Three days in Serengeti National Park – Part II

On our final day in the Serengeti we spotted a female lion with a couple of cubs in a clearing. The guides told us the female was not the cubs’ mother – she could have been an older sister. As we watched a few more cubs wandered out of the high grass around the clearing and then a few more and then more! Eventually there were ten cubs surroundning the female lion. It must have been cubby daycare!

Eventually the female lion got up and led the cubs away, back into the deep grass. This was without a doubt one of the highlights of my trip

Ten cubs in all! The female eventually led them away into the high grass.

The five most dangerous animals in the Serengeti are the lion, the leopard, the elephant, the rhinocerus and the buffalo. We saw huge herds of buffalo and some isolated males. The guides explained that when a male buffalo is beaten by a younger male and thus cannot mate with females, the older male will self-exile. At that point he “loses his sense of humour” and becomes more dangerous than ever!

The topi is a type of antelope. It has a dark marking on its thighs which led some of us – and perhaps others – to refer to it as the blue jean animal when we couldn’t remember its name.

We spotted several crocodiles all looking pretty sleepy but no doubt keeping an eye out for dinner.

Another animal of prey is the hyena. For such an unattractive animal, he has a lovely call. It’s like a dainty rising bark. We often heard it around our tents at night.

We visited another hippo pool as we were leaving the Serengeti. It was fun to watch them move around and sometimes over the other hippos. I caught my birding friend Don as he took a photo of the pool.

Seeing the lion cubs emerging from the grass was great entertainment, but watching this mother lion calling for her cub was heart-breaking. She had deposited her cub safely somewhere earlier in the day, and as sunset approached she went looking for it. When lions call their cubs they make a soft huffing sound, most un-lion-like, and their faces take on such a sorrowful look. We watched her for quite some time. I don’t know if she ever found her cub but hope she did.