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Female lions, these aren't your typical neighbors you roll out the red carpet for. Safari guide Sandor Carter shares how a couple of them have become too close to comfort at his doorstep.
Lions on my Porch: Pride of the Neighborhood
The two lionesses captured with a camera trap in a local yard in Nairobi, Kenya
There are lions on the loose where I live. Any encounter with wild lions is amazing, but what makes this more incredible is that I live in a suburb of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
One of the great things about Nairobi is that it’s got a big safari park within the city limits — the Nairobi National Park. It’s just four miles from the city center and it’s got virtually every kind of wildlife except elephants. The animals in the park are thriving. In fact, they’re doing a little too well. Now, a number of upwardly-mobile female lions have decided they prefer the quality of life in the nearby suburbs.
Since December, four of them have moved into my neighborhood. I haven’t seen them, but the residents have rigged up camera traps and caught images of them. Judging by the pictures, at least one of them has given birth recently.
Not everyone is delighted about our new neighbors. They’ve been going under people’s fences and they hunted some warthogs at the local school. People are worried about their pets, and they’re even more worried about their kids.
The Kenyan Wildlife Service has been in discussions with scientists about what to do. One of the things they’ve mentioned is using TLC — meaning, in this case, not Tender Loving Care, but Targeted Lethal Control.
I hope things don’t come to that. Ideally, we’d trap the lions humanely and release them somewhere a bit more appropriate. And there’s a surprising upside to having four huge predators on the loose in the neighborhood. I was recently speaking to our local police chief. He said there’ve been no crimes reported in our area since the lions moved in.
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