We tracked a group of lions for quite a while and for quite some distance, until we were rewarded in seeing them resting. Little did we know what had happened prior...

It had seemed like the two females from the Southern Pride and a sub-adult male lion, a group of three, had moved away from where they were found earlier in the weekend. Little did they know that the direction that they were heading in was directly towards another pride – the Mhangeni Pride, a pride of six lionesses.

I had noticed while tracking the group of three lions that there was suddenly a very quick movement in the tracks where you could clearly see that the animal needed to move quickly, like burst movement. I had thought it was chasing a prey animal, but it may also have been the sudden movement in realizing that they had stumbled upon other lions and it was a case of trying to get away.

We saw two females from the pride of six without the rest of the pride. They seemed confused and were a little bit nervous. After some time, they led us to the other females of their pride and rubbed heads in a social and tactile greeting. They then started to move as a group. As they were walking down the road something seemed to have caught their attention and the one older female turned around, visibly upset, started growling and hissing.

We looked in the direction that she was facing, only to see the sub-adult male that was with the other two lionesses, now behind the group. The sub-adult male then, showing submissive behaviour, slowly moved toward the angry female. With this moment he slightly overstepped the boundary and the female then leaped forward with a deep growl as if to say, “stay away”.

The hissing, growls and back and forth movements of the lioness were noticed by the rest of the pride and they came to the female as “back up”, also hissing and growling.

This carried on for about an hour until they lay about 5 meters apart. The group of six on one side of the road and the sub-adult male on the other.

With neither side giving up and now looking to rest in the middle of the day, we decided to look around for the two Southern Pride females.

It wasn’t long until we found the two lionesses walking in the opposite direction with heads down and also nervous from what happened a couple of hours ago. The younger lioness was not injured but the older of the two had battle scars showing us what happened during the early hours of the morning.

This is the wild and this is generally what happens when two separate lion prides meet...