Starting Off With a Bang (or technically a roar).

As you know…I’m in Kenya. In Kenya, there are many lions. Shocking as this may be, my interactions and opinions of lions have drastically changed since arriving on this continent.

In the states our interactions are usually limited to seeing them behind a fenced enclosure of sorts at a zoo. And in my experience, they are often doing their predator thing of just relaxing mid-day, knowing that their free meal is shortly on its way. They don’t really have a territory to protect, other lions to worry about, or reasons to fear humans.

Here in Africa, things are a tad different. To exemplify this, I will share with you how I spent last Saturday night.

Jeff (the other guy that I’m working with) and I, along with Dr. Holekamp (the principle investigator of the hyena research), went south of the Mara to help the Striped Hyena camp. Located in Shompole, the landscape resembled an even drier Arizona than I’m used to. Somewhat barren, everything that I had brought along was quickly covered in a few millimeters of dust. But that’s not the exciting part of this story.

Striped hyenas are an endangered and elusive species of hyena that are rarely seen at night. The research that our lab is working on is working to determine a lot of maternal effects and behaviors of them, along with basic biology and ecology of such an elusive mammal. So we had set out at about 3PM to set some traps for these animals. Returning after dark, we had to check all of the traps that we had set.

Lo’ and behold…we caught one!


What a great and lucky experience to have. The handling and release goes great, without a hitch. As we approached our second set of traps to see if we had caught anything, we hear a lions’ roar (which by the way sounds nothing like you’d think it does, MGM has it all wrong). One of the people we’re with says something to the joking effect of, “Oh. That lion was only 10 meters from us.” We all smile. The lion roars again. And this time, it actually was only 10 meters from us.

All of us, feeling the pressure to make a split second decision on how to react to this rapidly approaching predator, turn to Dr. Holekamp. Knowing that she’s been living in the bush for over 20 years studying hyenas must certainly know how to react to a lion that is stalking you. We expect suggestions of, “Dave, you get on Jeff’s shoulders and I’ll make a lot of noise with this clipboard. It will certainly leave us alone.”

However, all we received was, “boys, this isn’t good. Let’s get out of here, leave everything.”

Following our fearless leader, we hurriedly walked through the dark African wilderness to a nearby ranger station. Unbeknownst to us where the lion actually was (hopefully behind us). After the sun came up and the lion was nowhere to be seen or heard, we checked the remainder of our traps, packed them up, and headed home.

And so was my first night of staying in the actual bush. Quite the adventure.