LIFE & DEATH ON THE SERENGETI
Orcs! Brutish, aggressive, ugly, malevolent orcs! I’m perplexed at the site of the kill as if seeing a scene taken straight out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring. Just look at it. Its ears have been chewed off – probably during an argument with the other Orcs in the clan on who gets to eat Frodo first. I would have said it has a face only a mother could love, but he probably ate her already.
But this is not Middle Earth, nor your local pet adoption operation. This is the Serengeti – 30,000 square kilometers of vast East African Savana and one of the best places in the world for viewing wildlife – unchained.
Buffalo wings
That piece of bone it’s chewing used to be a 1.3 ton African Buffalo only 28 hours earlier. An unfortunate 1.3 African Buffalo, to be precise. The lionesses who took it down were, in an ironic inversion of fates, were very lucky indeed. It’s hard and quite rare for a lion to take down a buffalo. The big herbivore is a powerful and mean beast – not easy for the taking of even the most determined Savana hunters. The reward for overpowering one, however, is big (literally). And so was our reward – to be there in time to record it. The Buffalo? Well, at least he got wings.
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But it’s 28 hours later. Soon the hyenas will have their fill, and the remains of this former giant behemoth will be served to the vultures. Waiting anxiously nearby, they can hardly pause to start their turn. After the vultures, it will be the maggots, and then, there will be nothing left. Such is life, and death, in the immense plains of northeastern Tanzania.
28 hours earlier
Damn! We just missed it!!
A pride of lions has just downed a fully-grown Buffalo, and we weren’t there to document. It’s the dry season in the Serengeti, and my family – the wife, three kids, and I have made all the way here to see nature unfiltered from the comfort of a well-protected Toyota Land Cruiser. Driving through waterholes and dry riverbeds in anticipation for some wild action. In essence, we’re not much different than those vultures circling above – only we had iPhones. And when the sky gets packed with those big ugly birds, it means something interesting is happening just below.
A royal feast
Our local guide drives us closer. Few meters off to the right of the dirt road, a full-blown pride is busy tearing up the beast to pieces. We were just minutes too late to witness the actual hunt. Still, the consolation prize is not too bad. In the unofficial billboard ranking of Safaris in Africa, lions feasting on a buffalo still rank very high.
So There we were, standing on the jeep’s chairs watching the pride go through the carcass through the Land Cruiser’s open-top roof. Important to note that by “Lion Pride” I mean mainly the male lions. Not that they did anything meaningful to get that nicely-served, fresh breakfast. In the African Savanah, it’s the lioness that does all the heavy lifting. Gender equality in the Animal Kingdom, apparently, is still somewhat of a remote concept.
Vultures above, jeeps below
As vulture numbers above us grow exponentially, so does the number of Safari vehicles below. Lucky for us, we came in early and have a front-row view of the action. And what an action it is!
I’ll try to describe it without getting too much into gory graphical descriptions. The lions work their way through the bull’s “soft spots” – the places where the animal’s skin is the most tender and easy to pierce – the lower abdomen, the throat, and the anus… yuck! Then they eat the carcass inside out. In the end, what is left is almost complete skin covering bones and scraps. The whole sight is really quite ungainly. If you got soft stomachs this would not be for you. Although Lions are euphemistically called “the kings of the Animal Kingdom”, their table manners are somewhat less regal.
Hundreds of photos, and hundreds of kilos of meat later, all sides are spent. “Time to move on”, says our guide. “The lions will continue to play here for a while.” Don’t worry though, we will be back here tomorrow for the hyaenas.”
“In the wild, nothing goes to waste,” he says as we drive on.
