The Mane Man!

Juvenile Male Lion, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.

Whilst sorting through some photos for my new website I suddenly realised there were a number of photos from Kenya that have still not seen the light of day, or rather the light of Flickr. They’re not alone, I’ve spent a considerable amount of this evening, consolidating the photos from a number of the machines I own on to my network filer. This box has technology that replicates data across a number of hard drives to ensure I don’t loose any of my photos. I do still need to back up all the very best of them – but I can’t quite face that, I’ve only just managed to get them all into one place.

Today’s image shows a young male Lion taking the early morning sun, you can tell he’s a juvenile by the length of his main but more importantly by the colour. As I’ve mentioned before as male Lion’s get older their manes get darker in colour and as you can see from the photo, this individual has very little darkness (the colour change usually starts and the back and works forward).

The Lion wasn’t alone, he was presided over by a mother lion, and accompanied by three other juvenile males. The mother was very definitely in charge, snarling at younger lions when they misbehaved in any way. As with the other animal encounters, these ferocious animals were less than 20ft from our low sided vehicle, but were totally unconcerned by our presence, and had absolutely no interest in us. At one point a couple of Helmeted Guinea Fowl started heading towards the group of lions, we all held our breath in anticipation expecting at least one of the young lions to chase these brave birds… nothing. They may have given them a cursory glance as the birds squawked their way past, but didn’t even shift position. Perhaps they had tried and failed on a previous occasion, perhaps the birds weren’t raising the alarm with the calls but taunting the big cat, perhaps the lions were all still half asleep (or half awake) but the Guinea Fowl passed right by them, not even giving them a wide berth. So these early birds, lived another day to get the early worm.

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