That was such a great video yesterday from Explore that I checked out what they had on cats.
This “Inside the Pride” view of lions came up.
Link to their live Africams page, which has lots of information, too.
This cam is in South Africa’s Tembe Elephant Park, and per this source, the lions were introduced here in 2002.
According to the note accompanying the picture up above of a wary young lion in Rwanda back in 2015, he was donated to Tembe. Perhaps he is now one of the adult males shown in these videos!
That source link is a fascinating read, showing that these are more family groups than full-fledged lion prides, and that it’s touchy work to protect both the lions and the local people who share the wetland’s resources with them.
The elephants in this video — Tembe’s group is described in Wikipedia as the world’s largest pachyderms — are not impressed.
But sometimes the youngsters and their mothers must care very much:
A larger elephant, presumably Mom, came up behind the lionesses and they skulked off. It’s a highlights reel and other incidents shown indicate that Tembe lions do target isolated young elephants (and probably get some, though the ones I saw turned on the stalking cats, who then decided discretion was the better part of shopping the food aisle).
Some lagniappe:
Featured image: African Parks/Jim Ward, CC BY-ND 2.0.
Flight To Wonder 