In less than two weeks I will be going on another 5 day expedition to Tsavo National Park which is famous for it’s man eating lions! There has been a book and even two movies made about them! (Bwana Devil and The Ghost and The Darkness)

It all started in 1898, when the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River. Led by Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, the team of hired help from India worked for nine months on the project. Throughout that time period, two maneless, male lions began stalking the campsite and dragging worker out of their tents at night to eat them. The workers desperately tried to scare the lions off with thorn fences, campfires, and traps but to no avail. The lions weren’t phased, crawled right through the thorn fences and dragged away some more workers. It’s not surprise that hundreds of workers fled the area, fearing their lives and therefore halting all construction of the bridge. Patterson tried for months and was finally able to shoot and kill one of the lions. Three weeks later, he caught and killed the second. He made the 9 foot long skins his floor rugs before they were sold to the Chicago Field Museum in 1924 where they are now on display along with the lion’s skulls. The crew finally returned to the area to finish the bridge.

Research at the Chicago Field Museum has been conducted analyzing bone collagen and hair keratin. Isotopic signatures of human flesh were compared to normal lion prey and revealed that on lion at the equivalent of 10.5 humans and the second lion ate 24.2 humans! There are several spectulations for this extremely unusual behavior and appearance of the Tsavo lions. First is an ourbreak of rinderpest disease (cattle plague) in 1898 which wiped out a great majority of lion’s normal prey forcing them to look for alternative food sources. Another reason may be that the Tsavo lions became used to finding dead humans along the river from slave carivans heading to Zanzibar. One study suggests that a damaged tooth in the first lion could have significantly influenced his decision to hunt for easily captured human prey.

It is now just a rumor and superstition that the modern Tsavo lions still seek out humans. The lions are however still unusually large and maneless. This is probably due to the fact that Tsavo has an extremely high density of thorny shrubs and trees that would snag a thick lion mane. Lions of Tsavo have adapted to their surrounding and no longer have the characteristic dark mane. The lions of Tsavo also hunt as entire pride (females and males instead of just females) which is due to scarcity of prey.

The staff here has had a blast the past few days sharing horror stories about the lions at Tsavo but students have been going to Tsavo for many years now and haven’t had a problem yet. It will be just another adventure here in East Africa 🙂

Location: Kimana, Kenya