A bit of a change from the usual visit photos here i'm afraid, but this post still has plenty of relevance. The lions pictured here in 2005 at West Midlands Safari Park are relatives of Zuri at Linton Zoo. Zuri was born to this pride about 2006, and I know that looking through records that his parents were Luke and Dee. However trying to get photographs of these two individuals is incredibly difficult as it is in any Safari Park.
However from what I can remember, they had two fully grown males, one of which is pictured above. I can also remember thinking, along with the rest of my family that they were absolutely huge. However any photos that I can find from the Park, only show one male lion in recent years, so I suspect that the young male that I saw, pictured top, who was away from the rest of the pride is this male. And that the two older males were either retired from the pride, or died.
So this is a very interesting look at Zuri's heritage. Something that is I have to say, incredibly interesting to me, knowing Safi's heritage so well at Woburn Safari Park. Now that Zuri is fully grown it is certainly the right time to try and compare his looks to that of the males seen in these photos.
This stance definately rings bells to the photo of the oldest male, both having a very similiar face shape, aswell as reasonably large manes, and as he is getting older his mane is reaching the same colour. Zuri's mane as shown in the photo below was very light for nearly the first five years or so, but has suddenly in the last year got a lot darker, perhaps due to a more dominant standing as he has become more mature, or just a sign of older age.
So having got so much information on the pride at Woburn, and being able to track Safi's family tree back about 4 generations, looking at Zuri's side is a bit of a step into the unknown and incredibly hard to chase! However this is is more of a step into the familiar, as lions breed so readily in captivity, it can often be very difficult to trace back lines and so on, but still very interesting, and to me I have to say, somewhat exciting!
When trying to trace this line further, I came across some information from Woburn Safari Park. Woburn males Bruno and Bantu were moved to West Midlands Safari Park in 1999. This BBC article shows the story, this is not an uncommon case, and is already present at a couple of UK Safari Parks at the moment, this was before castrated males became such a popular choice, and males Bruno and Bantu as they became sexually mature, as they would in the wild started to challenge the dominant males Romeo and Legs Diamond.
Bruno and Bantu were born to pride female Blondie and I am pretty sure that their father was Legs Diamond, so Delilah was not the only breeding female at the time, the only litters that I have seen recorded were only from her, so it was interesting to see that there were more females being bred, which also indicates that a lot more cubs were born than I originally thought.
One article stated that the West Midland male lions "Soldier and Sailor" were 18 years old, a superb age for Safari Park lions, certainly one of the oldest that I have heard of. So there could be a possibility that Bruno and Bantu could be the two elderly males that I saw in 2005.
As not many zoos have any room for a spare pair of adult male lions, the only option was to put them down, something which was found by Animal Rights groups and protested against. This was when West Midlands agreed to take the two lions, and they were donated in 1999. This article here notes that the pride contained "four males" whether or not Bruno or Bantu are included in this I do not know. It also notes that Bruno and Bantu are three years old so they would have been born in 1996. Which would make them 16, an elderly age for Safari Park lions, I am pretty sure that they are both not here anymore, and died at West Midlands. However I also know that Woburn had another pair of male lions born in the zoo in September 1998, twin brothers of Tamby (Who is Riziki's mother, and as far as I know still alive) and they left the Park in February 2001. These could be the other two males within the pride at that time.
These stories show once again how difficult it is trying to trace movements of lions, and how male lions are quite often moved very subtly! Woburn Safari Park was left after this with an elderly pride of lions, but West Midlands always seem to have a ready line of cubs every year or so, I am pretty sure that their offshow facilities are not only more spacious than those that were at Woburn (their new house was only finished last year) and that they could have held more lions than the pride held, keeping their lion prides a lot more consistent than that of other Parks.
This may be a post that is continually updated as my research continues, so it may change!
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