MESSAGE
| DATE | 2002-10-12 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] There is a lesson here somewhere...
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NYTimes
5 Little Oryxes and the Big Bad Lioness of Kenya
By MARC LACEY
NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct. 11 ? Having been nurtured on nature shows, tourists to Africa typically relish a good kill: a cheetah chasing down a gazelle, a jackal devouring the carcass of a wildebeest, a lion pouncing on a squirming oryx.
But Africa's most popular wildlife star in recent months has been a lonely lioness from Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya that cuddles up to baby antelopes that she should be dismembering for lunch.
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The sight of a full-grown lion at the side of a newborn antelope ? she has adopted five antelopes this year ? attracted hordes of tourists.
As she defied the laws of nature, the lioness found herself constantly surrounded by safari vans. Even when the tourists retired to their lodges for the night, rangers tracked her and her latest adoptee in the dark.
Nicknamed Kamuniak, or "blessed one" in the local Samburu language, the lioness prompted oohs and ahs from camera snappers, comparisons to the biblical lion and the lamb from spiritualists and confusion among naturalists.
"It's a rare event," said a mystified Ditte Dahl Lisbjerg, an animal behaviorist at Unesco's Nairobi office. "It's like dogs adopting kittens and cats adopting canaries, but in those situations the animals are tamed. This lion has to have a mental disorder. To understand this, we'd have to study the history of this lioness. We'd have to put her on the couch."
Well, fears for the lioness's sanity may have been put to rest. She finally ate one of her adoptees, a kill that turned delighted stares from her audience of tourists into anguished grimaces.
Until Thursday, the only aggression the lioness showed came early in the "adoption" process. She would move in on a newborn oryx ? there are many antelope species in Kenya but she seems to prefer that variety ? and separate the naïve youngster from its terrified parents.
After securing a newborn, the lioness would lie down next to the baby and, like any protective mother, ward off strangers, antelopes and antelope-eaters alike.
True, her first adoptee was devoured in January by another lion that had a clearer sense of the proper predator-prey relationship. Since then, government rangers intervened to rescue each baby oryx as it weakened from lack of food. Their birth mothers, needless to say, were too afraid of the lingering lion to drop by and nurse their young.
The latest adoption came this week, when the driver of a safari van spotted the lioness early Monday morning with a wobbly little oryx, its umbilical cord still attached. The driver notified others, and soon Kamuniak and her new baby oryx were under full-time observation. But this time, Samburu's rangers decided not to intervene but to let nature take its course.
On Wednesday afternoon the two were spotted sleeping not far from each other, under separate acacia trees. Eventually the oryx awoke with a bleating sound not unlike that of a goat. The lioness heard the cry and, ever so slowly, ambled over toward the newborn, who walked away through the bush.
As the promenade began, vans hurriedly repositioned themselves for a better view.
At one point the mother oryx appeared on the scene and rangers tried to use their vehicle to block the lioness and permit a mother-calf reunion. But the lioness would have none of that. She trotted around the rangers and took control of the oryx again.
The lioness typically forgoes hunting while raising an antelope, apparently too concerned about the safety of the oryx to venture too far afield. Some months back she did catch a gerenuk, another kind of antelope, that happened to amble by while she was tending to her third adopted oryx. This week the lioness eyed a small group of wildebeest and even got into her hunter's crouch, but the oryx strayed away and the lioness soon pranced off after it.
All the tenderness that the lioness displayed temporarily changed the dynamics of game viewing in the reserve.
"Everyone always seems to enjoy a kill," said Julius Kimani, a senior warden with the Kenya Wildlife Service. "It's a rare thing to see a predator running after a prey. But this is even more rare. You have a predator who is caring for its prey."
Tourists in this park have seemed to tire of animals that would ordinarily provoke wonder or glee. An elephant scooping up grass with its trunk and two giraffes grazing on trees were virtually ignored this week as visitors jockeyed for position around the lioness and the oryx.
"Seeing a lion killing an antelope is something you see quite a lot on TV," said Baudewyn Baudoin, a tourist from the Netherlands. "That's the way nature goes. This is totally different."
Alas, as it turned out, not so different after all. Late Thursday, after the baby oryx starved to death, the lioness all of a sudden became a normal lioness again. She ate the oryx.
"I was so surprised," said James Lesuyai, senior warden at the reserve, who made the decision to let nature take its course. "I didn't think the lioness would consume the baby."
The most surprising behavior of all may have been that of the aghast tourists, the ones who usually relish a good kill.
"They asked me why I didn't save the poor baby oryx," Mr. Lesuyai said. "I told them that this is nature."
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