It all started yesterday (7th Feb) we had a call at the office here asking whether we would like to 'babysit' the lions for 4 hours during the night as the vet needed to dart them the next day and do some checks on them. This would mean sitting with them (we had to find them first as the game management department hadn't found them by the time we turned up at 9 o'clock) and then sit with them until game management came back on at about 1:30 in the morning. The 'payment' we would get for this would be to watch the darting the next day and if we were lucky, to take a few pics of the lions up close. We all gladly said yes - in fact, the opportunity to do this was one reason we chose Entabeni as we knew this activity was going to be a possibility.
Anyway, at 8-30 we left camp and headed out to the area of the reserve where the lions had last been seen; this was a 30 mins drive for us so we had someone on the bait seat spotting in case we saw anything interesting (we saw a Spotted Eagle Owl and a White Faced Scops Owl, which was nice). We had 2 cruisers, one driven by Ed (our cruiser) and one with Diana; there we six on ours and 7 people of Diana's.
We got to the area where the lions were last seen and relieved the game management team who wished us luck finding the cats as they had no idea where they were. Well, 20 minutes later Diana had found their tracks and tracked them to an area of low bushes. We had taken a different route so she called us in. It was pitch black (no light pollution in the bush) so as we pulled into the field where they were supposed to be (we couldn't see a thing) we suddenly found ourselves about 7 metres from a female and 10 metres from the big male. The problem was that the other cruiser knew roughly in the field where the cats were but not exactly where. Anyway, no harm done and we settled in for the night. People nodded off for a bit, the cats snored (seriously they were) and the bats flew around our heads picking off the damn mosquitoes.
One of the guys on our cruiser had a pair of night vision goggles and he had been trying to find the cats in the bushes but with no luck. We could hear a low rumble/growl/snore every now and then but the visual was zero, despite the powerful flashlights. Anyway, I had a quick look and as I was looking to my righ one of the big females stood up and walked towards me - she had gone from about 7 metres to about 3 metres. Trust me, when looking through those night vision goggles, and all the world looks green, seeing a big cat suddenly loom out of the darkness is a tad scary. Anyway, she was just after a comfy place to lie back down and she duely found just to my right and went back to sleep. At about the same time the big male stood up, looked at us, rolled back over and went back to sleep.
At 1:15 the game management guys came to relieve us and we headed back to camp. We got there about 30 mins later to hit the sack for a short sleep as we needed to be back out again at 5:30 if we were to see the cats darted by the vet.
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