Inside the Linyanti’s changing lion prides

When they resurfaced, the cubs had grown into sub-adults and they rejoined their mothers. Today, that small, embattled group is now the DumaTau Pride: 32 lions strong, the largest pride ever documented in our Linyanti concession, including 12 cubs born under the protection of the very males whose arrival once threatened to end it.

For Mpho Williart, the pride’s recovery provides an unusual opportunity to study how lion society functions in the Linyanti system, particularly during and after territorial shifts.

Between mid-May and the end of August 2026, Wilderness eco-monitors and guides recorded 63 distinct individual lions – 36 adults, 7 subadults and 20 cubs – across Botswana’s Linyanti NG15 concession through repeated sightings on game drives and dedicated monitoring runs. It’s not a census in the strict scientific sense; the team is upfront that sightings cluster wherever roads and open floodplain make lions easier to find, while the mopane woodlands further east and south remain harder to monitor. Even so, the sightings provide a detailed picture of the concession’s current lion population and social structure.

Three prides currently call the concession home:

• DumaTau Pride: 32 lions, the largest pride currently recorded in the concession
• Channel Pride: 12 lions, ranging east of Wilderness Savuti 
• Mma Mabele’s Pride: 5 lions, holding territory around Wilderness King’s Pool

For the past four years, the Linyanti's resident male coalition has been the Army Boys: six males – Toppers, Onix, Quartz, Jasper, Larminer and Magwagwa – that trace their origins to the eastern Moremi Game Reserve before pushing into Linyanti and displacing the two Golden Boys. But roughly a year ago, guides started noticing that the Army Boys had stopped moving as one unit.

Toppers, Onix and Quartz now hold ground west of Savuti and south of DumaTau, ranging as far north as King’s Pool – the territory where they breed with DumaTau and Mma Mabele’s prides. Jasper and his companions have shifted east, sighted mainly around and beyond Wilderness Savuti, closer to the Channel Pride’s range. The two trios haven’t been seen together in about a year. And on the rare occasions their paths have come close, guides haven’t recorded a single fight.

‘It’s an interesting possibility of spatial tolerance between former coalition partners,’ says Mpho. Rather than challenging one another directly, the two groups appear to have settled into separate areas of activity. Whether that arrangement will last remains unclear. The landscape has changed yet again: a four-male coalition first spotted in early 2026, likely moving in from Chobe National Park to the east, has already been tracked as far west as King's Pool, deep inside the Army Boys territory. No confrontation has been recorded yet. 

For Wilderness, tracking lion movements goes beyond recording notable sightings. Understanding territorial shifts, breeding patterns and the effects of male turnover helps build a clearer picture of population health across the concession.

The DumaTau Pride’s growth shows why record-keeping matters. Without it, the pride’s near-collapse and recovery would have gone unrecorded. Instead, the records show how a pride can persist and grow after a takeover. As the monitoring report notes, ‘The story of DumaTau Pride predates the arrival of the Army Boys, but its remarkable growth appears to coincide with their establishment in the area’.

Significant gaps remain, particularly in the eastern reaches of the concession where dense mopane woodland limits visibility and road access. But each new sighting helps fill in those gaps, gradually building a clearer understanding of how the Linyanti’s lion prides and coalitions interact across the landscape.