Photos shot by a Dutch nature photographer show stunning and unorthodox images of a lioness cuddling with a baby antelope after it killed and ate the antelope's mother.
New York Daily News reports that the photographs were taken y Adri De Visser, 50, and he took the photos in Uganda at Queen Elizabeth National Park.
He said to The Daily Mail "When I got there, I saw the lionesses feeding on a Uganda kob's (antelope's) carcass. I followed them for a while and they went up a tree to rest from the sun," he said. "I was watching them when I heard a noise. It was the kob's fawn that had been hiding in the long grass."
The photographer said the lioness looked at the antelope for about 45 minutes and never attacked it. New York Daily News reported that even when the calf crawled in between its legs the animal never pounced on it.
The Daily Mail reported that a motorcyle from a park ranger scared the lioness so she "picked the fawn up by the neck and carried it off like one of its own," the photographer said to The Daily Mail.
"We heard from a group of tourists that the fawn was later spotted alive and well," he added.
In 2002, The New York Times reported another incident where a lioness at Kenya Samburu National Reserve, would adopt baby antelopes.
Ditte Dahl Lisbjerg, an animal behaviorist at Unesco's Nairobi office said to The New York Times in 2002, 'It's like dogs adopting kittens and cats adopting canaries, but in those situations the animals are tamed. This lion has to have a mental disorder. To understand this, we'd have to study the history of this lioness. We'd have to put her on the couch.''
See the photos HERE.
