The moon has set over the Kalahari and in the darkness it has become very hard to tell which shadowy lumps are bushes and which lions. Suddenly a member of the pride decides to make his whereabouts known. A deep, resonant roar rends the African night; a great, bass groan that places the hunter spine-tinglingly close to our open-sided Jeep. We scramble for night-vision goggles. There he is, a brute of a male, not three yards from the vehicle. And he is not alone. We are surrounded by lions. After hours of inaction the pride is on the move. The hunt is on.
“It’s just unbelievable,” mutters Jonny Keeling, a BBC wildlife producer clinging to the top of the Jeep next to me. “They’re trying to kill again.” This is said with no satisfaction. Although a kill is what he has come to see, what the BBC is spending a great deal of money trying to record, the horror of what he fears is about to unfold on the plain fills him with dread.
A few years ago stories began to emerge from Botswana that were so extraordinary wildlife experts struggled to believe them. The north of the country is home to 130,000 elephants, a quarter of the world’s population. According to guides in a remote area of Chobe National Park a pride of lions had started attacking elephants. Driven by extreme hunger at the height of the dry season, when their normal prey was scarce, they had started by taking down baby elephants and then moved on to adolescents and occasionally even fully grown adults.
Lions are among the animal kingdom’s most brutal and efficient predators but no one had heard of them hunting elephants before. These two big beasts of the savannah have plenty of mutual respect and normally give each other a wide berth. The BBC’s Natural History Unit decided to send a film crew to try to capture a hunt on film and invited The Times to join them.
The bush pilot who flew me from Maun to Savute on an early October morning said that there had already been kills. “There’s not been a cloud in the sky since April,” he said as we flew over a dusty landscape veined by dried-up rivers. “The animals are getting pretty stressed.” For documentary makers and journalists this was promising. Less so for elephants.
The guide who met me at the airstrip had what seemed disappointing news. The lions had killed a young elephant the previous night. This would probably keep them going for a few days, until after I had left. On the way to the camp we stopped at the scene of the kill. A solitary lion was picking over the carcass. Other members of the pride dozed in the shade. It was more than 40C (104F) and with their bellies stuffed with elephant these guys weren’t going anywhere.
The lions hunt elephants because they have discovered that they can. The Savute elephant killers are an unusually large pride that fluctuates between 30 and 50 animals. The dry season has always been a desperate time for wildlife in northern Botswana. One year, perhaps, water, and therefore prey, was scarcer than ever and a small or weak elephant was killed in a moment of bold opportunism. Then there was no turning back.
Most of the hunting takes place at night when it is cool and the elephants, with their poor night vision, are at a distinct disadvantage against lions. By day the elephants rule, dominating the water holes that are at the centre of the nocturnal dance of death. In the late afternoon when the crew’s working day begins we find a group of five bull elephants at a pan close to where the previous night’s kill occurred. Aged between 30 and 45, these middle-aged gents refresh themselves at the end of a long hot day, extending trunks in a friendly greeting that seems to be the equivalent of the tap on the arm and the “Awight mate?” of pub drinking pals. They nuzzle against each other and compete to see who can make the most satisfying snorkelling noise, spraying water over their backs and luxuriating in mud showers. More elephants emerge from the bush, plodding slowly towards the group. A couple stop to stare at us. One advances to within ten yards, observing silently, ears flapping, for several minutes, then raises his trunk and moves on. To sit at sunset and watch these massive, ancient-looking beasts, so gentle and dignified, feels like an extraordinary privilege.
But the savagery as well as the beauty of nature lurks at the fringe of this scene. In the background 15 watching vultures are silhouetted in a dead tree. Waiting. A jackal trots backwards and forwards. And the lions are beginning to stir. As the temperature drops, they make forays to the water, slinking up in groups of five or six. If they come too close an elephant chases them away. The bolder lions snarl and pace, letting the elephants know they are there, but none dares to come within trampling distance of these hulking bulls in daylight. They retreat.
The balance of power shifts as night falls. Breeding herds start to pass through. Groups of female elephants guide their young to the water hole, which becomes crowded with as many as 30 or 40 elephants, noisily sluicing and splashing. For hours the film crew sits in two Jeeps close to the lions, who are lying right on the trails used by the elephants but show little sign of doing anything except good impressions of being the slobs of the animal world. One large male reclines with all four paws in the air. He does not bother to stand to urinate or defecate, which he does noisily, his elephant dinner having apparently given him bad diarrhoea.
During the hours of waiting the crew give me safety tips. Guns are deemed unnecessary but there are differing views on whether a lion will try to get into an open-sided Jeep while people are in it. One guide tells me that as long as humans stay in the vehicle they are seen by the lion as part of the vehicle and are safe. Later, however, I hear a story about a lion in the park that jumped into a Jeep. A combination of pepper spray and the lion’s own confusion caused it quickly to jump out.
The Jeeps are 100 yards apart and there is speculation about how far someone would get if he tried to run between them. The answer: not far. For while the lions are clearly used to people and don’t give us a second glance, almost as if we were embedded with the pride, this changes as soon as anyone tries to leave the trucks. I discover this when I try to go to the toilet. The lions appear to be sound asleep and not remotely interested in our presence, but as soon as my foot touches the ground a lioness, 50 yards away, raises her head and stares. I clamber back up and wait for a moment when my toilet routine will be less keenly scrutinised.
