2005: Behaviour: Mammals - Highly Commended Print
Michel Denis-Huot (France)
Mistaken identity
By the time he took this shot, Michel knew the cub was in terrible danger. In the pride's haste to investigate a hyena kill in Kenya's Masai Mara, it had lost three of its cubs. A couple of days later, two of them turned up. The bolder one approached a female, possibly its mother, and was quickly encircled by others. But suddenly one lioness growled. Alarmed, the cub lashed out, hitting the male. Then the female attacked, and within a few minutes, the cub was seriously injured. An hour later, he was dead, and his badly injured sibling had vanished. 'The lioness kept sniffing him, as though trying to confirm his identity,' Michel says. 'Maybe after two days away from the pride, he smelt strange, like an impostor.' The end was gruesome. 'The lioness dragged the small corpse into the shade. Then, alone, she ate him.'
Canon EOS 1DS mark II with 600mm lens; 1/800 sec at f7.1; Ektachrome E100VS 200.
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