Big Cats 24/7

In the Okavango Delta in Botswana, being the alpha can mean the difference between life and death.

The male lions, they look like they mean business.

It might look like dominance and ruling over the territory.

Female big cats are the queens of the savanna.

But here, the legacy of an alpha isn't written in battles.

It's written in bloodlines.

In the delta, who is the real alpha?

The big cats have very different roles if you're male and female.

Usually, a lion pride will have at least one alpha male.

The role of a male primarily in a pride is to protect the pride at all times, to ward off any intruders, to fight off other males, and to help taking down big prey.

Well, I mean, sometimes.

A male's primary role is to provide the muscle.

They're like the the minders, the kind of, the henchmen.

They patrol the territory, keeping it under constant surveillance, making sure that there are no intruders coming in.

Intruder males looking to take over the pride, are a constant threat here.

Right.

We have a big male lion dead ahead.

The pride males prevent any invaders from coming in and killing the cubs to create room for their own.

Even through this heat haze, that's a face I'll never forget.

That's Madumo.

Madumo is one of two male lions that are the head of the Xudum Pride.

I first met him and his coalition partner, possibly his brother, a year ago.

Male lions will often cooperate with others related to them to rule a pride, sharing the alpha title.

Madumo is over 11 years old, and for a lion, a male lion, that's a ripe old age, and it is quite astonishing that at that age he still has this pride.

Male lions usually only live around 12 years in the wild.

A couple of years less than the females.

My style of parenting, I think is very different from his.

[Laughs] Is that you hiding from your children?

Male lions are not particularly... they're not very hands-on dads.

He did what he needed to do, which is to check that everyone's okay, no one needed him, but then off he goes to his own little private lounge, to have some more me time.

While male lions prefer the hands-off approach...

I think female big cats are the queens of the savanna.

They are the hardest working.

They are absolute grafters, and they put up with an awful lot.

Lion prides don't technically have solo alpha females who are the only ones allowed to breed.

They all do, and they will time their births so they can all be raised together in a lion cub crche.

You've got the females whose primary role really is to look after those cubs, to, to rear them, to try and make sure that as many of them survive as, as possible.

But these lionesses definitely have that alpha energy.

I think this place is just about an extraordinary group of females, and they're doing what they do with a lot of proficiency, a lot of style, a lot of experience.

Typically, only half of cubs will survive their first year, but these lionesses have kept nine of their ten cubs alive.

It's just a testament to, you know, the fact that they're incredible mums.

Hunting may be viewed as a stereotypically alpha male activity, but in reality, it's a little different.

You might think that males are the formidable hunters, but actually it's the females that are doing the hard work.

They're the ones that are out hunting most often, and then males will quite frequently come in and then essentially take that prey off their hands.

It kind of comes in ebbs and flows and everyone does their part.

Whereas with cheetahs and leopards, they don't really have a family unit, so it's kind of you against the world.

Leopards, unlike lions, prefer solitude.

Leopards, the males, they hunt.

You know, they're very solitary and they're kind of looking after themselves.

They're not part of helping the cub grow or teaching it anything.

A male will have a huge territory like that big, and you'll probably have maybe 4 or 5 female territories dotted within that.

And then his job is to kind of roam that, protect it from other males.

The Okavango has probably one of the highest densities of leopards in the world and it's great for leopards, but as a, as a young female trying to raise cubs, it's proving incredibly challenging for her.

Leopards kill leopards more than anything else does.

Xudum is a female leopard who has previously lost cubs to territorial male leopards.

But a new male is beginning to look like he might have the strength to become the area's alpha male.

This guy is now settling into the area.

As we come across new individuals in this area, we I.D.

them, and this one is called Unknown Male Six.

He might have to get a name.

Something like "The Brute".

I'm hoping that with him coming in here and being quite fiery, he becomes the dominant male here and gets some stability to part of Xudum's territory.

If he can keep the other males out, there's more chance of Xudum's cubs surviving.

Female leopards' role is being mother.

It's, you know, raising the next generation.

It takes them a long time to get to the point where they are capable of doing that and they have the kind of street smarts to, to be able to do that.

Under constant threat from both predators and their own species, a female leopard and cubs need to go as unnoticed as possible to survive.

Yeah leopard cubs kind of don't need to be babysat, they're the most solitary of the three big cats and that is how it is from a young age.

Mum will leave home to go and hunt and bring food back, or bring the cubs to food and that's how it is.

That's how they grow up.

Female leopards and female cheetahs.

Probably some of the most prolific hunters.

Unbelievable.

You know they're providing for their family.

It's them against the world.

I mean, you really can't beat them in their determination to, to provide.

And no other cheetah proves this as much as the mother the team have been following for the last couple of years.

Pobe.

Mornings like this with Pobe and the cubs are just so special.

It's at times like this that I remember that they're not part of a pride.

They don't have the back up and team support like lions do, but when they're all sat there as a three together and they're just showing each other so much love, you just start to feel like their own little family unit is really, really special.

Female cheetahs have it pretty hard when it comes to having cubs.

They haven't got any back up.

They haven't got a pride or coalition to rely on, and they are essentially the main teacher of these cubs.

There's no one else teaching them the ropes.

They've got to rely on themselves to bring their cubs up and show their cubs how to hunt.

Pobe is so good at being a mother in fact, that some scientists may even classify her as part of an elite group of cheetahs.

What's fascinating about cheetahs is that you get what they term "super mums", so you'll have like, many, many females that have a really bad track record of being able to raise cubs.

It's really hard to raise cheetah cubs.

But then you get these certain mother cheetahs that are phenomenal.

And Pobe is one of those.

She's phenomenal.

She's unbelievable and the landscape that's so full of lions and leopards and hyenas and wild dogs, she's still managing to raise cubs.

If anyone is a cheetah alpha, it would seem that Pobe takes the crown.

And as for cheetah father of the year...

Male cheetahs, they really just go out, they're spending their lives trying to lay claim to, to territories.

They come together with females to mate, but then they have absolutely no involvement in the bringing up of their cubs.

They may be of no help to mothers raising cubs, but unlike lions and leopards, they're very unlikely to try and kill them either.

So, I guess that's something.

I guess a similarity between cheetahs and the domestic cat is that cheetahs actually have multiple paternity litters, so that means they can mate with multiple males and then their cubs can be from different dads.

So that means that cheetahs can never know whether a cub is theirs or not.

So they aren't going to use their energy on killing the cubs for no reason.

So within big cats, the alpha title comes in different shapes and sizes.

Whether it's defender of the territory, or bringing home the bacon for the kids, in their own way, big cats are just all-round alphas.