Lion in Serengeti National Park

Panthera leo

Chance of an encounter
Possible

Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Serengeti National Park, aggregated onto a 25 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.

Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.

The evidence here

Grid cells
4
Records
4
Cell size
25 km
Years covered
1986 to 2026

A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 4 squares of 25 km carry records for Lion in and around Serengeti National Park, and the 4 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.

About the Lion

Africa holds perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 wild lions, down from a couple hundred thousand a century ago, and Etosha is one of the strongholds where you can still watch a whole pride operate. Namibia also keeps a wilder secret: a small population of desert-adapted lions that patrol the Skeleton Coast, hunting seals where the dunes meet the Atlantic, something recorded almost nowhere else on Earth. A male can pass 200 kilograms, and a pride is really a matriarchy: related females who hunt together, raise cubs together, and hold the territory while males come and go on shorter, harder careers. Most of a lion's day, up to 20 hours of it, is spent doing magnificently little.

The full field guide entry, and everywhere else it is recorded

Before you go

Never bait, call, or spotlight lions for a photo, and keep night drives to licensed guides. A habituated lion is eventually a dead lion.