This is the heart-stopping moment a group of tourists following a male lion in the middle of the road witnessed a spectacular kill right in front of them!
This sighting was reported to LatestSightings.com in real-time, through our app, and we managed to get incredible footage from different angles!
Liana Bierman, who was the first on the scene, tells LatestSightings.com how she felt:
“We were a bit lazy getting up that morning. We would have left at 6am, but didn’t, and I was so irritated! I even told my husband ‘there goes our last chance of seeing lions before we leave!’”
“But, we turned a corner on our way to Lower Sabie and a male lion had just stepped into the road in front of us! It was busy patrolling its territory. We ended up following him for around 2-3km. But we thought we would only follow him for around 500m where he would then lay down! This was the last thing we expected would happen.”
Nicole Tobias, 34-year-old designer and insurance administrator, was able to capture the lion starting the chase and told us the story from her and her family’s perspective!
“My husband, daughter, and I were driving on the tar road from Skukuza to Lower Sabie on the 29th of July 2019 after entering the park as early as we could, to see what we could find. Even though we had already had a beautiful rhino sighting, with elephants, various giraffe, and antelope, our little girl was dying to see a lion (after recently watching Madagascar at The People’s Theatre at the Joburg Theatre.)”
“We promised her we were looking hard for one. We drove around the corner to a parade of cars crawling towards us on both sides of the roads and immediately knew something was up. In an instant, we’d spotted this beautiful male tracking towards us. We were so excited to show our little one what she’d been looking for!”
“We did not expect a hunt to take place at all! It was a lone male, it was broad daylight, the male lion didn’t appear to be hunting and the kudu didn’t appear to be nervous. We seriously just thought we were about to get an up-close lion sighting…”
“He tracked closer and closer until he noticed the kudu and slowly broke into a jog, and the immediate killer focus on his face is something I don’t think my husband nor I will ever forget – it was electric!
He ran for the kudu but I still don’t think we possibly thought he could be serious. The lion and kudu sort of tussled into the road, and we were in shock as to what was happening.”
“My husband said he thought someone had turned on National Geographic in front of him, and all my brain was telling me was that I shouldn’t swear in front of my little girl, so I searched for an acceptable last word while I kept repeating ‘Holy’ over and over!
‘The lion managed to pull the powerful male kudu to the ground, just off the road, but it took the kudu a little while to stop struggling and kicking – the poor guy really fought hard. My little girl was quite bewildered by the sighting, so we actually drove off as soon as we were no longer parked in, but this took quite a while, so we were around for all the subduing the lion had to do, which included disemboweling the kudu to speed up the process (since the lion had caught the lion by the rump and not the throat). There was a lot of the guttural throat sounds that lions make while on a kill – bone-chilling!”
—WATCH—
“I think this is the third successful kill I’ve seen in the Park (one other lion pride, and one leopard). I’ve seen wild dog hunting, but they moved out of sight very quickly, and a few other unsuccessful lion hunts too. You can see anything in the Park!”
“For anyone else lucky enough to see a kill, try and take it all in, even though your adrenaline is surging. And please try to be considerate as you can, we saw lions tracking down the road the next day too, and once again, cars followed them on both sides of the road, pushing in from behind us constantly.”
