A colleague and I had just arrived in the Semliki Valley, in the Congo, to a part of that valley then known as the most predator-rich region of Africa, with loads of lions and heaps of hyenas. Lots of leopards too. We arrived at the main base camp for a large expedition that I was to join a year later (this was a brief visit) and were told to find the satellite camp, out in the bush.

“Ten clicks that way, then a left on their road. Good luck finding the road.”

Good luck indeed. Took us forever. And, at one point, after night fell, we had the brilliant idea that we could stand on the hood of of the Land Rover and maybe see lights in the distance (this turns out to have been totally worthless, as the camp was down in a valley, very far away, they mainly had candle light, and by this time only a single hurricane lamp would be burning, invisible from this distance).

So, we stopped, and I got out of the Land Rover, climbed up on to the hood, and just before the driver switched off the headlights, a giant lioness walked up to the truck, right in the headlight beams, looked at me, sniffed at the grill of the truck, and wandered off into the blackness of night, now invisible to us.

She was was about ten feet tall, fifty feet long, and had fangs about a foot long.

OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but here’s the thing. You see a giant cat, like a lion or tiger, in a zoo, in the enclosure, and that’s one thing. You see a giant cat in the wild, a wild giant cat, not a tame one, and it is close enough to reach over and take your leg off without going anywhere, and that’s a different thing.

That was not to be my first close call with lions, nor the closest in fact, over the next year and a half. And, though I was not eaten by a lion, something like six people were, right near that spot.

Between this short trip and the later, much longer visit to this site, a lion, it is said, started eating people. It was local villagers, living in the usual wattle and daub grass-roofed huts who were being eaten. Lions tend to go for the head region when they kill, but they usually attack much more robust prey, like a large antelope or a buffalo. So, when the take a human, they may crush the head in such a way that an eye ball or two pops out. I was told that in a few of the locations where the lion ate someone, all that was left was an eye ball or two, and that freaked the freaken heck out of the people in those tiny villages.

I was told this by a local Greek merchant named Andre, who happened to be the guy with the biggest and most accurate firearm in the region, who, with his brother, took out the lion. Andre was wearing a nice neckless he had made himself, using one of the canines of the lion. His brother, he told me, had a matching neckless.

So, what about Tsavo? You may remember “The Ghost And The Darkness,” which was a book and a movie, or you may have heard about them from another source. It is an old story.

Back when the British were building a railroad across what is now Kenya, during much of the year 1898, two lions took to dining on the mostly Chinese rail workers. The number of victims they are said to have eaten ranges up to 135 people (see: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures), and the lions were said to be mysterious and demonic. The reality is a bit different. They are known to have eaten 28 railway workers, and they were just regular lions, but of the mainless variety found in that region.

Lions, like cats generally, tend to be specialists. The way to find, trap, and kill (and sometimes, to process or eat) a particular species involves a lot of important detail. They way a Zebra vs. a Buffalo can kick you to death if you are a lion matters. The way to entrap a Ugandan kob vs. a wildebeest are not even close to the same thing, if you are a lion. Lions, therefore, tend to hunt a particular prey, or a small number of possible prey type, for a long time, possibly their entire lives.

Putting this a different way, the list of prey lions are known to have fed on is long. The list of species you actually observe a given pride of lions to feed on, if you watch most of their kills for many months, is very short. Humans are totally on the long list, and of all the wild mammals that kill humans in Africa, lions kill the most. But humans are rarely on the sort list. Why? Because they taste bad to lions, right? That’s what everyone says. Unfortunately, that is not true. We taste just fine, if a bit stringy. But we are bad prey for other reasons. First, we are rare. Yes, yes, seven billion is a lot, but in lion country, we are rare. Second, we live inside hard to get into nests much of the time, so it is not really worth it. Third, lions are not idiots. We have sharp weapons and sometimes guns, so even if a lion can easily sneak up on a human, some other human is going to stick or shoot you. In any event, once a lion starts to eat humans, it does not live too long. The Tsavo lions probably lived longer than the average man eater. The Semliki man eater emerged on the scene, ate some people, and was dispatched between my visit in late August and my return the following June.

But there is some new research telling us a few cool things. Here’s the paper:

DeSantis, L.R.G. and B. D. Patterson. 2017. Dietary behaviour of man-eating lions as revealed by dental microwear textures. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 904 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41598-017-00948-5.

Here is the abstract:

Lions (Panthera leo) feed on diverse prey species, a range that is broadened by their cooperative hunting. Although humans are not typical prey, habitual man-eating by lions is well documented. Fathoming the motivations of the Tsavo and Mfuwe man-eaters (killed in 1898 in Kenya and 1991 in Zambia, respectively) may be elusive, but we can clarify aspects of their behaviour using dental microwear texture analysis. Specifically, we analysed the surface textures of lion teeth to assess whether these notorious man-eating lions scavenged carcasses during their depredations. Compared to wild-caught lions elsewhere in Africa and other large feliforms, including cheetahs and hyenas, dental microwear textures of the man-eaters do not suggest extreme durophagy (e.g. bone processing) shortly before death. Dental injuries to two of the three man-eaters examined may have induced shifts in feeding onto softer foods. Further, prompt carcass reclamation by humans likely limited the man-eaters’ access to bones. Man-eating was likely a viable alternative to hunting and/or scavenging ungulates due to dental disease and/or limited prey availability.

You need to know that at Tsavo, at that time, the prey was very reduced in frequency because of a drought and the rinderpest. So some lions were probably desperate. In the case of Tsavo, one lion had a tooth problem, which may have made killing larger and more formidable prey difficult, and the other lion was apparently its friend and went along with it. (Male lions do form such small teams.) Other research at Tsavo indicated that these lions had eaten more people than recorded by the railroad, so they may have been eating humans for a while, though not their entire adult lives.

There are two other writeups on this work you will want to check out:

Virginia Morell, “Why did these lions eat 35 men?”

Bem Giaromp “Why did the Tsavo lions eat people?”

See also: Michael Torrice, “A body count for two man-eating lions“

“Florida ‘zombie cat’ crawls out of grave”

Always use proper methods to determine if the cat is dead.

Owners and neighbors attribute the cat not being dead to “god’s miracle.” That is unlikely. More likely, the cat was not really dead to begin with, don’t you think?

A King Cheetah (a rather large form of cat) in South Africa:

Picture Of Cat On Top Photo Credit: Gatto Mimmo via Compfight cc

This reminded me of a story. One day many years ago in a galaxy far far away (The is a euphemism for “before Amanda”) we got this cat named George. Everything was just like that … as in we had this cat named George … for months, then I went away for a few months, to Africa, to search for ancient fossils and stuff. My Significant Other would occasionally send an email, and we would even chat on the phone now and then, and initially I would hear a story about the cat, and a story about the dog each time. Then one day the stories about the cat stopped.

A couple of weeks went by without any stories about the cat and then one day we were on the phone and there was a story about the cat again. So, Sherlock Holmes like, I said, “George was in the garage for the last 10 days, wasn’t he?”

Silence. More silence. Then, “How did you know?”

I had noticed that every time the garage door was opened, which was rare (we never put the car in there), George would run in and in order for me to close the door again I had to get him out. This had been discussed but I was pretty sure I was the only person in the household who was fully tuned into the fact that George did this. When mentions of George the Cat stopped in the irregular updates, I inferred he had gone missing. That could have been for a lot of reasons. But when he reappeared a while later, I realized the most likely scenario was temporary incarceration. The actual period of entrapment was about a week, during which time George would have eaten all the mice in the garage then gotten hungry for a few days. Confirmation bias: In a post hoc world, it makes for a great story!

My friend’s cat might have a secret place she hides. I wonder if it will ever be discovered? Quite likely not.

From the daily mail:

Jansen said the Orvillecopter is ‘half cat, half machine’, and part of a visual art project to pay tribute to his cat Orville.

Jansen, part of the art cooperative Generaal Pardon, said: ‘After a period of mourning he received his propellers posthumously.’

Click through to see more photos, and here’s the video:

Are these people true cat lovers, or are they monsters? Modern technology does certainly bring up novel ethical concerns for cats …

And here are selected blog posts about lions and related beasts:

• Amboseli Lions May Go Extinct
• The Evolution of Cats: Sabertooth vs. Regular
• Tarangire Lions
• The Lion That Ate the Earthwatcher
• Biker and Greg get Eaten by Lions
• The Lion, The Tent, and the Anthropologist
• The Evolutionary Dynamics of the Lion Panthera leo Revealed by Host and Viral Population Genomics
• The Science of Lion Prides
• Lions being all liony
• Where the lion sleeps tonight
• On the Ownership of Large Dangerous Wild Animals
• http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/11/a_field_guide_to_all_of_the_ca.php

Lion by Greg Laden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Yet, there is such a field guide, Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides), and the truth is, this is ONE OF THE COOLEST BOOKS I’VE EVER SEEN! All the carnivores (almost) in one book. Interestingly, it turns out to be possible. There are fewer than three hundred species of terrestrial carnivore in the whole world, and that is fittable in a single book.

That itself is an interesting fact, in proper context. Indeed, when I went through this book, spending a bit of time on each and every page, a number of interesting thoughts about carnivores came to mind….

Regarding taxonomy, diversity, and disparity (the former = number of species, the latter = how different they are), carnivores are fairly unique, but in a way that applies as well to primates. Looking only at the regular terrestrial carnivores first, they are all very similar in certain respects yet there is a fair amount of variation among them, including a huge range of body size from the smallest carnivore that could easily hang out in an open soda can to the largest being the northern Bears (either polar or brown, depending on how you measure a species “size”). There are almost 30 orders of Mammalia, and Carnivora is about the fifth most speciose. Yet, Carnivora has fewer than 300 species. Compared to some other animal Classes (Mammalia is a Class). the mammals, for all the interest we have in them, are fairly low density in respect to species (there are something like 10,000 Birds!), high in disparity (the “hooved animals” includes whales and bats fly like birds!) and are rather cryptic with respect to how visible they are on the landscape (compared, again, to birds, which are always rather in your face).

Carnivores, relative to some of the more common mammal Classes, are both ubiquitous and thinly distributed. As you track mammals across the landscape, you might find that certain mammals are highly concentrated here and there, almost absent in other places. The total biomass of bovids in northern climes varies dramatically as you go from herds of bison to forests with thinly distributed deer to tundra or mountain slopes where the highly specialized forms occur in small groups with big gaps between. But everywhere you go, you will be within the territory of a carnivore. In fact, as a rule, you’ll be within the territory of between two and four carnivores, as they tend to divide themselves up by size class, with the classes sometimes competing with each other. In one place there may be otters or minks (small) and coyotes (medium) and either a cougar or a wolf pack (large), or there may be lots of coyotes (large) and otherwise mainly stoats and the like (small). In much of Africa, there will be one large cat (lion) one small cat (golden, wild-house, or sand?) one hyena and two or more mongoose-getet-civet-like creatures that are different from each other in size covering the exact spot you are standing. You’re standing there looking at some bird, and off in the bush there are five carnivores looking at you. In the ancient middle east, there would be lion, leopard, a smaller cat, and an even smaller cat. And so on.

Don’t think about that too much … it is just a rule of thumb. The point is, most space is occupied by carnivores, yet at the same time they are way spread out because of their territorial habits which arose for a number of reasons including the fact that they eat other animals and thus are limited. And, this means that as they disperse during their own carnivoresque personal development cycle, they tend to disperse over very long distances, maybe not during all generations but certainly some. Therefore, some carnivore species have huge ranges, or if they have diversified a bit, some carnivore groups of species have huge ranges. And, for many types of carnivores, there are both tropical and template’s and in between forms. This is not typical of the other orders of mammals.

This is why we get interesting patterns such as the fact that the New World cougar and the Cheetah are close relatives, having differentiated in North America. The Cougar did not spread from North America probably (this is just an educated guess) because medium+ size cats were already everywhere, but the Cheetah was rather a novelty … a doggish cat that could run as fast as the fastest antelope or pronghorn … so it did spread. Subsequent events left the Cheetah only in Africa but it was once more widely dispersed (as a type of cat, not necessarily the same species).

The lion was probably the one mammal among all mammals, other than humans, that has the largest range of all mammals ever, having been spread across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa not too long ago. And so on and so forth.

The result of these patterns of adaptation, dispersal, and ecology is what you see in Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides). When you look at the carnivores organized more or less by taxonomy and then pay attention to the geography, your mind will be blown and you will demand an explanation! How the hell did we get the same basic animal living in the woods of North America (wolverine) and the nearby prairies (badgers) as we have across Europe and Asia and Africa (the honey badger) with about dozen or so other versions all over the place? And you will see other patterns as well; As you thumb through the pages, you will repeatedly see size grading among the carnivores, but most of the size grading is localized. It isn’t like Asia has large otter-mink-stoat critters and Africa small ones .. everywhere gets a range from small to large. Also, as you thumb through the pages, every here and there you’ll see “Crab Eating X” where “X” is some kind of animal (dog, badger, cat, whatever). Either carnivores like them their crabs or carnivore namers are regularly surprised enough to see crab eating that they tend to name anything they see eating a crab after that behavior, even if some of them actually rarely do. (Had I named coyotes after my first extended wild encounters with them, they would be the “crab eating dog”!)

Hunter’s book does not cover the fish. Yes, folks, just as the “hooved animals” gave rise to several fish (whales) and other groups have given rise to fish (hippos, etc.) the carnivores has a fish branch as well (walrus, seals, sea lions). I think it would be cool if Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides) included these critters as well. Including them would make important points about evolution. I respect the fact that this book is written by an expert on land carnivores, so having seals and such in there with the terrestrial forms may be inappropriate. But in a future edition of the book, I would love to see five pages dedicated to the Fish nee Carnivores, not all species but just a nod to the families of seals, walrus, and sea lions.

The other thing that is missing from this book that I would very much like to see and that I must insist (as if I could) be included in the next edition is range maps. I have ideas as to how to make them fit. It is important. (But see below)

Luke Hunter is an Australian who has done research in South Africa and elsewhere. He heads the Panthera Corporation and formerly headed Great Cats and the Wildlife CosnervationSociety.

The Panthera Foundation web site has lots of information about carnivores, and in particular, you can download the range maps that are missing from the book, here!

You have probably heard about the cougar which was just killed in Connecticut but which is thought to have wandered there from the Dakotas. Well, I have a couple of stories to bookend that story. One of them has to do with the lion in this photograph, and the other with something I saw in the woods. This photograph was taken by me not too far from Connecticut and it was shot with a 50 mm lens. The only thing between me and this cat was his breath.

No, the lion was not running around free. It was part of a travelling group of cats. The lion you see here may be familiar to you because he’s done a number of TV commercials and even did a shoot or two as the MGM lion. You may know him better as a Dryfus lion. I was photographing him, and his friend who is a Bengal Tiger, while they munched on cattle bones, as part of an experiment in bone taphonomy. The owner of these cats also had a tame mountain lion.

This experiment was carried out at the King Richard’s Faire in Carver, MA, where the cat keeper ran a show where you could get yourself photographed with the cats. I’ve talked about this before. The day before I shot this picture, the local police had come by to complain that his cougar had been seen by local residents wandering around in the nearby woods. Several individuals had seen the couger. However, the tame cougar was never out of its enclosure. What seems to have happened is that a local cougar had picked up the scent of the captive animal and was curious enough to allow itself to be spotted. This was in the 1980s.

The other event took place in the woods not too far from this as the cougar wanders (maybe 45 miles away?). I was doing archaeological survey and found a cave (more a rockshelter than a proper cave, but something you need to crawl into) which showed lair wear indicating that animals had squeezed in and out of the small entrance way for a very long period of time; These were animals the size of a full grown dog. I assume the cave was used by bears more than anything else, but the whisker I found there looked to me a lot more like a cat’s than a bear’s or a dog’s, and the feces found nearby were cat feces from a very large animal. I can’t say with any certainty that I had found a cougar lair. The biological materials could have been of a bobcat, I suppose. But, if cougars were common in the area I would not have questioned that provisional identification.

Again, that was in the 1980s.

Around the same time, coincidentally, there was that event in Nairobi of interest, related to leopards. Some’s pet leopard had gotten out and the authorities were called. A few dozen leopard traps were set up around the neighborhood. A couple of leopards were caught right away. Wild leopards, which no one expected.

A cougar lived a short distance from the Twin Cities airport for several years, known of by the National Park Service rangers who covered the Minnesota River park down in the valley just off the highway. No one else knew about the cat. Then one day the cat started watching/stalking hikers, and started wandering out of the park. It was seen at a local gas station one morning. The rangers, knowing exactly where she hung out and worried that she was going to start eating people, found her and put her down.

And the female cougar with subs that rangers were following but secretly, until she was spotted by a member of the public, in Vermont a few years back.

And so on.

Cats are like that.

Hat tip: Todd.