Lion

(Johannesburg: Macmillan, 1983) 0869541226. 8vo; original brown boards, lettered in gilt on spine and upper cover; laminated pictorial dustwrapper (housed in removable protector); pp. 295, incl. index; colour plates; photographs and line drawings in text; maps. A little minor foxing to edges and reverse of dustwrapper, which is very slightly sunned on spine panel. Very good condition. "Lion takes us into a world where predators and their prey compete for survival in a common environment within the confines of man-made boundaries. The central question of this book is, How does the lion, the world's only social cat and the second largest feline predator after the tiger, fit into such a scheme? Unfil fairly recently no one really knew how many lions there were in the Kruger National Park. In order to find out, Butch Smuts and his colleagues had to develop a reliable technique for counting lions, which led them to work by night, calling lions by means of tape-recorded sounds, capturing, marking and releasing them. In less than five years over 1200 lions were captured. This lion capture method proved so successful that it was later used in the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. ... It is an exciting as well as informative tale, in which the author relates his experiences, often surprising and sometimes dangerous, in capturing and handling wild animals." .