On our first morning at the Serengeti Camp, we found a dozen lions in the grass under a large tree. We only saw female lions and cubs. Outside Serengeti National Park, we were able to drive off-road. Lions in the grass on a warm summer day.
Our guide let us spend a long time with the lions, so we had time to observe behaviors such as grooming, yawning, and sprawling.
Lions groom by licking. According to the Honolulu Zoo, the lion “tongue’s upper surface has small bumps on it which enables the lion to hold on to meat while eating and to remove parasites when grooming”.
In the above closeup, the lion’s tongue extends back past the tuft of hair under her mouth.
It was noon, and the lions sleep 20 hours a day.
We can see the lion’s teeth. The female lions do the hunting. When the teeth clamp onto the neck, the lion can suffocate the prey. We let sleeping cats lie.
For the yoga enthusiasts, this lion got up and did a cat pose, where you exhale and arch your back.
Finally, a lion walked up to one of our trucks for shade from the noonday sun.
Cats are cute to watch, when they’re not killing something or eating it before your eyes.
The Best 5 Years 
Aw! Some gorgeous close ups!
The lions we saw in the Serengeti were wearing radio collars – took some creative angles to make the scene a bit more ‘wild’.
Our other encounter with a line female up a tree was somewhat diminished as we had to share it with eight other vehicles – never seen anything as crazy in my life. Felt very sorry for her! It was like paparazzi!
These are just stunning.
Bet they were gutted when you had to leave and take the shade with you!
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Thank you! The closeups took work. WordPress only allows photos of 584 pixels, making it hard to show interesting details.
Lions in the Serengeti wearing radio collars? Weren’t you in the National Park? I’m surprised! We saw no radio collars on our 12-day safari. One of our safari members had been on a safari in South Africa; he said that he learned that animals there had some form of locator. From the way he said it, I assumed that the locator was under the skin, rather than a collar.
It’s a tough issue. On one hand, you want to see animals on safari. On the other hand, a radio collar looks tacky and takes away some of the adventure of what not knowing you’ll find on today’s game drive.
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Yeah, we were in the National park itself.
They don’t use them to make safari easier – at least I’ve not known them used that way. The collars are there to study behaviour and movement in a population.
When I get round to writing about SA you’ll see they are pretty big. A private reserve I went to had to have their cheetahs collared because of their rarity – they had to be monitored to see how they would fit in to their environment in KZN
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