The lion sleeps tonight
Aidan Hartley
Laikipia
Iwas in Nairobi traffic when I received an ISMS message on my phone from the farm: LIONS ATE DONKEY LAST NIGHT. ONLY ONE HOOF LEFT. We have seven donkeys — or, rather, now we have six. They collect water from the spring. More often in this part of Kenya, lion prey on cattle. Since ranchers and herders make their living out of livestock, people sometimes retaliate by shooting lion. If they poison a carcase, they might finish off an entire pride. Such 'human–wildlife conflict', together with loss of habitat, accounts for why there are probably fewer than 23,000 lion left in Africa.
To understand more about this, I went Out on a weekend of lion-trapping with Alayne Mathieson, a British lion researcher with the Laikipia Predator Project. This unique scheme looks at various ways to promote the co-existence of people and predators. The Laikipia plateau is home to lots of humans and also lions. And it's a success story, because this is the single area in East Africa where wildlife numbers are increasing rather than going into catastrophic decline. One reason is that tourism is an even more valuable industry to Laikipia than livestock. If the big cats vanish, so will a huge amount of money.
It was evening and tall, blonde Alayne was in combat trousers and wielding a machete to hack up a stinking camel carcase for bait.
'Catching large predators is all about working in the dark, blood and guts and the smell,' said Alayne. She is formidable yet kind, a cross between Lara Croft and a Blue Peter presenter. Guts spilled. She said the stench of rotting meat would attract lion to the snare traps her Learn had set. So would a looped recording of an abandoned buffalo calf mooing for its mother, 'Different animal distress-sounds work but with curious young adults they don't care. You could play Mozart and they'd come running.' 1 blinked. 'Then what?'
'The lion materialise out of the long grass near you and you pray that they're going to go into the trap. Then, in the halflight, all you hear is a bubbling roar, then quiet. As you approach, it throws itself around furiously.'
'OK,' I croaked.
'They don't like you too close. But they'll give you a "rev", a roar, before they take you out. If you don't back off, then next time they'll go for you.' I asked if Alayne enjoyed getting a 'rev'. 'It's great! But you do pooh your pants.' 'And then?'
'Then you go in and dart it as swiftly as possible and back off. Things go quiet. After eight minutes hopefully it'll he unconscious. One of you is posted on lion watch with a torch. You only ever approach from behind and pull its tail. If that doesn't get a reaction then you push it with your foot and then go round the sharp end.'
Sometimes the lion is still half-awake. Recently, Alayne was working on a big male, LM 107. She was trying to move him as he had fallen on the dart. 'When I rolled him over 1 could see that only half the dose had gone into him, and as I held him under the belly I could feel the growl coming up through his body. He threw himself towards me hut then fell straight over. They do that. They pretend.'
After that, the team takes samples, conducts tests and fits a radio collar that will help track behaviour. The Project people know all about the lives of the collared lion. It sounds like a soap opera, full of girlfriends, fights and passionate encounters. For rue it was like being in Big Cat Diary except for real. For the sake of science, the lion are identified by serial numbers. Alayne and her husband Graham's children have informally christened several. There are Barbie, Nimo, Magic, Caspar — a young male who's so scarce he's like a ghost — and also Bambi, so named according to Alayne 'as a reference to what she eats rather than what she is'.
As the evening wore on, we caught a striped hyena — and 1 stroked its unconscious, lovely head — but no lion. The same thing all next day. In the car I kept nodding off to sleep and waking with a start, only to hear the interminable mooing buffalo calf. Catching lion was, I decided, rather like fishing. On the third day still no lion and I had to leave. Ninety minutes later I was bumping along in the car and the phone bleeps up another SMS: SODS LAW. WE GOT LION B4 DARK!
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