Two Longs (+1): Of Longs and Lions

Well, given that Kathleen has continued to shoulder the majority of the burden for keeping our blog up to date with entertaining anecdotes about our adventures in Mozambique, we both thought it was about time for me to get off my lazy rear end and help out a bit. So, although Kathleen has her own story to contribute in the middle of this post, for the most part you all will once again have to suffer through some of my far less creative writing style.

Over the past couple of weeks here, we’ve managed to have three really amazing experiences with the lions of Gorongosa, and so we both thought that it would be appropriate to focus this post on the king of the beasts. Enjoy!

Encounter #1 – Lion 1, Nyala 0

The two major animal research projects currently underway at Gorongosa are my own study of Gorongosa’s antelope, and an in-house project that’s aimed at collecting baseline data on Gorongosa’s small lion population. Well, a few weeks ago our two projects intersected for the first time in a cool, albeit unexpected, way. I was out early one morning with Rui Branco, the park veterinarian, looking for nyala (one of the three antelope species I’m studying) to dart, when completely by chance we came across a young lioness lying in the open next to a water hole. She was super calm, and let us drive to within about 20 yards of her to check her out and take pictures. We soaked in the experience for a little while, and then went on our way. About 10 hours later, in the early evening of that same day, we happened to be back in the same general area, so we thought we’d take a look and see if she was still there, just for fun. We drove around the water hole for a bit without seeing any sign of her, but just as we were about to leave, we noticed some movement in the tall (like, 6 feet tall) grass nearby. We slowly approached in Rui’s land cruiser, and low and behold, there was our lioness…on a fresh kill! Closer inspection with the binoculars quickly revealed that the animal she was feeding on was, in fact, a nyala. So, score one for the lion project, and zero for the antelope project!

This is one of the better pictures we were able to get of her feeding on her freshly killed nyala. Good thing I didn't have a collar on that one!

Anyway, she once again let us approach to within about 20 yards of her, and we watched her feed for a little while, which was really cool (although not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure). After she’d begun to fill up, though, she got curious about us, and decided to leave the safety of the tall grass to come check us out!

At this point she was sitting less than 10 yards from us.

She walked to within about 10 feet of the truck, sat down on her haunches, and proceeded to give us a good looking over.

Although she was certainly curious, she obviously didn't find us nearly as interesting as we found her!

It was at that time that Rui simply said, “don’t make any sudden movements.” His warning, of course, was designed to keep us from scaring her away, but the way it was worded gave a bit of a fright to our guest for the evening, a young graduate student from California who accompanied us in the hopes of getting to see us dart a nyala. Eventually the lioness had her fill of us and wandered back into the grass. What a cool experience it was though!

Encounter #2 – I saw a thing!

I guess it’s my turn now. :-)

Ryan gave me another mommy day last week. This is the first you’re hearing about it because we’ve been busy. I’mstillnewatthiswholescheduledblogpostthingdon’tjudgeme!

Ahem.

So, anyway, he spent the day with Caden (brave man) so that I could go out into the park with Rui and several others and look for some lions! Whee! I’ve been in the park a few times now, but never to specifically track down a lion. It involved getting up early, a lot of driving around, most of it off road, and most of it following a very roundabout kind of path, since there are few roads in Gorongosa. The GPS said the lion was Thisaway, so we went Thisaway, road or no road, and we had to drive around termite mounds and trees and brush and suddenly uneven terrain, etc. Along the way we got to see many other cool animals that we’ve already shown you guys so many pictures of (don’t wanna bore you with another bucketful of kudu, water buck, and nyala pictures). Well... I'll include one... 'cause it's funny.

Posing like a boy band.

Actually it’s kind of funny that we kept seeing so many nyala. Ryan and Rui are working soooo hard to get those last two nyala collars out, and we were seeing nyala left and right when we weren’t even looking for them! I am not yet trained enough to recognize them on sight but on this trip I always knew if the animal we’d just passed was a nyala because Rui would start muttering to himself like a government employee who’s one step away from going postal. The other two people in the car could recognize nyala on sight and they took great pains to point out every single one with childish glee.

That's Tara in the backseat with me. Between us is a dart gun (not loaded). And there's the back of Rui's head up front. The steering wheel is on the right side of the land cruiser.

Seriously, we saw so many! Ryan and Rui just aren’t working hard enough…

Wow. If looks could kill…

Anywhooo! After several hours of purposeful meandering we did finally get to see an honest to goodness African lion! We got as close as we could without spooking him off, and he wasn’t too close to the Land Cruiser, but he was actually a little closer than my camera makes it look like though. ;-p

His name is Njenga, and we went looking for him because there is a female with cubs that is part of his pride and Rui wanted to find them because the female’s GPS collar isn’t working anymore and needs to be changed. No luck with the lioness or the cubs, but we still got to see Njenga, which was very cool! He’s a very laidback kind of lion because he’s used to being viewed by Paola and by tourists, so he just sat there in the long grass and watched us watching him.

Peekaboo...

We left him a short while later (after all of us had gotten the pictures we wanted) and drove around a little more, hoping that the female would show up if we gave her some more time. When we went back she still wasn’t there, so we had to call it a day at that point. Not as exciting a day as Ryan’s two lion stories, but still pretty cool for me. ;-)

Encounter #3 – The new coolest thing I’ve ever done

OK, my turn again.You might remember from the last post I took the lead on awhile back that in the process of darting antelope for my project, I got the huge bonus of getting to watch Rui dart and collar a lioness for the lion research project. The GPS collar that went on that lioness was the 5^th of 6 collars that the lion project currently has, and the sixth and final collar was reserved for a very specific purpose. The biologist that oversees the lion project (Paola Bouley is her name) located a “coalition” of two young male lions last September that had never before been seen in the park. So, for a variety of reasons, getting a GPS collar on one of those males had been her primary goal since March of this year. Unfortunately these two lions are super elusive, and although Paola and Rui have spent countless hours over the past few months searching for them both night and day, they’d only seen them a couple of times, and Rui was never presented with the opportunity to dart either of them.

So, fast forward a few months. Rui and I were out looking for nyala (yep, still have two more collars to get out on those stupid things!). It was mid-afternoon, and it was just the two of us, when Rui got a call from someone who thought he might have seen one of these males near one of the park roads. He sent a picture and sure enough, it was one of the two they badly wanted to collar. Unfortunately the guy had seen the lion at 7:00 that morning, so it had been about 8 hours already. Still, lions spend most of the day laying in the shade and sleeping, so we figured it would be worth a look anyway. So, we set the nyala hunt aside and went to look for a lion. Amazingly, when we got to the area where he was sighted earlier that day, it only took us a few minutes to find him. And that was when Rui made my day (or maybe my year even) with one simple question: “you wanna do it?” Hmmm, let’s see, do I want to dart a male African lion in the middle of the Mozambican wilderness…ABSO-FREAKIN-LUTELY!

As amazing of an opportunity as that was, though, it quickly turned into a pretty high-pressure situation. Remember, first of all, that Rui and Paola had been trying to collar this lion for months, and that the lion project’s last GPS collar was reserved for him. In addition, Rui only had enough drugs to put together two more lion darts, and apparently you can't get those specific drugs in Mozambique, so when he runs out it's gonna be weeks before he can get more. No worries though, I can handle all that ;) The lion is pretty wary, but he lets us slowly drive to within darting distance. I make a good shot from 20 yards, and...the dart bounces off of him! Rui said he'd never seen that happen with a lion before. We got a great video of that whole sequence, but unless we can find some way to sensor it, we probably won’t put it on the blog, because Rui used a few choice words when that dart bounced off that I’d hate to expose any of our friends and loved ones to. Anyway, the lion proceeded to pick up the dart and chew on it, and we had to chase him around in the land cruiser and harass him to get him to drop it before he swallowed the needle, the whole time thinking that he would take off for good because we were pushing him. Unbelievably, he didn’t swallow the needle, finally dropped the dart, and laid back down again. It took a few tries to get close enough again, because he didn't like us too much at that point and kept getting up and moving as we approached. Finally, though, we got within 20 yards again in the tall grass. Now, however, we are officially on the last of Rui’s lion drugs, so if something goes wrong with this shot then the opportunity he and Paola have waited months for is lost. Talk about pressure! I couldn’t actually dart him where he was lying because the grass was too tall, so we had to just wait until he stood in the hopes that when he did, he’d stand long enough for me to dart him. Well, he finally stood, but when he did it was walk off directly away from us. I took the opportunity and hit him with the second dart just as he began to walk off. Talk about a high pressure shot on a moving lion! Man was I glad when it hit him good and injected. We also got an extremely brief (but still cool) video of that shot, which we’ve posted below for you.

This was the view I had shortly before he stood and I darted him the second time.

Oh yeah, a nicely placed dart right in the hindquarter! And a male lion wondering what in the world just happened, and whether the people in the truck are somehow responsible for it...

Starting to get sleepy now, but definitely not sleepy enough to handle!

The final interesting piece of that roller coaster ride is that he was much bigger-bodied than we expected, and the drugs didn’t fully anesthetize him! After 20 minutes he was still able to hold his head up, which doesn’t bode real well for handling when it comes to something like a lion. As I mentioned, Rui was out of anethestics for lions at that point. Fortunately, though, he had a mild sedative on hand that we figured would probably be enough to finish the job. So, I got to dart him a third time (this time in the front shoulder because of his position), and shortly thereafter he was sleeping nicely. Given that this wasn’t my project, and there was a lot to potentially lose here, it was super nice of Rui to let me have this opportunity. It was, without a doubt, the opportunity of a lifetime for someone like me, and an experience I’ll never forget!