On March 5, wildlife guides at the Ngala Private Game Reserve in South Africa stumbled upon an unusual sight—a white lion cub in the wild.

According to Lyle Bruce McCabe, a field guide at the reserve, he was watching a male lion sleeping in the Timbavati river bed when he heard the call of a young cub squeak out of a thicket nearby.

“I moved closer to the bank to investigate, and we saw the small head of a lion cub roll out from its mother’s teat,” says McCabe, who has been guiding at Ngala for two years.

The cub is the first wild white lion that McCabe or his colleague, animal tracker Fanny Mathonsi, have ever seen. And Mathonsi has been