Archive for the 'lion' category

Or how can a grass-eating prey keep its calm even among the most aggressive predators.

‘Big Boy’ and ‘Leonardo’ are the names of two of the GPS-collared desert lions living in Namibia under the constant surveillance of animal researchers. These big males fell under the bullets of trophy hunters, even with collars and in a protected area.

It’s a pity, but these hunters will kill anything and anywhere. In this case, this will be a major blow to the small population of desert lions (a specific adaptation of the African lion to dry weather conditions).

Photo: Hunting Ventures

Source: Bush Warriors.

London is a city marked by centuries of colonization when Britons crossed the planet and brought back memories of the conquered countries including many representations of lions (both from Africa and from Asia). London kept it as innumerable statues celebrating the King of the Animals.

Londonist has a map of all these attractions sometimes dating back much further in time: Lionist.

Via Neatorama.

WebEcoist assembled some nice photos of the nicest big cats.

• Tiger
• White Tiger
• Lion
• Leopard
• Black panther
• Cheetah
• Puma
• Snow Leopard
• Lynx
• Caracal

the Barbary Lion, sometimes named Atlas lion or Nubian lion, Panthera leo leo, is a sub-species of African lions which lived in the Atlas mountains (Morocco, Algeria, mainly). It is now totally extinct out of some zoos. But it seems that it was a great animal with a truly impressive look.

Honoring its memory, I collected a few images from the world wide web:

This scan of a children’s book comes from a wonderful compilation of a collection coming from between 1860 and the 1920s and assembled in a book: ‘From Mother Goose to Dr Seuss: Children’s Book Covers 1860-1960‘ by H Darling, 1999.

There are a few more covers in the set (mostly without felines, though) that you can see on Flickr and on Bibliodyssey.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

We usually think that a country rich of an impressive wild life like Kenya is nearly out of danger of seeing the full extinction of an emblem of Africa like the lion. This is not all so certain.

According to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), wild lions from Kenya are disappearing quite quickly: 100 lions less each year for the last 10 years. But there are no more than 2000 of them left. The last lion would so die in 20 years.

But Laurence Frank, biologist in the protection group for big cats, Panthera, believes that the KWS estimate is much too low and that the last lion in Kenya has no more than 10 years left!

The pressure applied by the human population onto the wild eco-system of Kenya already seems huge and this is compounded by a smuggling traffic small but measurable.

So, your next safari in Kenya this year may well be the last hope you have to see the king of animals.

Source: New Scientist.

A car thief probably got the surprise of his life when he grabbed the light truck from a circus. No doubt he thought he had a good one, but he got more than he bargained for: a 5-year old lion, circus star armed with a set of teeth able to recover the last remnant of honesty from the worse stealing bandit.

The German police found the wrecked truck and Caesar safe and sound. It is not known whether the thief was unable to drive or if the noises from the back of the car were more distracting than the usual mobile phone used while driving.

Source: AFP.

This is what these visitors of the Lion Safari Park in Johannesburg (South Africa) learned while they were driving slowly in this wildlife park to admire some wild animals. But, this lion found how to open their Toyota’s door with its teeth. The driver had only a few seconds to understand that the best reaction was to press the pedal deep and run away.

Lion opens car door

It would never have happened with a large American SUV, of course.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk.