LIONS OF TSAVO

Hi Friends,
Welcome to my blog. This is my first posting…since I have a passion for wild life and read lot of Jim Corbett books and Kenneth Anderson books. I will start with a posting on lions of tsavo
If I tell ‘LIONS OF TSAVO’ nobody will ever have a clue about it but when I say ‘GHOST AND THE DARKNESS’ then quickly you can remember that it is a 1996 Hollywood blockbuster movie
Starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas. The movie is based on the true tale of man-eating lions in Africa .
I will give you the true accounts of the story that actually happened in Africa and in my next post I will write about how the Hollywood movie differs from the actual facts.
In March 1898 the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo (SAH-vo) River in East Africa. Over the next nine months, two large male lions killed and ate nearly 140 railway workers. Crews tried to scare off the lions and built campfires and thorn fences for protection, but to no avail. Hundreds of workers fled Tsavo, halting
Construction on the bridge. Before work could resume, chief engineer Lt. Col.John Henry Patterson (1865-1947) had to eliminate the lions and their threat. After many near misses, he finally shot the first lion on December 9, 1898,and three weeks later brought down the second. The first lion killed measured nine feet, eight inches (3 m) from nose to tip of tail. It took eight men to carry the carcass back to camp. The construction crew returned and completed the bridge in February 1899. Lions Rarely Eat People We will never know why the Tsavo lions became man-eaters, but two factors may have contributed to their unusual diet. In the 1890s, an outbreak of rinderpest disease killed millions of zebras, gazelles and other African wildlife. Lions had to look elsewhere for food, and attacks on humans increased across the continent. Poor burial practices may have also contributed to the Tsavo tragedy. Railroad workers who died of injury or disease were often poorly buried, or not buried at all A scavenging lion coming across this easy meal might start going after live humans.



After completing the railroad, Patterson became chief game warden in Kenya and
Later served with the British Army in World War I. He published four books and
Lectured widely on his adventures. After speaking at The Field Museum in 1924,
Patterson sold the museum the lion skins and skulls for the then-sizeable sum of $5,000. The skins arrived in less-than-perfect condition--old and dry, they had been cut down into rugs. (In real life the lions were even larger than they appear as taxidermy mounts.) Gunshot wounds and thorn scratches also blemished the skins. Museum taxidermist Julius Friesser did an extraordinary job creating the life-like mounts you can see at The Field Museum. Call the Hair Club for Lions although both of these lions are male, neither has much of a mane. Lion manes vary from place to place in color and thickness; Tsavo-area lions are often mane less. This may be a "family trait" common in the area--although we don't know if these two lions were closely related. John Henry Patterson’s 1907 book THE MAN-EATERS OF TSAVO is available on the Internet and his account of how he hunted and killed the lions is well worth reading.