Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  The longer I drove, the more convinced I became that we had crossed Deception at one of its indistinct points and were driving to nowhere. We stopped, talked it over, and decided to go only three more miles. If we still hadn’t found the river valley, we would turn back at an angle and shoot for another intercept, hoping to hit a spot where the old channel might be deeper and better defined.

  Hunched forward over the steering wheel, my shoulders tight with fatigue and tension, I looked back at our last half-empty jerrican of water. Suddenly Delia shouted and banged on the roof. “Mark, I see our spoor! Off to the left!” Her eye had caught the faint line of tire tracks running through the shorter grasses of a small pan. I grabbed the water bottle and passed it up to her for a well-deserved drink. We were so relieved at the sight of those two arrows pointing the way back to the riverbed that we camped right there. The next morning we followed our tracks to the valley.

  We had been gone from camp for only five days, but we had used a lot of water looking for the nonexistent pan. Logically, we should have headed straight back to camp and at least made it to the water hole on Springbok Pan. But there was still more of this end of the valley to see, and so we drove on, looking for a place to top up the jerricans. There had been no rain in this area for quite some time, and the several pans we found were filled only with mud and animal tracks. The Kalahari was drying up.

  By noon the following day, the riverbed had become shallow, intermittently obscured by ridges of bush-covered sand, and more and more difficult to follow. We came to a grove of trees at a calcrete pan. Less than an inch of water covered the grey, muddy bottom, and antelope droppings floated on the surface. Never mind all that—it looked like an oasis to us. I shoveled out a deeper hole, and while we waited for the water to clear, we sat under a shade tree drinking tea and chewing strips of biltong. Later we scooped up water with pots and strained it through my shirt into our jerricans. When we had finished, I dug out another hole, and after stripping, we sat on the slimy bottom and bathed. After drying off in the wind, we smeared lard on our faces and arms to ease our burning skin.

  The next day the ancient riverbed faded into the desert, so we turned back for home. Several days later we crossed the large conical dune at the turn in the valley and entered Springbok Pan. “Lions!” Delia pointed to an open stand of acacias: Two males and five lionesses were sleeping in the canopy of a fallen tree, beside a giraffe they had killed. The males, who had dark coats and thick, jet-black manes with halos of golden hair around their faces, raised their heads to look at us, yawning deeply.

  We named the males Satan and Morena (which in Setswana means “a respected man”). The largest female we called Happy, and the others Dixie, Muzzy, Taco, and Sunny. Stonewall, a scraggly male adolescent, completed the pride. We set up our four-by-six nylon pack tent under the trees nearby, and early the following night we were able to ear-tag some of the lions. They all recovered well and, after sleeping off their hangovers, began to feed on their giraffe kill again. Later that night we scoured the riverbed for a couple of hours, searching for brown hyenas before heading back to the tent. I was tired from the darting, but Delia was determined to find a hyena, so she drove away to continue looking. I crawled into the pup tent for some sleep.

  But I was too keyed up to doze off. I lit a lantern and set it just outside the gauze flap to keep the insects from crawling in, and propped up on one elbow, I began writing in my journal. Sometime later I heard a sound, rather like someone slapping his leg. It took a moment before I realized that it was a lion shaking his head. I slowly reached out and doused the lantern. I felt a little uneasy about my visitor, for we did not know these lions the way we did the Blue Pride. The moon was nearly full, but suddenly a great black shadow blocked it out. Satan stood within inches of where I lay.

  At twelve feet four inches long and more than four feet tall, he could have squashed the tent like a bubble with just one paw. His shadow moved; a twang sounded and the tent sides shook. He had stumbled over a tie-down line.

  Satan was very still for a few long moments, the shaggy silhouette of his mane against the side of the tent. His feet made a crisp rustle in the grass as he moved around the tent toward the flap. A second later he set one of his forepaws directly in front of me: I was looking right under his sagging belly at the riverbed. The belly tensed, he lifted his head, and his roar earned away into the valley. Aaoouu-ah aaooouu-ah aaaooouuah-ah aaaoooouuah-huh-huh-huh-huh. When he had finished he stood perfectly still, ears perked, listening to two lions answer from not far away. Then he walked over to them and joined their chorus of bellows, all three lying together in the moonlight.

  In a few moments I heard the truck coming. “I came as soon as I heard them roaring,” Delia said, unzipping the gauze and slipping in beside me. I was still stirred by my encounter with Satan.

  “Incredible—Incredible!” was all I could say. It was not until after dawn that they moved away to the west, still bellowing at Bones and the Blue Pride, who answered from the valley six miles to the north.

  We found the Springbok Pan and Blue prides as often as we could, knowing they would leave at the end of the rains. The Blue Pride was not difficult to observe, since our camp was a favorite point of interest along their route through the valley.

  Our relationship with these lions had gradually changed. As we had learned to recognize facial expressions and postures that indicated their moods and intentions, and as they had become less curious about us, we found we had little to fear from them, as long as we did not create a setting that they might interpret as compromising or threatening. This is not to say that they had become house cats; we realized that they were still wild and potentially dangerous predators. Yet, even when we blundered into them during the many times they had come into camp, they had never done us any harm. We no longer hurried to the truck when they wandered into camp, but sat quietly under the ziziphus tree or at the fire while they moved around us. Because we no longer felt threatened, we could more fully appreciate and enjoy them in our close encounters. We were not just observing them, we were knowing them in a way that few people have ever known truly wild lions in their natural state, and this was a unique privilege.

  When we began our research, most of the information about lions in the wild had come from studies by Dr. George Schaller on East African prides, particularly those in the Serengeti. Our observations were beginning to reveal that lions in different parts of Africa do not necessarily behave the same.

  The portion of real estate used by a pride is termed its area, and it may overlap others.1 The territory, a smaller portion within the area, is defended against intruders—lions from other prides and nomads. In the Serengeti, a pride may move its territory around within its area to take advantage of seasonal changes in the densities of prey. However, they still defend the territory against foreigners.

  The rainy-season behavior and ecology of Kalahari lions was similar to the year-round behavior and ecology of the Serengeti populations. By spooring the Blue Pride, we had learned that during the rains their area is comparable in size to that of some Serengeti prides, roughly 130 square miles. However, because the prey communities are different, the diets of the two populations of lions are quite dissimilar: Serengeti lions feed mostly on wildebeest and zebra, whereas gemsbok, springbok, hartebeest, kudu, and giraffe make up most of a Kalahari lion’s prey. Wildebeest are included when they are available.

  Each East Aican lion pride has a nucleus of related adult females (grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and daughters), their young, and from one to three dominant males, who are unrelated to the older lionesses. The females usually remain in the same pride until they die, although a few may be forced to become nomadic if the pride gets too large. But when they are about three years old, young males are expelled by the dominant adult males. They become nomads, wandering widely and without territory, until they reach their full size and have well-developed manes, at five to six years of age. From two to five of these prime males
form an alliance, or “coalition,” which often includes brothers or half-brothers, and after collaborating in driving established older males from a pride area, they assume possession of its harem of resident females.

  During the rainy season, Kalahari prides, too, are made up of several females who associate together. The difference—as we were to learn later—is that, unlike the lionesses of Serengeti social groups, they are often not closely related.

  The behavior of the two groups is, however, very similar: In prides of both the Serengeti and the Kalahari there is a great deal of touching and camaraderie. While sleeping during the day, Sassy often rolled over and placed her paw on Blue’s shoulder; Blue nuzzled Chary’s flank; Chary’s tail dropped over Spicy’s ear; and so on throughout the pride. Everybody was in contact with someone else, except for Bones, who usually lay a few yards apart. The females hunted cooperatively, as well. In the evening and at sunrise, when they weren’t sleeping, hunting, or feeding, they licked one another’s faces and romped in play.

  One of the most striking differences between Kalahari Desert lions and those in the Serengeti is related to the amount of rainfall in each area. Because the Serengeti normally receives more than twice as much rain, it has a greater number of large prey animals that are permanent residents. Furthermore, there are usually places for lions to get water year round. But in the Kalahari, as we have described, when antelope herds drift away from the fossil river valley, the lions disappear for months and stop defending their riverbed territories. The questions of how much their ranges expanded, what they ate, and where they found water to drink were intriguing. But we were especially curious about how their social behavior changed in response to diminished prey resources and other ecological constraints. It was our desire to answer these questions that eventually led us to new and exciting discoveries about desert lions, and lions in general.

  In the meantime we began to study more about how lions communicate. When pride members are together at close range, they signal their moods and intentions with a combination of ear, eyebrow, lip, tail, and general body postures. Even the pupils of the eye have expressive value.

  Blue was resting with the Blue Pride in Easter Island one morning when she noticed a lone gemsbok, an old bull, entering the riverbed at South Pan. Her ears cocked forward, her eyes widened, she lifted her head, and the tip of her tail began to twitch. Seconds later Sassy and Gypsy had picked up her cues and were looking in the same direction. Blue had as much as said to them, “I see something interesting over there.”

  After they had killed the gemsbok, Bones arrived, intending, as usual, to take the carcass from his females. Sassy faced him, her eyes little more than slits. With her mouth three-quarters open, she bared her teeth, wrinkled her nose, spat, and growled. She was expressing defensive threat, saying in effect, “I’m not going to attack you first, but you had better not try to take my carcass.” Unfortunately for her, Bones took the carcass in spite of her threats.

  After having snarled, growled, and cuffed one another during feeding, lions make up by engaging in an elaborate face-licking and head-rubbing ritual. By the time they have washed all the gore from one another’s faces, peace has been restored to the group.

  A lion often locates others and advertises its claim to a territory by roaring or bellowing. To roar, a lion draws air deep into its chest, tightens its abdomen with great force to compress the air, and then releases it through its vocal cords, the sound erupting from the throat with such energy that it carries great distances. Occasionally, when the Blue Pride assembled around the truck, roaring in unison, the metal floor buzzed in sympathetic resonance.

  A lion’s roar consists of three parts: The first one or two sounds are low moans; these build in volume and duration to a series of four to six full bellows, followed by a number of grunts. Both males and females usually roar while standing, their muzzles pointed forward, parallel to the ground, or slightly lifted. But they may also roar while lying on their sides or while trotting.

  We noticed that Kalahari lions roared most often when the air was still, moist, and at its most efficient as a conductor of sound. They almost always roared after a rainstorm and during that part of the night when the relative humidity was highest, from about 4:00 A.M. to half an hour after sunrise. In the valley, and under the conditions described, the sound carries the farthest, up to eight miles, to our comparatively unspecialized human ear. Sometimes the Blue Pride also roared in apparent response to the morning or evening calls of jackals, who also vocalized soon after storms.

  In the dry season, however, we could hear a lion no more than a mile and a half to two miles away. Actually, in fact, they rarely roared at that time of the year, possibly because large antelope prey were so scattered that it was not economical for them to spend the energy to advertise and defend territories; or perhaps it was a waste of energy to try to communicate through the dry air. It may also have been that subgroups of prides were so spread out, looking for food, that they would not likely have heard one another even if they had roared.

  Whether or not pride-mates are successful at locating each other by roaring depends on whether the recipient of the call chooses to answer. Bones regularly became separated from his lionesses, especially if he had taken their kill from them. The females would move on until they made another one, often miles away from him. One, two, or three days later, when he had finished his carcass, Bones was faced with the problem of finding his pride. He would walk in the general direction they had taken, roaring as he went and listening for answers. In the rains, when the territory size was comparatively small, his roar carried the full length of his domain, and he could reach the females wherever they happened to be. Usually they answered him, and the pride would reunite.

  But sometimes the lionesses seemed less than anxious to get in touch with Bones. On several occasions he walked down the riverbed roaring and passed within several hundred yards of where the females lay silently in the bushes. He called repeatedly, smelling the ground and looking in every direction as he continued on down the valley. But for some reason, perhaps to protect their kill, his pride would not answer him. When in estrus, however, it was often the females who first put out a call for Bones. With them it was, at times, a matter of “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

  Lions can also coo as gently as a baby. This aaouu sound is tossed softly back and forth among them when they are moving through thick cover. It apparently helps them keep track of each other, as well as providing mutual reassurance in uncertain situations. Sometimes at night we were able to find and follow a pride through the bush by stopping the truck and listening for this genial call. In the early years, before the Blue Pride lions felt completely at home in our camp, we were often awakened by their coos as they moved through our tree island investigating the tents, water drums, and other pieces of equipment that were strange to them.

  A third way lions communicate is through olfaction—by scent-marking and smelling. The Blue Pride walked through the valley at night along scent-paths, often coincident with trails made by antelope or our truck. In most areas the trail was defined only by scent-marking; there was no visible path. Taking one of these routes, Bones would often stop at a bush or small tree, raise his head into the lower branches, close his eyes, and rub his face and mane against the leaves, as if reveling in the scent from a previous mark, and perhaps also applying it to himself. Then he would turn, raise his tail, and spray urine, mixed with secretions from two anal glands, into the branches. Certain bushes and small trees along his route were irresistible favorites, including the acacia bush next to the window of our tent. He would never pass by without giving it a squirt or two. To our unsophisticated noses his odor never lasted for more than several minutes after he had gone. The females also marked bushes, but only occasionally.

  Sometimes these bushes became visual signposts as well. Bones never failed to spray a seven-foot albizzia tree on North Pan when he walked by. Its bark had been shredded by the Blue Pride li
onesses in sharpening their claws, and its limbs had been twisted and broken because they couldn’t resist playing in it—all of them at once. After three or four of the lionesses had managed to get into the canopy, another would try to climb up the trunk. One of them would end up hanging beneath a limb while the newcomer stood on top. Rumps and tails poked from every quarter of the poor tree, until the inevitable happened: A limb broke, dropping the lionesses to the ground. In the end, the albizzia was reduced to a tangle of woody rubble that Bones, nevertheless, continued to spray every time he passed.

  A scrape mark is another type of olfactory and visual signpost used by male and female lions. The sign is made when the individual hunches its back, lowers its rump, and rakes its back feet over the ground, tearing up the turf with its claws while dribbling urine into the soil. Lions mark territory in this way, and scrapes are often made while roaring to foreign prides. Two young males who had recently taken over a new territory, scraped twenty-six times in three weeks along a 400-yard stretch of our truck spoor on the riverbed. By comparison, the older male they had replaced usually scraped once or twice along the same route in a similar period of time. The youngsters also jetted the same bushes he had marked. They were making sure that every lion in the valley knew they now owned this piece of real estate.

  Besides marking territory, scent probably identifies the lion that left the mark and indicates how long ago it passed the spot. It also communicates the condition of females in estrus. George Schaller reported that Serengeti lions can locate each other with scent, and he observed one male track two others for a kilometer by smelling their trail. Kalahari lions appear to be less successful at this, especially in the dry season, possibly because the scent denatures more quickly in the arid desert heat. We once watched Bones circle, his nose to the ground like a bloodhound, searching for Sassy, who had left him only thirty minutes earlier for better shade; she was a mere 200 yards away. He kept losing her scent and circling back to their former resting place, but he could have seen her if he had only looked in the right direction. When he finally did stumble upon her, he turned back his ears, squinted, and looked away. If I hadn’t known better, I could have sworn he was embarrassed.