We are excited to have a guest on the blog for today’s post, Leigh-Ann Aingworth, she was recently at the Kruger and she is here to share an incredible sighting from her trip.
Leigh-Ann is a part-time photographer, wildlife being her passion. She is from Durban and since Kruger is around 700km away she makes it a point to visit the park once a year, but visits Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park for her bush fix.
“We were staying at Lower Sabie and had been sitting at an awesome sighting of my favourite animal, the leopard, it was up a tree with a kill. We decided to move on from the causeway and we carried on along the H4-1 and had stopped someone heading the opposite way to tell him about the leopard and he told us there are two male lions on the river bank about 500m on, I think the gentleman meant 5km, because we drove on for a while thinking we had missed the lions completely and all of a sudden they were there!” Leigh-Ann told us,
Leigh-Ann, who is Greame Mitchley cousin, found out from him that the two male lions were the Lubyelubye pride males who are often seen around the Lubyelubye rocks with their cubs and pride lionesses.
Read Greame post of when the white lion had a scary encounter here.
“So we parked on the side of the road to take some pictures, a while later someone pointed out that there was a third lion further up the river bank. The third lion was firstly laying low and relaxing like only lions know how to, when he started making his way down the river bank, and we just assumed he was going to join his “brothers”, he looked very unflustered and didn’t approach the other lions aggressively at all, next minute the Lubyelubye pride are up and all hell broke loose.
“My heart nearly jumped out of my chest!! I have seen lions fighting on TV programmes and it’s never nice to see, my finger just pressed down on my camera button and I clicked away, I actually was so scared for the poor trespassing lion, that I didn’t really remember seeing too much just hoping I was getting good pictures and also hoping that the poor lion lived.
“The sighting only lasted a couple minutes, the trespasser submitted to them and the Lubyelubye pride males waltzed off and sat together on the rock whilst the other lion(S129 Male) sat for a while and then thankfully got up and walked off licking his wounds.”
Leigh-Ann also informed us that she found out that the trespassing lion has a brother whom also got a thumping from the Mantimahle coalition a week ago, it clearly hasn’t been a great week for this pair of lions, but she was happy to report that the lions are back together and are looking good.
Go follow Leigh-Ann wildlife Facebook page here.
For lions that took over the Lubyelubye pride from the great Jock males, we really underestimated how powerful they were going to be.
Male lions are often seen fighting other lions for territory and females, the trespassing lions were likely trying to stake their claim on a territory, unfortunately they encountered some fierce lions among the way.