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Visit Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda or Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania and you’ll see something unusual: lions that climb trees and spend most of their lives resting on branches high above the ground. Elsewhere, lions rarely climb and look pretty silly when they try to climb.
“They can get out there pretty well,” he said. Craig Packer, director of the Serengeti Lion Project for about 35 years. But “they get up there and then ‘Wow, how do I get down?’ they say,” he said.
Other large predatory cats always climb trees. “Anatomically, leopards are better made for climbing,” said Luke Hunter, the company’s executive director. Wildlife Conservation Society’s big cats program in New York. “They are lighter, and a leopard’s scapula, shoulder blades, are proportionally larger, flatter and more concave than those of a lion.
“Lions, on the other hand, are built with extremely strong forelimbs and a very, very stiff back,” he continued. “This is for taking down heavyweight prey like buffalo.” He added that their enormous strength “comes at the expense of the agility and vertical strength of a leopard to be able to whip a tree with an impala.”
Dr. Climbing a tree can be dangerous, especially for heavier male lions, Packer said. “A lion coming down can dislocate a limb with so much weight.”
Most lions also have little need to climb trees. They are social and live in pride and can often defend their food from other predators. Lone leopards should hide their prey in a safe place and according to a researchif they fail to lift their caught prey up a tree, they lose more than a third of their kills to hyenas.
So why do lions in some areas climb trees if they weren’t built for climbing and rarely need climbing? It has less to do with natural abilities and more with learned behaviors and unique local conditions.
Moreangels Mbizah, a conservation biologist who works with lions at the Kavango-Zambezi Transboundary Reserve, said there are few records of lions climbing trees in Zimbabwe. “The only reason they want to climb is if there’s something on the ground they’re avoiding,” he said.
For example, in 1963, after a particularly heavy rainfall period, a plague that bitten Stomoxys flies lowered lions into trees and wild boar burrows to escape insects that caused open wounds and deadly infections. This learned habit, George B. Schaller “Serengeti lion“Secular research on lion behavior may herald a tree-climbing culture among the lions of Lake Manyara.
Lions can also climb trees to escape the heat and search the land for prey, says Joshua Mabonga, Uganda program carnivore research coordinator at the Wildlife Conservation Society. But there may be another reason in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park: The lions there live in smaller herds than in many other lion habitats, sharing the park with large herds of buffalo and elephants. When lions encounter a stampede of buffalo that could endanger them, they flee to the branches. “The safest place for lions is in trees,” said Mr. Mabonga.
Or Dr. As Packer puts it, “Lions climb trees to escape vermin, whether as big as an elephant or as small as a barn fly.”
To make such an escape, lions need the right kind of tree. Lions often climb African plane trees or umbrella acacia thorn trees with horizontal branches that are not too high above the ground.
Dr. “It makes it really easy for the lions to climb up and take off,” Hunter said.
Where lions had a taste for experience and where conditions were available that allowed them to climb, they began climbing trees with leopard-like exuberance. At Queen Elizabeth National Park, Dr. Hunter said: “You plant whole families—adults, young people, everyone—in trees. From generation to generation, it has really become a habit to climb trees.
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