Then I drove south across the border, past a big black billboard that stood beside the track:

TANZANIA NATIONAL PARKS

HERE THE WORLD IS STILL

YOUNG AND FRAGILE

HELD IN TRUST

FOR YOUR SONS AND OURS

About eighty miles further on I came to a place known as Seronera, site of a tourist lodge and headquarters of Serengeti National Park. It was also headquarters of the Serengeti Research Institute.

...... the Serengeti Research Institute, the direct descendent of the Grzimek's pioneering effort, is one of the biggest and best known organisations coordinating the work of such researchers.

I arrived at Seronera in midafternoon, and next morning I saw Dr. Hugh Lamprey, director of the Institute. He could not, he said, speak for individual researchers - they worked independently and each would have to answer for himself - but he wouldcertainly do all he could to help.

.... We discussed grass management by deliberate burning. The value of burning, said Lamprey, was still an open question. New grass, which on the savanna sprouted within twentyfour or thirtysix hours of a rain shower, came up far stronger on burned land. Burning also kept gall acacia and other bush under control. But if done too often it impoverished the soil. Most people seemed to accept that. They did not agree on much else.

Lamprey smiled. "We held a grass management conference here just the other day. Experst from all over the world. But we couldn't get even two of them to agree on the best burning practices. The trouble is, nobody really knows." Burning, said Lamprey, was just the question the Institute had to tackle: its job was to pin down at least some of the basic facts..

That afternoon, on my way back north, I stopped at Banagi, the original Grzimek camp, and still a subcenter of the institute. There I met Tony Sinclair, and Englishman just starting buffalo research; George Schaller, the American author of Year of the Gorilla, now working on lions; and Hubert Braun, a Dutch grass expert.