The Wrong Lion Won the Fight | Virtual Safari #322

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:09]Welcome back to the virtual safari. A quick little note for anybody that's new. On this channel, we take you around for a week in the bush. The way it actually happens, the winds, the near misses, and all the little bits in between, not just the sightings when we find them. This week, things have been a little bit busy with a lot going on.

[00:00:27]Wild dogs cruising around, leopards actually behaving themselves, and a lion saga that's got us asking a lot of questions where a large male lion has turned up with a couple of injuries and we still quite haven't been able to piece it all together. Right, so let's get into it and see what we find.

[00:00:44]Busy bumbling along here because this is the last area where a pack of six wild dogs was seen this morning. So, I hope I haven't got here too late to see them getting up and start moving. But here we are with a couple of giraffe stations. We've located one pack member mobile in the westly direction over circuit south.

[00:01:20]Damn, I'm in the wrong place. Let's try and get ourselves across there and see what we find.

[00:01:30]I have my doubts as to whether we will see the dogs though and it is getting close to sunset and dark camera. Let's try slight hiccup. Going to close on a short break.

[00:01:46]>> Question is who has right of way?

[00:01:53]I think he does. Let's see if he moves or what he gets up to.

[00:02:02]Light is fading rapidly. No sign of the dogs. It's going to have to be a mission for tomorrow morning. Got a strong feeling they're going to be on the Londonoi air strip charging around chasing some parala first night. So, let's get out there tomorrow morning and see what happens.

[00:02:22]>> We've dislocated those animals and fluffy's caring mobile ones.

[00:02:26]>> So, there we go. Literally, as we called it in on the radio, Keegan's just found the wild dogs in Fluffy's clearing. So, they're not on the air strip, but they're still very close by. And let's try and get across there. Starting off with a bit of a bang.

[00:02:47]So they are heading in the direction of the airirst strip. So we nailed it. It's just a matter of timing.

[00:02:54]Problem is with wild dogs often things can change in a heartbeat and they set off at a rapid rate chasing after something. So if they do, I need to make sure I hold on all the camera gear. Make sure we don't have anything bounce out of the vehicle. I'm a pilot right here.

[00:03:13]Let's see what happens.

[00:03:38]web it out obviously changed route so they're probably heading >> up towards the air strip there you can see a filter the beast a few Impala right on the edge of the air strip up there we go see they're starting to Thanks.

[00:05:02]Right, a brief little interaction there with some berries on the air strip.

[00:05:07]They've moved on. So, so we're going to make some space for some of the other rangers to get in here and see these dogs.

[00:05:58]Quick little stop. We followed the Three Rivers female, walking back to where we believe she's keeping her cubs.

[00:07:17]It's in an area that we are unable to alive. But just sitting there, as torturous as it was, watching her walk up this little ridge of boulders and hear her contact calling tells us that at least her cubs are alive. They're well, and they're safe.

[00:08:01]on a recent morning. We heard lions fighting in the north and so we couldn't actually see what was going down, but we could just hear it. Towards the end of the drive, word came through that the Kajjima male had been found with some pretty severe injuries.

[00:08:15]So, we didn't get across there in the morning, but I set out first thing in the afternoon to go and play detective and try and piece it all together.

[00:08:24]One of the Gajima males was seen this morning with a couple of injuries.

[00:08:28]So, I want to start off heading to where he is, get a little status update on him.

[00:08:37]just driving in here. I could actually smell him before I saw him.

[00:08:49]When we got there, it wasn't pretty. He had a big gash by his left eye, puncture wound in his front pore, and a huge bite mark on his back left leg, as well as some bites and scratches on his knees, between his legs, on his rump.

[00:09:07]So he was pretty beat up.

[00:09:12]The Kajima males are arguably some of the biggest lines we get to see around here. The only real other contenders in my personal opinion are the planes males. Immediate assumption plains camp males. Two verse one. He got a hiding.

[00:09:27]He's come running back this side.

[00:09:30]Thankfully nothing major. But begs the question, what do the other lines look like?

[00:09:40]The dark maned Gajima male was seen on Malamala with the two and several females mating. So he was nowhere around to lend his brother a hand.

[00:09:55]So I am very keen to get up there, see if we can find any other lines.

[00:10:06]Okay, we'll see him a little bit later on.

[00:10:11]So, we left the blonde male resting in the shade trying to recoup from his injuries and we set off towards Finoot to go and see if there was any tracks or anything further around there because that's where he had come from.

[00:10:30]As I'm reversing here, I have just spied tracks of this male.

[00:10:37]Some tiny drops of blood. Ding ding.

[00:10:44]And then off he goes in the direction of where he was found. So Kirst had managed to find the Enorma breakaways relatively close to where there were tracks and signs of an altercation going down, hinting that maybe they were involved in said altercation.

[00:11:01]Right.

[00:11:05]So I joined them. The sun was setting in the background and immediately began to scan the female, but she didn't have a single scratch on her. She was completely untouched, which immediately complicated my theory because the injuries on the Gajjima male were almost inflicted by two different lines in a coordinated takedown. If these gulma breakways were involved, it would be assumed that both of them should have at least a couple of scratches on them. So, just as I was processing that, a rutting male impala came into the scene and our sighting completely transformed.

[00:11:58]There we go. Look how she's going.

[00:12:26]She's a matter of 20 m.

[00:12:31]If he gets the male impala gets any closer, this line is is going to launch.

[00:12:39]Come on, you can do it.

[00:12:43]>> I'm going to stay focused on the lime.

[00:12:46]Just arrived now.

[00:13:09]that's being ratted down.

[00:13:11]It thinks it's seen the male looking around.

[00:13:16]The umbrella's walking away. Let's focus on the umbrella quickly.

[00:13:22]It's an opportunity lost for her.

[00:13:26]Look, she's watching it.

[00:13:41]Just trying to see where the water is.

[00:13:44]Can't feel the view is conceal.

[00:14:50]With us arriving here, I only got a few small brief shots.

[00:14:55]at a sort of closish distance to him.

[00:15:01]You can see he's looking a little bit sorry for himself. His face a little bit swollen, battered and bruised. Tiny little gash on his bottom left lip there.

[00:15:11]And these lines are really close to where Kirst found some evidence of a scuffle taking place.

[00:15:19]So I highly doubt it was the plain scare males. If these lions are here, he looks a bit battered and bruised.

[00:15:30]So for this young male to have inflicted such serious injuries to the gajima male is absolutely mindboggling because he's I don't want to say half the size, but he is a lot smaller.

[00:15:49]has maybe a tenth of the fighting experience that the Gajima males have got.

[00:15:56]And he's hard to come out of it with any injuries because that gajima male was pretty beat up.

[00:16:14]And normally when it comes down to lions, experience pays for its weight and gold, size and strength is obviously a factor.

[00:16:25]For this just proved all of those theories wrong.

[00:16:28]So for him to have held his own against arguably one of the biggest males around here is ridiculously impressive.

[00:16:42]And that shows the greatest signs for him holding his own in this world of an incredibly competitive landscape of lions.

[00:17:01]>> Oh, really?

[00:17:05]>> Blows all my theories out of the water.

[00:17:07]Guess maybe the gajjima males aren't as dominant as we thought. As it stands, I'm pretty lost for words.

[00:17:15]Maybe the next couple of days will really answer all these questions.

[00:17:22]But on first impression, immediate sort of knee-jerk reaction, he looks perfectly fine.

[00:17:49]We're going to wrap it up here and bumble back home because I've got a lot more questions than answers this afternoon.

[00:18:00]Now, if I want to be honest, the evidence isn't clean. There were tracks of a lot of lions in that area.

[00:18:07]But we couldn't conclusively say who those tracks were from. We have got news that the Plains Camp males were seen much further west the next day and only with one tiny scratch. So it's unlikely that they were involved in the altercation. But it would be unusual for that amount of damage to be done to the gajima male with the enkahuma male only walking away with a couple of small scratches and a little bit of a swollen.

[00:18:37]So I guess there's a lot of different parts to the story that we'll never really know. But I guess that's the bush, isn't it? Every theory that you might have can get turned on its head in an instant. The good news is it looks as though the Gajjima male will recover as long as he gets a good couple of meals and can rest up. I'm sure those injuries will all heal. But then Kohuma male has earned himself a little bit of a reputation and I'm sure he's walking around puffing his chest out a little bit after having put one of the biggest male lions in his place.

[00:19:08]And so just as we thought the lion landscape was beginning to settle around here, we've just been thrown another curveball with one of these young nomadic lions coming in here to cause a bit of trouble.

[00:19:25]Quick thing before we move on. The Shinkova female storyy's taken a bit of a difficult turn since you last saw her in the previous episode.

[00:19:34]I'm putting together a special piece on what happened. It's not something that I would normally do, but I felt that the story deserved its own space. So, keep an eye out for that in the next couple of days.

[00:19:49]And so right at the end of this virtual safari, I'm going to leave you with this. A colony of white fronted bee eaters just having a luxurious little dust bath in the late afternoon sun.

[00:20:57]So some weeks give you lion mysteries and others give you this. If I had to take one thing away from this week is that out here nothing is fixed. The gajima male bigger dominant a lot more years of experience.

[00:21:13]Got put on his back foot by a single male who we still can't fully account for. The three rivers female sounds like she's still got her cubs and they're alive and well. And a pack of wild dogs found us before we found them.

[00:21:26]None of it went the way we expected, which is I'm starting to think the point. If you want to come along for next week, as well as the special edition that I mentioned earlier, hit subscribe and we'll see you back here again for another game drive.