This is Going Wild: Shorts and I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.
If you’ve been keeping up with the show, you just went with me to Tanzania in 2009. I was there to study lions in the Tarangire National Park. But the story I told you was mostly about a giraffe, a dead giraffe, actually, and I didn’t really get to tell you much about lions. So I want to take you back to my first day in Tanzania, in the middle of the bush, and introduce you to two very unique lions that I still think about to this day.
I arrived at the field site and, unlike many of my experiences and many of my projects, we got straight into the field quite literally the next day. All of us piled into the car, five of us that day, which means that we were really, really cramped.
We tracked the location of lions by using radio telemetry. One of the lions in the pride has to have a radio collar around their neck, and we had to have an antenna that someone, the lucky person each day, would hold out the window and kind of turn at different angles in order to try to pick up a radio signal, which sounded just like a very faint beep. And the beep would get louder and louder as we got closer and closer to the lion with the radio collar on her.
On a typical day, we would stay and observe the lions for about an hour and ideally we were looking for them to do something. We were trying to document their behavior so we were looking for them to behave in some kind of way. But honestly, you know, I had read and learned many times before that lions spend about 20 hours a day resting, and that could not be more true from my personal experiences.
I will never forget one time we were able to find a big male lion, one of those big ones with a huge dark mane. He had just killed a zebra, probably, early, early, early at dawn and he had this huge belly. His belly was so big, he had gorged himself on this zebra, so that it was almost like in cartoons when you see a cartoon character eat so much that their belly is so big that they can’t move. It was like that. And he was panting because he was trying to digest. And I remember his face, like all the fur on his face was just red with blood. It was amazing. And I remember that some other animals came by, like some other lions came by, and that was really exciting because I was with the researchers who knew that this was a solo male. He wasn’t attached to a pride. And so a different pride came in. And he was so big and full that, although he growled a little bit, he actually couldn’t get up and fight the other lions.
It was this really interesting experience because I thought, well, I don’t see this on nature shows. This isn’t what they show. But it was real. It was the real deal, you know, he was satisfied and there was nothing he could do to prevent other lions from taking some of the kill.
The first day was a huge learning experience. But after a few days, I really got used to how we did this: wake up in the morning, jump into the truck, find the lions and sit and observe them for a long, long time. But the thing that actually took longer for me to learn was actually how to identify the individual lions.
Every lion, every lion in the world has a unique whisker pattern. The spot on the lion’s face where the whisker sprouts from its cheeks has a little freckle and every lion has a unique pattern of those freckles on their face. And so it’s kind of like a human fingerprint. You can identify an individual based on their whisker pattern. It’s super cool.
And so the idea was that in the glove compartment of the car were all these big, kind of blown-up pictures of the individual lions we were looking for. We would look through our binoculars and try to count the whiskers on the right cheek and count the whiskers on the left cheek. And then if we were able to identify the lion, and they all had names, we would then make a note, you know, in a different notebook that said, okay, we spotted this lion at this time of day, she was with this group of other lions and her behavior was “resting,” which was almost always the case.
We would also note from what we could tell through our binoculars, the body condition of the lion and there was this scale of one to four. So, excellent condition is probably actually what all the lions were under, but usually we centered around 3, sometimes even 3.5, between good and excellent. You never wanted to give any of them a perfect score, because also we were guessing. Points were deducted if we could see the ribs through its fur or if for some reason it was panting so much, like if it was sick or dehydrated. I remember once we did give a lion a score of a two. We never got to one, which was really good, at least for my heart. But I remember once we gave a lion a two and it was because it looked like it had gotten in a fight of some kind. But I have to say my fellow researchers never seemed worried. Never, ever, ever. There are enough lions in this space. If we lose one, to battle, that’s okay. But if we lose one to starvation because of drought, you know, that’s what we really need to address.
Over the summer, we mostly focused on three prides of lions and that was a total of, you know, maybe 20 or 25 animals. So a really good number. And most of them had already been named and they had names like Mary and Edith and Joseph. I met lions that were named Kupenda, and I met lions that were named, you know, C-39.
All the lions were named by the researchers that were studying them. And their names varied from really creative to super boring, just depending on the personality of the researcher.
I definitely did not think going into this that I would ever have the opportunity to name one of these lions, so it was a total shock when I was given the chance.
Someone from the local Maasai community close to where our field station was came to me. I mean, they came, like, walking, maybe a day’s walk, all the way to the field station and they came with news. And they thought that they were giving me news that one of my family members had died.
My full name is Rae Jackson Wynn-Grant. Jackson is my middle name and it’s because it’s my grandmother’s maiden name. There’s no relation to the famous Jackson family, but the Maasai village didn’t know that. So when this person from the community came over, they were really, really concerned.
“Miquel Jack Sony!” “Miquel Jack Sony!” That’s how the person pronounced Michael Jackson’s name: Miquel Jack Sony. He was dead. And, you know, if any of us remember back then it was super unexpected. He was even preparing for another world tour.
And I was actually pretty destroyed. It kind of was like one of my family members had passed away because I had been such a huge fan of Michael Jackson since I was a little kid. You know, this was before I knew a lot about the problematic things related to Michael Jackson. This was 2009. And so for me, he was such a hero and I was very emotional. My team did not see me cry, except for when I got the news of Michael Jackson’s passing.
And it was a couple of weeks later that we were out in the field and we identified a new male lion, one that we had not recorded before. And they said that I could name him and I named that lion Michael Jackson.
I don’t know if he’s still alive. If he is, he’s super, super old, but I love the idea of a lion named Michael Jackson running around the Savannah in Tanzania to this day.
This episode of going wild was hosted and written by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. Production by Rachel Aronoff, Danielle Broza, Nathan Tobey, and Great Feeling Studios. Editing by Jakob Lewis. Sound design by Cariad Harmon.
Danielle Broza is the Digital Lead and Fred Kaufman is the Executive Producer for Nature.
Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell.
Special thanks to Amanda Schmidt, Blanche Robertson, Jayne Lisi, Chelsey Saatkamp, Natasha Padilla, and Karen Ho.
Going Wild is a new podcast by PBS Nature. Nature is an award-winning series created by the WNET Group and made possible by all of you. Funding for this podcast was provided by grants from the Anderson Family Charitable Fund and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
