Harry and Megan found something the other night that I really wish I had been there for.

They’d come across the Msuthlu Pride, eleven lions, out on the open ground near the airstrip. Not an unusual place to find them. This pride has been spending a lot of time out there lately. At night, the short grass makes for easy hunting, and the flat open ground gives them a clear view of everything moving around them. But on this particular evening, hunting was the last thing on the agenda, at least for most of them.

Somewhere in the darkness, a porcupine had made the unfortunate decision to wander through.

Now, I want to be clear about something. This was not the life-or-death drama that Tayla Brown witnessed when two young porcupettes — yes, that is what a baby porcupine is called — held off six lions right here at Londolozi, clinging to each other in the dark while lions pawed at them from every angle. What makes that even more remarkable is that those were the same lions. The Msuthlu Pride, back when they were still known as the Talamati Pride, had already had their first humbling encounter with a porcupine on this very airstrip, and apparently learned absolutely nothing from it.

The porcupine defends itself using its quills to ward off the curious lions

And it wasn’t the sheer numerical absurdity of Lucien Beaumont’s sighting back in 2014, when one very unlucky porcupine found itself surrounded by thirteen lions and four coalition males — a situation that, by any reasonable calculation, should not have ended well for the porcupine. Spoiler: This porcupine held off the onslaught of lions and walked away the victor.

This was something different. This was a porcupine being mildly irritated by a group of young lions who had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

The adult females, to their credit, had already figured this out and moved on. They know what a porcupine means — a whole lot of effort, a whole lot of quills, and absolutely nothing to show for it at the end. Experience is a good teacher out here, and these females had clearly graduated from that particular lesson already.

The young males, however, had not.

What followed, by all accounts, was less a predator-prey interaction and more a masterclass in how not to approach a porcupine. One of the older young males took it upon himself to be the strategist of the group, getting ahead of the porcupine, cutting off its escape route, and was very proud of himself. The rest of the youngsters fanned out around it, doing their best impression of a coordinated hunt, which mostly amounted to standing around looking curious and getting nowhere near those quills.

And the porcupine? Completely unbothered. Tail up, quills splayed, rattling away in the darkness, backing into anyone who got too close for comfort. Just doing what porcupines have been doing for millions of years, to remarkable effect.

The first glimpse of the porcupine as it darted out of the hole in a hurry to seek shelter in a thicket nearby

Here’s the thing about a porcupine’s defence — it is almost absurdly effective. The quills themselves are modified hairs, coated in keratin, tipped with microscopic backwards-facing barbs. A porcupine doesn’t shoot them, as the myth goes. It simply raises them, turns its back, and waits for the predator to make a mistake. The barbs do the rest. Once a quill embeds itself in skin, it doesn’t come out easily, and if it breaks off, the infection risk is serious.

The Mhangeni pride and the four coalition males take an interest in an unfortunate porcupine.

Lions know this. Even these young ones, as inexperienced as they were, showed enough respect to keep their distance. Curious? Absolutely. Committed? Not even slightly.

I genuinely wish I had been there to watch it. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing a ten-kilogram porcupine hold eleven lions at a standstill — not through any feat of strength or speed, but simply because it has perfected the art of being deeply unpleasant to touch.

Eventually, as these things tend to go, the lions lost interest. One by one, they drifted off into the darkness, the older females long gone, the young males quietly pretending they’d never been that interested in the first place. The porcupine trundled off into the night, quills still raised, dignity entirely intact.

Eleven lions. One porcupine. No contest.

Late in the evening, the pride was seen attempting to hunt a family of four porcupines on the airstrip! Something you certainly don’t see every day (night…)

This is the third time we’ve written about lions and porcupines at Londolozi, and I have a feeling it won’t be the last. Something about that airstrip keeps setting up this exact confrontation — the open ground, the night, a porcupine going about its business and a pride of lions deciding, briefly, that this might be an interesting idea. It never is. The porcupine always wins. And yet here we are, watching young lions learn the same lesson that lions have apparently been failing to learn on this particular stretch of grass for over a decade.

The bush doesn’t always deliver what you expect. But every now and then, it delivers something better.