C-BOY - Lion Gangland Of Serengeti | LIONS OF AFRICA № 42

*Lions of Africa: C-Boy (2004 - 2018) [Serengeti, Tanzania]
Note: Remembering an African Lion That Defied Death
They say that cats have nine lives, but they don’t say that about the Serengeti lion. For a certain young male, black-maned and robust, known to researchers as C-Boy, the end seemed to have arrived on the morning of August 17, 2009. A Swedish woman named Ingela Jansson, working as a field assistant on a long-term lion study, was there to see it. She knew C-Boy from previous encounters; in fact, she had named him. (By her recollection, she had “boringly” labeled a trio of new lions alphabetically as A-Boy, B-Boy, and C-Boy.) Now he was four or five years old, just entering his prime. She sat in a Land Rover, 30 feet away, while three other males ganged up on C-Boy and tried to kill him. His struggle to survive against those daunting odds, dramatic in itself, reflected a larger truth about the Serengeti lion: Continual risk of death, even more than the ability to cause it, is what shapes the social behavior of this ferocious but ever jeopardized animal. On the day in question, near the dry bed of the Seronera River, Jansson came to check on a pride known as Jua Kali. The resident males of Jua Kali, were C-Boy and his sole coalition partner, a golden-maned lothario named Hildur. Approaching the river, she saw in the distance one male being chased by another. The fleeing lion was Hildur. Fleeing from what, and why, she didn’t at first understand. Then she found a group of four males in the grass. One lion had a bloody tooth, the lower right canine, suggesting a very recent fight. Another was hunkered flat, as though wishing he could disappear into the ground. From the flattened male came a steady, nervous growl. Driving closer, Jansson saw the dark tinge of his mane and realized this was C-Boy, wounded, isolated, and surrounded by three of the Killers. Jansson thought she was witnessing the terminal event of a lion’s life. If the immediate injuries didn’t kill him, she reckoned, the later bacterial infections would. Then it was over, as abruptly as it had begun. The Killers strolled off and positioned themselves atop a termite mound, with a commanding view of the river, while C-Boy slunk away. He was alive, for the moment, but defeated. C-Boy went missing for 2 months. After his harrowing experience with the Killers, C-Boy surrendered his claim on the Jua Kali pride and shifted his attentions east. Hildur, his coalition partner, who’d been so little help in the pinch, went with him. Three years later, C-Boy and Hildur had established control over two other prides, Simba East and Vumbi, whose territories lay amid the open plains and kopjes (rocky outcrops) south of the Ngare Nanyuki River. This is not the most hospitable part of the Serengeti for lions and their prey—during the dry season it can be lean and difficult—but it offered C-Boy and Hildur an opportunity to start fresh.
Time past and someday in 2012 a well known opponent arrived in their kingdom. The four Killers. They were handsome devils, a quartet of eight-year-old males, resting in a companionable cluster. They looked forbidding and smug. They’re probably two sets of brothers, born within months of each other in 2004. They had been dubbed “the Killers” back in 2008 by another field assistant, based on his inference that they’d killed three collared females, one by one, rather systematically, in a drainage just west of the Seronera River. Such male-on-female violence wasn’t utterly aberrant—it might even be adaptive for males in some cases, opening space for prides that they control by removing competition in the form of neighboring females—but in this case it won the males a malign reputation. Their individual names as recorded on the cards was to call them by their numbers: 99, 98, 94, 93.
C-Boy became famous through the story "the Serengeti Lion" in National Geographic Magazine and the documentary "Lion Gangland". The local photographers and rangers called him and Hildur also Bob & Ziggy. The Names derived from the size and colors of the manes that Bob and Ziggy had was black and long like the dreadlocks of the legendary Bob Marley (the reggae music singer). C-boy, an iconic African lion, lived a longer-than-average life for his kind, and was admired for his tenacity and fierce spirit. Dead of "natural causes" by the age of 14 years, his body discovered by a tour driver in the backcountry of Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, in early June 2018. The category “natural causes,” in the case of African lions, includes the kind of murder and mayhem that occurs routinely among competing members of the species. After he lost his comrad, Hildur went missing months later in the same year. The Circle of life of the Serengeti Lion was closed.

*All vids & pics are copyright of its original authors (rangers, field guides, photographers, tourists): A big thank you for the great effort and sharing these exciting moments with all of us!

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