Dr. George Schaller

[in Uganda] one of the visitors from over the frontier was a young American called George Schaller. Twenty-four years old, he had just spent two years in close intimacy with the mountain gorilla, in spite of all the rumours of these animals fierce intolerance of man.

'For over three years in the late 1960's my wife Kay, two small sons, and I made our home in the Serengeti National Park'

In 1961, the Serengeti was my ultimate destination in East Africa; in the winter of 1969 it was my home. We land and refuel at Barafu Kopjes, a beautiful garden of huge pale granite boulders and dry trees, in the clear light, where years ago I accompanied George Schaller on long walks across the plain to learn how primitive humans might have fared in scavenging young, dead, or dying animals. The wind is strong in the black thorn of the acacia, and a band of kestrels, migrated from Europe, fill their rufous wings with sun as they lift from the bare limbs and hold like heralds against the wind on the fierce blue sky.

Then we are aloft again, on a course Northeast toward the Gol Mountains, in a dry country of giraffes and gazelles. Olduvai is a pale scar down to the south, in the shadow of the clouds of the Crater Highlands, and soon the sacred volcano called Ol Doinyo Lengai rises ahead, and in the deep hollow in the land that is Lake Natron, on the Kenya border. We will fly across Natron and the Athi Plain and be in Nairobi in an hour.

Dr. George Schaller, ... carried out his exemplary studies of lions and their prey

Howard Baldwin, American electronics expert, contracted by George Schaller and Hans Kruuk to make radio transmitters suitable for tracking lions and hyenas. Turned to the challenge of developing similar tracking for elephants.

As George Schaller so truly says in the conclusion of his scientific report on the Serengeti lion:

�Ecological and aesthetic considerations aside, predators should be allowed to survive in National Parks without justification, solely for their own sake. Only by doing so can man atone in a small way for the avarice and prejudice with which he continues to exterminate predators throughout the world."

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.

Much of what is known about the life of lions in the wild has come from long term studies of them in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Starting in 1966, George Schaller, then I [Brian Bertram], then David Bygott and Jeanette Hanby, and then Craig Packer and Anne Pusey, and several associates, have been able to keep tabs on the fortunes of individually recognized lions and their prides for over 30 years. There have been few other studies of individual wild animals that have been going so long, or that have yielded so much information,