are even related. We cannot know. Cats are always good for a surprise. (:-) While you mention the "Seronera pride", I once walked into a pride on my way from Seronera Lodge to the airfield, which is about 4 km away from the lodge. Those were six more or less adult females, sleeping in the high grass under a tree. Suddenly their heads popped up in front of me, because I was going exactly to that tree. I didn't see a male. They didn't take me for lunch either. They walked away instead. I found this behavior rather pleasing, I can assure you. Hans-Georg -- No mail, please. |
#17
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
On Thu, 11 May 2006 22:13:57 +0100, Pat Anderson wrote:
did you check the link I gave you re Big Cat Diary? http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature It`s filmed in the Mara and will be on air in July, this is unusual as we usually see the programmes in March. Pat, the link switches me to http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/ , which is something like a cover page. Hans-Georg -- No mail, please. |
#18
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
Pat Anderson wrote ...
Hans Georg, did you check the link I gave you re Big Cat Diary? http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature It`s filmed in the Mara and will be on air in July, Hans-Georg Michna replied ... Pat, the link switches me to http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/ , which is something like a cover page. Try this link instead ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programm...cd/index.shtml Bill |
#19
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
In message , Hans-Georg
Michna writes On Thu, 11 May 2006 22:13:57 +0100, Pat Anderson wrote: did you check the link I gave you re Big Cat Diary? http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature It`s filmed in the Mara and will be on air in July, this is unusual as we usually see the programmes in March. Pat, the link switches me to http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/ , which is something like a cover page. Hans-Georg Hans Georg, BBC have had a change to the page, you just need to go to the bottom of the page and click on TV and Radio follow up, you will see Big Cat Diary there, Planet Earth, a recent series, is also worth looking at. Pat -- Pat Anderson |
#20
|
|||
|
|||
East Africa - Drought Conditions
On 14 May 2006 12:45:27 -0700, Bill wrote:
Try this link instead ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programm...cd/index.shtml Bill, Pat, thanks, found the page. Lots of stuff there, ran out of time. Have to pack first. (:-) Hans-Georg -- No mail, please. |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Southeast England facing 'serious drought' | Earl Evleth | Europe | 14 | March 25th, 2006 06:55 PM |
Looking for TENT in South Africa | Ynot Ant | Travel - anything else not covered | 1 | September 19th, 2004 11:10 AM |
Africa Destinations | Jhrossouw | Europe | 1 | October 8th, 2003 03:51 AM |
Africa Destinations | Jhrossouw | USA & Canada | 0 | October 7th, 2003 10:28 AM |
Africa Destinations | Jhrossouw | Africa | 0 | October 7th, 2003 07:16 AM |