Cheetahs on the Edge

National Geographic (Roff Smith)

Anticipation ripples through the crowd. Fingers tighten around binoculars. Camera lenses snap into focus. No fewer than 11 canopied safari buses, bright with tourists and bristling with long lenses, huddle near a solitary acacia tree in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. For the past half hour a mother cheetah named Etta has been sitting in the shade with her four young cubs, eyeing a herd of Thomson’s gazelles that drifted into view on a nearby rise. Now she’s up and moving, sidling toward the herd with a studied nonchalance that fools no one, least of all the gazelles, which are staring nervously in her direction.

Lions on the Loose in Kenyan Capital

Discovery News (Peter Martell, AFP)

When Danish author Karen Blixen penned her autobiography “Out of Africa”, she wrote of the fierce leopards and lions that prowled the coffee estate she farmed at the foot of Kenya’s Ngong hills.

Today, that farm is a leafy upmarket suburb of the rapidly growing capital Nairobi, swallowed up by breakneck urbanisation that has turned a century-old colonial railway yard into a traffic-clogged major city.

But the sharp-toothed big cats have remained, finding themselves under growing pressure as one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities creeps onto ancient migration routes and hunting grounds.

Lion Lights Invention by 13-Year-Old Kenyan to Save Big Cats?

National Geographic (Luke Hunter)

Agricultural Pesticides a Major Threat to Lions

The Huffington Post (Dr. Luke Hunter, Executive Director of Panther)

“Last month, 60 Minutes ran a segment on an agricultural pesticide called Furadan. Through much of the developing world, farmers scatter Furadan and similar poisons on their crops to keep insect pests at bay. As a big cat conservationist, I normally wouldn’t worry about this except that Furadan doesn’t just kill insects: it is also utterly deadly to lions.

A handful of the tiny, bright blue granules sprinkled on a dead cow in the bush spells an agonizing death for anything that scavenges the meat: lions, leopards, hyaenas, jackals, even vultures which die by the dozen after feeding on a laced carcase. It kills domestic dogs just as efficiently, and even poisons livestock and wild herbivores that graze near a tainted carcass. Furadan is so potent that it leaves a signature halo of dead flies surrounding a poisoned carcass, a black corona that warns of death, if only predators knew what it meant.