Transcript:

music; ambience: lions, night sounds in Tsavo

Poison and a mysterious death at nightfall - sounds like fiction, but it’s an all too real fact of wildlife management in Kenya. Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. Bruce Patterson is the MacArthur Curator of Mammals at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. He’s in Kenya studying the lions of the Tsavo Region, home to Kenya’s largest national parks. Bruce tracks the lions at night, when they’re most active. As his team heads out into the field, they come upon an increasingly common sight.

“Very early in our drive we passed a small stockade of 200 cows manned by 3 people, and the herders flagged us down and informed us that a lion had been harassing the cows just moments before and had withdrawn as our vehicle approached. Returning to the camp at 8 in the morning, found a cow dead in the grass. But unlike a lion kill, this animal had been sliced open rather than ripped open. And this raised a central concern to us, because it's quite common in rural Africa when lions kill a cow, the herdsmen will allow the lion to feed on it until the lion feels very comfortable with it, is into eating mode. They will then drive the lion off and lace the carcass with poison. A carcass so laced becomes toxic to any animal that samples the flesh and many other animals often share the agonizing fate of death by poison.”

We’ll hear more about Bruce Patterson’s research in future programs.

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