For the past two weeks there have been interesting sightings taking place in the Southern part of the reserve and it has been thrilling to take our Mhondoro guests there on game drives. In the reserve we have two different prides of Lions; the one is known as the Southern pride and the other one as the Western pride. On this particular day, my guests had already seen the Western pride on three different occasions during their stay. In an attempt to keep the game drives as interesting as possible, I decided to venture into the Southern plains of Welgevonden to track down the Southern pride.
The Southern part of the reserve offers wide open grass plains, enabling you to see far in the distance. While driving there I spotted a huge cloud of dust near what is called Blue dam; named after the beautiful colour of the water that can be seen from far away.
On arrival we saw two sub-adult Lions and a Lioness digging in and around an Aardvark hole. It was evident that they had spotted something going into the hole. And indeed, it was a male warthog! After a few seconds the warthog shot out of the hole with the Lions in hot pursuit. The warthog saw that he was in grave danger and turned around to defend itself.
Due to his lack of experience in hunting, one of the young sub-adult Lions rushed straight forward to attack the warthog. This was a mistake!! The warthog used its pair of tusks to defend itself and counter-attack the sub-adult Lion. In split seconds we saw the young male lion being attacked by the warthog, unfortunately causing a bad injury on his right upper front quarter. The poor warthog was cornered by the other two lions though and killed on the spot. While the two lions were busy enjoying the hard fought kill, the other youngster was busy leaking his wounds.
The moral of the story being that, you only learn by making mistakes. Hopefully this young Lion male will never again just rush at a Warthog!
