We first met Lady Liuwa in 2007 when our family moved to Liuwa Plain National Park in western Zambia. My husband Craig was the new park manager and I spent time trying to teach our children Kyle and Erin, aged six and three, as well as assist Craig in the park. He had been to Kalabo and Liuwa before and was told about this legendary lioness that had once been part of a pride but now spent her days roaming the vast plains alone.
Staying in Kalabo in those days was hard and initially a huge culture shock. We had lived in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in South Africa and were accustomed to a remote life, but Kalabo made it seem like we had been living in a modern city. After a six-hour drive from Lusaka to Mongu, we would hop onto a speedboat and, three hours later, arrive in Kalabo. During the dry season, we could take the road from Lusaka across the Zambezi floodplain to a pontoon, which ferried us across the Zambezi River, then back onto another bumpy road to Kalabo.
I don’t know which route I loathed more – the trip across the floodplain to the pontoon, which was sometimes broken or had run out of fuel – or the three-hour boat trip; during the wet season, we invariably got drenched. For parts of the year when the park was flooded and inaccessible, we stayed in Kalabo, a small noisy Lozi village. A missionary family there told us that Lady Liuwa had once been part of a pride that had been killed.
In 2003, when African Parks assumed management of Liuwa in partnership with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife and the Barotse Royal Establishment, wildebeest and zebra were in steep decline and grasslands were threatened by rice fields. Lady Liuwa was the last lion. We were told her pride had been shot illegally by a hunting outfitter operating in the game management area. Many years later, when we were working in the north of Zambia for a different project managed by African Parks, a hunter boasted that it was he who had hunted out the last lions of Liuwa.
The first time I encountered Lady, I was filled with anxiety. She had grown accustomed to humans and was completely unafraid, frequently coming to within a few metres of people in the camp. She spent most of her time in the southern parts of Liuwa, around the woodlands of Matiamanene Camp. She liked to lie near the campfire, next to your tent or even on its veranda. She was a beautiful lioness with a distinctive dark spot on the left of her muzzle, below her nose.
My encounters with her got better over time. I was able to rationalise that she had no evil intent and that we, the humans responsible for her aloneness, should not run away from her like everything else did and were her only company. Staying at Matiamanene, she would announce her arrival each evening by running into camp with low grunts, greeting us and perhaps explaining how her day had gone. Needless to say, we never let our guard down. Instinct is a survival skill and if we ran or approached her, we would become the hunted.
Working trips to Matiamanene, where Craig and I regularly hosted donors to the wildlife cause, were sometimes tricky. We had to take our children with us, which meant enforcing some rules. Our children were somewhat feral. They owned shoes but seldom wore them, they had nice clothes but these were reserved for rare trips to ‘town’. The sand at Matiamanene was fine and had black organic matter in it that would turn feet black. For reasons I cannot explain, our children loved to play in it. When not doing that, they would rush about and climb trees. However, there was one rule that was never broken and strictly enforced: come dusk, both children had to be inside the management shed.
During these years, I became a master of classic DVDs, bribery and corruption. We needed the children to be glued to the screen so they did not follow me outside while I was shuffling to and from the main dining area. On one occasion, Lady and I bumped into each other on ‘our’ way to the dining area: me to deliver snacks and drinks and Lady to take up her spot on the outskirts of the firelight. She was often so close we could hear her breathing.
This may sound romantic from afar but – close up – it is not! She was a lioness and needed other lions to answer her call, to roll with her in the black dirt, share a meal, scrap and growl at – not humans around a campfire.
Lady spent most of the year in the south but as we found out later, during the rainy season she would move north and disappear for months. We hoped she would return with another lion but never did. No lions were ever reported there, not from scouts on patrols nor from any of the many monitoring flights that Craig conducted. She was literally the Last Lion of Liuwa.
Before we joined African Parks in Liuwa, we had worked with lions, darting and monitoring them. We knew their behaviour and ecology fairly well and it was sad to think she would spend her life without another lion. We would often talk about the possibility of introducing more lions to Liuwa and, eventually, it became a reality.
We received the go-ahead internally from African Parks head office and Craig set about getting the necessary approval from both the Department of National Parks and Wildlife and Barotse Royal Establishment. After what felt like an age, we obtained approval to catch one male lion from Kafue National Park and to dart Lady and fit her with a tracking collar. Craig enlisted the help of wildlife veterinarian, Dr Ian Parsons, for the darting and to fit the collar. It went routinely and was the first time we were able to physically touch her, which we did with great respect and fondness. We were concerned this procedure would negatively affect her relationship with humans and were relieved to hear her coming into camp a few nights later, apparently unfazed.
Craig and Ian then drove to Kafue National Park where they were told there was a suitable male lion that had no pride. Three days of searching later, they found him lying next to the Kafue River. He was darted with a sedative and loaded into the back of a closed-canopy vehicle.
The plan was to check on him every hour and to roll him over to minimise any fluid build-up from lying in one position for too long. At a fuel station, Craig jumped into the back and grabbed the lion’s skin by the flanks and stomach to move him. The lion, blindfolded, lifted his head, let out a huge grunt and swatted Craig across the face with his paw, grazing him. The onlookers all ran away while the vet quickly administered the top-up sedative before exiting the vehicle with haste.
After 11 long, hot hours and many fuel stops, the team arrived in Liuwa. The lion was quickly offloaded into a boma in a thicket that Lady frequented, and we waited for him to come out of his sedation. As he woke up and stumbled towards a carcass to feed, it was clear that, despite the tranquiliser given to him, the new environment was stressful. Later that night we heard lots of growls and what sounded like him hitting the electric fence and getting shocked. We left at first light the following morning and found the fence badly damaged. We switched off the electrics but our presence repairing the fence distressed him. We had no choice but to sedate him again and, sadly, he died in the process. We were all devastated.
Despite the tragic first attempt, we knew we could not give up and requested permission to capture a coalition of young male lions. We strengthened the original boma electrics and enabled areas where we could observe them without their seeing us. We agreed that the most suitable option would be to transport the lions in a reinforced antelope truck, awake rather than sedated.
The new date chosen was the middle of the wet season. We reasoned that, with flooded rivers, plains and abundant wildlife, any lion would not want to leave such easy pickings. A bonus was that they would have a water barrier preventing them from finding their way back to Kafue. However, going by road from Mongu was not possible. Fortunately, the Ministry of Health had recently offered a speedboat, which was fast with lots of space, and exactly what we needed.
Craig and the team returned to Kafue once more, but this time, since it was the wet season, they found it difficult to find suitable male lions. They spent many days hunting, and eventually found what they were looking for. Two males were darted and loaded into the truck where they were able to wake up from the sedative. The team drove through the night, getting to Mongu harbour at first light where the speedboat was waiting. The trip from Kalabo to the boma took roughly an hour. Everyone retreated to the secure area and anxiously waited while the males woke up. That night, we could hear cries from the boma as they tested the electric fence. I could see the stress written all over Craig’s face and the next morning he left before dawn for the boma. He was delighted to discover they were okay.
We were not the only ones who heard their cries. Lady had come to investigate. Instinct told the males they should be somewhat aggressive towards this older female and Lady reciprocated by charging at the fence and then scent marking around the enclosure. But she stayed at the boma day and night, moving away only to hunt. Eventually, both lions began to accept her and she them, lying close to one another on either side of the fence.
On the fifth day, the lions in the boma were nowhere in sight – they had escaped. But their collars told us they were still in the area and they were spotted together with Lady Liuwa. Liuwa Plains had a lion pride at last.
Many questions remained: would Lady mate with one of these males, would she raise cubs of her own and teach them how to live among the Lozi people living in Liuwa? The one thing was for sure, however: Lady was once more a complete wild lion with a non-human pride.
– Andrea & Craig Reid
Lions are the stuff of legends. Revered and feared in equal measure, both majestic and terrifying, they once reigned supreme over an extensive domain. But this once-dominant beast’s original range has contracted by some 85%, and the world population is thought to have dropped to just over 20,000 individuals. The IUCN Red Data List now classifies lions as Vulnerable, and the West African subpopulation as Critically Endangered. Not only are lion numbers crashing, but the remaining populations cling to their existence on ever smaller, more fragmented pockets of land. Feared and despised by farmers trying to eke out a living on marginal land, lions are increasingly being exterminated or repurposed for commercial gain. Trophy hunters pay extortionate sums to bag specimens in their prime, and lion bones are being sold for the roaring Eastern trade in ‘tiger wine’.
