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A mighty lion walked off with a photographer’s telephoto lens while on safari in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Park.
Dansen Raddy Raddy, who shot incredible video of the incident, tells PetaPixel that the lens belonged to another photographer who mistakenly dropped the expensive glass.
“The lion picked it up and I was in a good position waiting for the lion to come,” Raddy explains. “I didn’t know that it had picked up the camera. Gosh, I was surprised. That’s the time I picked up my camera and took a video.”
The photographer managed to get the lens back but the lion, perhaps unsurprisingly, inflicted damage on the lens. The footage, which was filmed just a few days ago, has gone viral online.
“Oh my God! That’s a really expensive cat toy,” writes one Redditor. Some accused the scene of being orchestrated but as Raddy explains, that wasn’t the case.
Another video (see below) captured the same incident from a different angle showing the lion dropping the lens close to a truck after walking around with it for a while.
The lens appears to be a 400mm f/2.8 or a 600mm f/4 but it’s difficult to tell with the camouflage lens covering.
Lions love to play and it is not the first time the king of the jungle has taken interest in an expensive bit of gear. All the way back in 2012, PetaPixel reported on a lion in Zimbabwe kidnapping and killing a Canon 5D Mark II. Photographer Ed Hetherington placed his camera next to a buffalo carcass, but when a lioness came back to check on her kill, she was more interested in the equipment and the camera did not survive.
And it’s not just lions, even crabs can give photographers a hard time like the one in the Bahamas last year which ran off with a diver’s 360-degree camera.
Image credits: Photographs by Dansen Raddy Raddy
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