In the morning of July 13 in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, Carolyn Dunford, who lives nearby, saw a string of cars turning Kruger’s main road into a parking lot. This was an indication of a wildlife sighting, and that was not unusual in the park. But what happened after that most certainly was unusual.
Dunford saw two fully grown male lions start to make their way up the road, stopping now and again to spray a bush or scent-mark a tree with their faces. A cool sight, to be sure, and an equally scary one to those watching from their cars as the lions approached. But then the crowd of tourists got a massive dose of real-world National Geographic.
Sensing the lions’ presence, a kudu—a striped species of antelope with a shoulder hump and four-foot-long twisted horns—suddenly leapt from his hiding place in the bush and tried to dash across the road.
The lions begged to differ with the kudu and took it down in the ferocious manner characteristic of nature’s deadliest felines.
The lions proceeded to a leisurely middle-of-the-road meal for about a half an hour, then dragged their victim off into the brush.
Photo via Derek Keats/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
