Male African lions can be ten feet long and weigh 400 pounds or more, and this one appeared to be pushing the limits of its species. The sublime brute only 15 feet away was my first wild Panthera leo. The Serengeti usually dazzles first-time visitors, Packer had warned, making us giddy with an abundance of idyllic wildlife straight out of a Disney song-and-dance number. Since arriving in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park only that morning, I’d gaped at wildebeests on parade, dawdling baboons, gazelles rocketing by, oxpecker birds hitching rides atop Cape buffaloes, hippos with bubblegum-colored underbellies. From a distance it looked like a deposed lord, grand and pitiable.
He pointed out the lion’s scraped elbow and a nasty puncture wound on its side. Packer, a University of Minnesota ecologist and the world’s leading lion expert, spun the wheel of the Land Rover and drove straight toward the animal. It was a dark-maned male, elaborately sprawled, as if it had fallen from a great height. But Craig Packer and colleagues have found that's not the main reason the animals team up.Īnup and Manoj Shah / Craig Packer was behind the wheel when we came across the massive cat slumped in the shade beneath a spiny tree. Biologists long believed that lions band together to hunt prey.
