Status Updates From Marsh Lions: The Story Of A...

"The moon rose: a hunter’s moon, ripe and round and yellow. In the clear air of the high plains its light fell with a hard and searching brilliance. In the distance the bleached October grasslands shone silver like the sea, crossed by the ghostly shapes of feeding animals. Night sounds: frogs and cicadas, hyenas, zebras and, from the south, from Musiara Marsh, the groan of a lion."

"The light in the East African highlands is not like the soft watercolour skies of northern Europe. In the high pure air of the Mara, barely 100 miles from the Equator, it sparkles clear and diamond bright; and its peculiar clarity, falling across the far-ranging vistas of the open plains, makes for a wild and heady sense of freedom."

"In the wake of rains, when storm clouds trailed their dark veils beyond the Mau escarpment, the Mara was a glittering emerald shot through with the gleam of water that lay everywhere. Cycnium flowers sprang up, stippling the plains with delicate white blossoms. The spicy scent of shrubs and marsh plants prickled in the nostrils, and over everything hung the rich meadow smells of warm grass and wet earth."

"The rain fed the grass and determined its growth, which regulated the numbers of herbivores the land could support. They in turn, according to their abundance, dictated the number of predators. So it had been since the Pleistocene: a precarious paradise, beautiful to behold, both in its economy and complexity, stabilized by the extraordinary diversity of interacting life forms that maintained its continuity."

"The wind ran along the ground like a great sigh, as if the earth itself could feel that the drought was almost over. Where the whistling thorns grew, dwarfed and stunted like unkempt midwinter orchards, the numberless dried and perforated galls in which fierce stinging ants had made their homes now rang in the silence of the day, a melancholy sound like the mindless sibilance of tiny flutes."

"Everywhere, out on the dun-coloured plains and along the river margins, the air was heavy with the sweet scent of acacias. Fierce black bees swarmed out of the woodlands to gather nectar from the creamy blossoms, while bee-eaters gorged themselves among the branches, [diving] from their treetop perches, wings fluttering like opaque bronze fins in the sunlight as they picked off the bees in mid-air."

"He stood on the ridge looking out on his world and felt the breeze lift the back of his mane in a hackled crest. Farther off, above the clamour of Egyptian geese in the Marsh, he could hear other lions roaring on Paradise Plain"

As a long time avid viewer of Big Cat Diary, this was a must read.

absolutely fantastic so far