Watch Wild Predators Battle for Survival: Beyond ‘Savage Kingdom’ (Part 3) | Nat Geo Live

[Music] So these are the five clans, and I'm going to introduce you to them more specifically now. The Marsh Pride would probably be the dominant force in Savuti. Very interesting pride. There were ten of them, three of them were adult lionesses, and the rest of them were quite young cubs of different ages. So it always made for quite a lot of entertainment. They were fun to film, fun to be with, they're always up to no good, stealing bags from cars and doing strange little things. They were quite happy-go-lucky. They ruled by brawn and power and owned the jewel of the whole area, the Great Marsh. They were led by a lioness called Matsu, Matsu Mee-mah. A lot of my butt's one of people would know my mean mother and summer being hunt and hunter, so she was mother hunter, and that is something she certainly was.

I remember when I first did a recce into Savuti in 2008, as the water was coming in there for the first time after 30 years, and I saw Mutsumi as a cub. She was about three weeks old, really small. She was a little part of a litter of four, and her brothers and sisters were also lying in a big heap, you know, bellies up, and they were farting, making noise. And Mutsumi was off to one side, and she was actually, you know, chasing a butterfly or trying to kill her mother's tail. Even at such a young age, I mean she was destined to be a great lion, she was destined to be a leader. And she can have led this pride right through the Savage Kingdom period; an amazing individual.

But the Marsh Pride had one advantage over the other lions in the area, their competitors: they had that guy. Now, that is Sec Akama, and he was the dominant male. His dominance out of a coalition of two, but he was the dominant male, the brute force. He was the muscle that sort of ruled over that entire area. And I didn't make up his name at all; his name is Sec Akama. You know, not Sec Akama, Sega Comer, not after president, but he was the ruler of that entire area. And he kind of enabled them to hold on to the jewel, the Great Marsh.

Let's meet the Marsh Pride. [Music] Mutsumi's young have a direct line to the throne; she must make them warriors. [Music] She is scarred mother and commander. [Music] [Music] Your daughter shows promise; she has gifts. Your sons too mope; she will be your heir. There is more to leading than just killing. Not Mutsumi; the provider must hold this volatile gang together and appease her brutal King, Sec Akama. [Applause] Nobody eats before him, least of all his sons; even Mutsumi yields. So for those of you that end up watching this, you'll always realize that in the Savage Kingdom, the piggy always gets it.

Just to introduce you to the next group of lions, the Northern Pride. They're a group of lions that lived in the forests and the hills that sort of overlooked the Great Marsh. The two prides were very similar in many ways. Instead of ten, these guys were nine, and it was led by a lioness called Satara. She kind of steered with this pride when she was one of two lionesses, and the other was her mother, so it was quite a close family. The rest of that pride were cubs, but unlike the Marsh Pride, they were all of the same age, and they were already about three years old. They didn't have an adult male, and that was the defining difference between the two prides. In fact, Sec Akama was actually their father, was part of their group, and once he'd had those cubs, he kind of just abandoned them and headed down to the south, to the glory land, and joined Mutsumi and her pride in the south.

Although they were young, you could see they were starting to get quite big, and seven, six out of the seven of those cubs were actually young males. So they started to pose a real threat to Sec Akama's reign, and that pride really wanted to move down into the Martian and take it for themselves. And you can start to see how the Game of Thrones narrative starts to push in. Let’s meet them.

Satara knows the dangers of buffalo, as six young sons and daughter do not, but this is the moment they have been training for. Work together, take this beast. Duh, the skillful defense by the old bull. Satara has yet to teach her young family how to kill. In water, they will learn. They were a very interesting pride and very quickly fell under the wrath of Sec Akama, and the entire dynamic of that pride shifted very quickly from the sort of brawn and muscle of the lion world around Savuti. It moved to a very different type of character and possibly my favorite, Sabah. She is a mother leopard whose territory was right at the heart of where all of these predators were being thrust.

I had the dubious privilege of being in charge of finding Sabah and working with leopards. Totally different to working with lions; you track a rugby team through the bush, or you track a secret silent assassin, and it's a lot harder to keep up with her. But the positive side of it is that instead of dealing with the team, you're dealing with an individual, and I got to know Sabah incredibly well. I had spent several years with her, did a film, and part of her life, and it really was a privilege to spend another chunk of time really focused on that individual.

It's a very personal relationship; it's very one-on-one. It's very hard to stay impartial and, you know, remember that you're dealing with a whole bunch of different families. We all had our favorites. Rich loved the Marsh Pride and the fun of the Marsh Pride. I loved this cat; I loved Sabah. She used to come right up to the truck, as explained before, just lie down and sleep next to you. In fact, one night I was downloading material that I had shot of her sitting at night in the dark in front of my computer, and I was downloading material, and you know, I'd feel this, you know, something on my foot, and I thought a beetle had flown into my computer by the lights and fallen down into my shoe.

I kind of shook it out and carried on, and it carried on. So then I looked down, and I leaned down to get it out of my shoe, and it was actually Sabah smelling my shoe, and her whiskers were tickling the side of my foot, you know? And it's those kind of scenarios that really endeared me to her. I never felt that I was in danger; I never felt that I was threatened in any way by her. And, you know, if I had the thing all over again and I had an animal that I would go to, it would have been her.

Let’s meet Sabah. There is one that rises above them all; Sabah, the phantom assassin, watches everything. Living alone, hunting alone, stealth is her greatest weapon. She can kill almost anything, but birds are her specialty. She is perfect but for a small nick to her ear. Remember I said how some particularly individuals developed their own unique set of skills, and that's what kept me interested in these animals? Sabah was an example of that, and I used to follow her all around Savuti.

She would go up to a tree, and there's a big nest in the top of the tree. She normally went to nests that were from the bigger birds, eagles or owls or various things. In this case, a barn owl nest. She would go up, and she'd get to the nest and look inside, and there were often eggs or small chicks in there. And I'd be waiting for her to just dive in and kill them and eat them, and very often she actually just used to ignore them.

Then she'd bounce back down the tree and she'd move on, and I was like, well, you know, eat while you can. And then, two weeks later, she would try and kill an impala and she'd mess, and she would try and kill a duiker and she would mess, and she'd be failing and failing and failing. Then she would remember where that nest was, and she'd do an about-turn, and she would march in a beeline straight to where she had mapped out a pantry right across Savuti.

She knew where she had these little emergency rations that she could go and access at any time, and this is one of them. We had been with her at this tree two weeks before this happened. Janet and Ashley, who were with us in Botswana, witnessed her climbing up and eating her little emergency ration. And, you know, that sort of mapping out, I mean, just shows the level of intelligence that they have. And it served her incredibly well.

She had two cubs, and when her back was against the wall and she needed food to help get the milk flowing, she could always turn back to finding something small to eat. She just was, you know, a cut above the rest, and she had this air about her of a sort of sense of royalty. I mean, she's an exceptional, exceptional cat.

Another one of my favorite animals, and the families that were there were wild dogs. Now, as long as I can remember in Savuti, no pack of wild dogs actually denned in that area. They make dens underground, and obviously, the pups are incredibly vulnerable. So no pack of wild dogs actually den in Savuti because there were too many predators; there's too much activity.

And the year that we started Savage Kingdom, a small pack of dogs came out of nowhere, and they were just determined to stay and live in Savuti. This was now their home, and they were going to, you know, have a go at it. They were here to stay. And it was a great family to follow; there were only six dogs in the pack, which is particularly small for a wild dog pack.

Anyway, they were outgunned, outnumbered; they were the real underdogs, the sort of refugees, as you were, of Savuti, and there really were tenacious and wanted to really make a go of it. Let’s meet the pet of the pack. The Pale Pack is new to the kingdom. Runaways from a barren wasteland, two formidable hunters lead the pack: the devoted Tamannah, wearing her distinctive white diamonds, and the heroic Milau with his golden collar.

These six dogs are a splinter group from a larger clan, desperately needing to increase their ranks. If their pack gets any smaller, they will never survive. [Music] They're here to defy the odds; with great leaders like Tamannah and Milau, a small pack can grow quickly, but they need to kill every day. Endurance is what we have. Run them into the ground.

So leopards were difficult to work with because they're sneaky and hard to find. Dogs were definitely the next hardest character to keep up with. They're incredibly fast, and as soon as the hunt kicks off, if you want to be part of that, you've got to be driving through the bush at 35 kilometers an hour just trying to keep up with them. And you don't know who you're going to stick with and who you're going to move with.

They are basically a 101 lesson on how to completely wreck a filming track. We kept up with them the best we could, and we knew that they were denning in Savuti. We just didn't know where, and we tried tracking them, but we couldn't consistently pick up a direction that they were going in. We knew that we had to find the den, and the only way we were going to find that den is to get them on a kill.

They would whoop it down. Now there's five of them. Tamannah was staying at the den to babysit and look after her pups, and they were four down, and they'd have to run back to the den to feed her. They had to do that fairly quickly; otherwise, sort of gestation would start setting in, and they would not be able to regurgitate fur.

So one day, the pack killed the pig; piggy always gets it! They killed the pig out on the open marsh, and I knew this was our moment. There were only five of them, and this was the moment that we were going to find the den. So I called in a few other vehicles, and we were hell-bent on making it to the den this time.

Typically, they went off the edge of the marsh, straight into the thick stuff, and then they just started running, you know, 25 kilometers an hour right through the middle of the marsh. It’s really hard, scrubby environment, and I went in after them. We had another vehicle sitting on the edge of the marsh, you know, just sort of mirroring movement, so we kept in touch.

You know, I could just hear the bush breaking out, the wires, the pipes, and everything underneath our car. I mean, brakes were starting to fail, and we just had to do it. We were just smashing through the bush, and at one point, I actually ended up jamming the car in between two trees. We got stuck in between two trees, and I had to call the other vehicle to cut ahead and cut into the bush and pick them up and keep on them while I got myself out of the bush and trying to catch up again.

We followed them for about 25 minutes before we finally lost the pack, still running on adrenaline, you know, panicking that we'd lost them. We got out and got on the ground and started tracking, went through this clearing, and walked straight into the den that arrived in front of us. Sorry, we made it all the way, and finding that den was such a great moment for us. It was one of the big turning points for us within the dog story itself.

Tamannah was living there; she had six pups, and we got a really amazing little window into the life of these little dogs growing up and living in this thing. They were not that far from the edge of the marsh; they were right under our nose all the time, but they had managed to conceal that den so beautifully. It just took us forever and the wrecking of one of our cars just to actually find the den.

Here, last but not least, hyenas. Everybody sort of disregards hyenas; they have bad associations with them. They are one of my favorites of all the animals. They're incredibly successful. I mean, few people realize that the hyena is actually the most successful predator that we have in Africa. They really are ahead of most of the others. One of the things that worried us is that when we first arrived in Savuti, we saw probably three hyenas in the first year.

As time went on, slowly but surely, we started seeing a few more and a few more, and they started coming out of the woodwork and getting a bit more relaxed around us. But by the time we started Savage Kingdom, these guys had already built a small army. Again, we knew that the den was there, and it was just a case of finding a female who was lactating and just doing the hike in, doing the time, and following all the way back up towards the sand, which they always denned.

Let’s meet these guys—a battle-hardened clan of mothers. The Sisterhood is raising an army. Growing their numbers is the only hope against lions. [Music] Looms and a generation will starve. [Music] Armies need discipline; Zolly cos rule is absolute. Hyenas are really fascinating to me; the entire social structure is governed by aggression.

It's a matriarchal society, and because of that aggression in these societies, a lot of the females have such high levels of testosterone in their bodies all the time, and over years they've developed these pseudo penises, so they're quite odd in a lot of ways. But that level of aggression actually manifests in the womb, and you actually get to sublings fighting it out in the womb. The level of testosterone in a fetus inside the womb is often much higher than an adult male lion, so they're very peculiar animals and a hole in it for a lot of ways.

What I really liked about them in this particular show is that their path was kind of the antithesis of all the others. While everybody else was fighting to survive, these guys were getting fat on all the killing and everything that was happening during their time. So they kind of countered the whole Savage Kingdom program.

So those are the five animals that we really invested a lot of time and invested a lot of emotion into. We had the crews around the clock working with them for 15 months, and as we got to understand their plight, their different lives, their different directions, that in itself started to become a bit of a problem for us, in that we knew at some point these clans were going to clash. And when they did, you know, whose side were you going to be on? Did you inadvertently try and support your favorite, or were you going to be able to just stand back and know that this is the process, and this is what was happening?

We often had these debates, you know, Richard and I used to have arguments over the radio saying, well, keep your lions away from my guys! I mean, it’s not going to be fair, you know? You got lions, and one of the two of the main characters that I felt were sort of the lead heroines of the entire place, the ones that I got to know the most, were Mutsumi and Sabah.

Mutsumi I'd known since she was a cub; I'd seen her become this warrior cat who took on the biggest of prey, and Sabah, who, you know, you could see why I loved that cat. There was one particular incident in this whole project that really brought home what this entire project was about for me. Basically, Sabah used to leave her cubs, she had two cubs, a male and a female, and she used to leave them on this big hill called Leopard Rock, and that formed a sort of nursery for her when she was out hunting. And of the two, the daughter was much bolder and more adventurous and probably a little bit impatient.

What she did was lead her brother down off the side of Leopard Rock. And this is [Music] Mutsumi, the Huntress of the Marsh Pride, is looking for a den of her own. She heads towards Sabah's stronghold. [Music] [Music] Sabah is finally home, but her calls go unanswered. Oh, I find them! [Music] Where are you? [Music] [Music] Sabah finds her cubs. [Music] But it's too late. [Music] [Music]

So, as you can imagine, this particularly event really shook me. It was really unfortunate that the two females that I loved most in this program came together in such a devastating way. It is one of the hardest things that I had to witness, let alone film. But it made me realize it was not for me to judge. I couldn't be angry with Mutsumi for what she had done; I couldn't be angry with Sabah. You know, this was the natural process of survival playing out, and I had to just accept that Sabah took her cub; she took it up to the tree and tried to revive it by licking it. It was dead already, and eventually, she ate it, returning it back to the body from where it came.

I got sort of completely thrown out by this, and I actually had to leave Savuti. I went home; I needed to get some space, gather my thoughts, and just step away from it and contextualize what had happened. And this is the kind of thing that happens when Africa's apex predators get squashed into a small environment and then have all of their resources withdrawn. It becomes brutal; you know, it becomes savage. I mean, it is quite epic.

The first season, the first installment of Savage Kingdom hits our screens this next week, and since then, there have been a number of births: the Marsh Pride, Mutsumi, and her sister both cubs. So, Satara, you know, her pride was decimated; they have another ten cubs who are already a year old. There are a lot of new lives fighting away in Savuti and making the new path. The dogs have had new pups, and Sabah's son, who survived, is growing strong, learning very quickly. He's actually slightly bigger than his mother already.

As for my own family, my children are trying very hard to be teenagers. But I hope that in their early years in the bush, it has sort of installed a sense of the environment and nature in them that they can sort of grow up loving the animals and, you know, working to protect the animals and, you know, continue what we try to do going forward. I believe that as humans, we are becoming less and less in touch with nature. We are being separated further and further away behind our cement walls and neon lights.

Some people only get to see some of these animals in sanitized nature films or cartoons or in a zoo. Some people are fortunate enough to come and visit us in Botswana and go on a safari and see these animals for themselves. What we try to do with the films that we make is try and take people out of their offices, out of their homes, and in some ways out of their own heads and to try and get them to get involved in a little moment in time where they can emotionally relate to these animals and let that sort of reach out and touch them and motivate them to really care about these animals.

We want people to feel the thrill, see the beauty, accept the savagery of it, the brutality of it, and just really wake emotionally to the wonderful creatures that we live with. And, as I said to them, the way we do while out in the field in Botswana, we have fun. We do what we do because we love it and because we love those animals, and it gives us much joy and much pride. So thank you. [Applause] [Music] [Music] Oh.