Lion Pride Documentary - The Realm of the Desert Lion | Namibia Safari Full HD

Lion Pride Documentary - The Realm of the Desert Lion | Namibia Safari Full HD
#wildplanet #lion #documentary
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Africa’s Namib Desert is a harsh and unforgiving place, home to shifting, barren sand dunes, jagged mountains, and gravel plains. The vast desert — whose name means “place of no people” in the local Khoikhoi language — covers nearly 100,000 square miles and stretches along some 1,200 miles of the coast of western Namibia, in southern Africa. In the ancient 55-million-year-old desert, the world’s oldest, rainfall is scarce (less than 2 tenths of an inch per year in the west), and there is no surface water and just a few dry riverbeds.

And, yet, surprisingly, the Namib is a living place, home not just to the big cats featured in The Desert Lions, but to an impressive array of plants and animals. In the Namib live gemsboks (oryx) and springboks, ungulates that can avoid drinking water for weeks at a time by ceasing to sweat, plus a large number of small rodents and reptiles and a stunning diversity of beetles — which, like desert vegetation, have devised techniques to condense water out of the western desert’s distinctive, eerie, and life-giving morning fog. The fog is produced when the cool waters of the offshore Benguela Current interact with the warmer air over the desert. The Benguela also moderates the desert’s climate; temperatures in the searing, arid desert rarely rise over 104 degrees Fahrenheit (but can drop to near freezing at night).