Series 2 cat spotlight: Serami

By wildlife cinematographer Anna Dimitriadis

You don’t often stop to consider what it’s like for a wild animal to be a first-time mum.

We tend to assume instincts will swoop in, take the wheel and handle everything flawlessly, but while filming season two of Big Cats 24/7, following a young lioness called Serami, we quickly discovered that ‘new-mum chaos’ is not exclusively a human phenomenon. In fact, Serami could have had her own parenting reality show, and we would’ve watched every episode.

Serami’s timing wasn’t ideal. The Xudum Pride was splintering just as she gave birth, with older, wiser females drifting off and leaving the younger lionesses to figure things out solo. And if there’s one thing we learned, it’s that lion society is the backbone of lion survival. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ becomes, in lion terms, ‘it takes a pride to stop everything going terribly, terribly wrong.’

Left to her own devices, Serami made a few questionable decisions. First up: her choice of den. She picked a prime location… if you were opening a café. For vulnerable cubs? Less so. It was smack in the middle of a busy wildlife thoroughfare beside a lagoon, where everyone from elephants to unfamiliar male lions wandered past. Great for people-watching; terrible for newborn safety.

Then came her hospitality problem. One morning we arrived to find three lionesses casually lounging around her den like they’d popped over for a brunch date, except Serami’s cubs were right in the middle of them. Allo-parenting does happen, but not usually when the cubs are still at the ‘can barely move without falling over’ stage. And these lionesses weren’t exactly gentle aunties. Watching it was like witnessing someone bring a newborn into a rugby locker room.

But the moment that really tested our nerves was the sunbathing incident. Serami left her cubs out in the open under the blazing midday heat while she napped in the shade with her friends. The cubs began overheating quickly, panting in an alarming way that made us think they’d soon shrivel like raisins. After three painfully long hours, she finally retrieved them before they fully turned into charcuterie. (We coped with the stress by affectionately referring to them as ‘chorizo and prosciutto.’ Making wildlife documentaries is emotional work.)

However, for every eyebrow-raising moment Serami gave us, she had one secret superpower firmly working in her favour: false oestrus.

Lionesses can pretend to be in heat, encouraging multiple males to mate with them without actually becoming pregnant. It’s a brilliant evolutionary lie - because it convinces each male that her cubs might be his. And a male who thinks he’s a dad is far less likely to commit infanticide.

And that, remarkably, was Serami’s saving grace. For all her novice mum misadventures, she absolutely nailed the one behaviour that mattered most. If she got one thing spectacularly right, it was this and it might just be the reason her little 'charcuterie duo’ lived to tell the tale.