Snapshots From The Past

This weeks guest blog is from our moderator David Bygott who has been guiding us through Snapshot Serengeti images since the beginning.

I’ve been lurking here for years as a moderator, but Lucy Hughes invited me to come out of the shadows and tell you how I got my Serengeti creds.

As a country boy in England I was obsessed with nature and yearned to see more of the world’s wildlife. Reading “Serengeti Shall Not Die” by Bernard Grzimek, inspired me to go there. The dream took some years to achieve. First, I worked hard to get a zoology degree. Then, I wrote to anybody doing field research in Africa who might need a research student, assistant, or slave. I got lucky. A scientist, studying hyenas and wild dogs in Ngorongoro Conservation area, wanted me to work on her better-known chimpanzee project, which I had been following in the pages of ‘National Geographic’. Sounded good.

Thus in 1969 I pitched up at the camp of my new bosses, on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater. Ten days of getting to know Jane Goodall and her photographer husband Hugo van Lawick, and total immersion in African wildlife. Incredible nights of watching hyena packs run down wildebeest and tear them apart. Even a road trip into the heart of Serengeti.

A seed sown, my mind blown, I continued across Tanzania to the remote chimp camp at Gombe National Park on the beautiful forested shore of Lake Tanganyika. Here I spent 2 amazing years with a small team of young people, following the famous chimps through the forest and recording their behavior. Experiencing at first hand our closest kin was a life-changing experience for me.

David with a chimp group at Gombe, 1970

While at Gombe, I met more of my scientific heroes. Bernard Grzimek visited, so did Dian Fossey, and I travelled to Rwanda to see her gorillas. Jane’s doctoral advisor Robert Hinde came, and encouraged me to write up my fieldwork for a Cambridge PhD.

Two unexpected things happened at Cambridge. I met my wife, primatologist Jeannette Hanby. And we got to know Brian Bertram who had studied Serengeti lions for 4 years, following George Schaller’s pioneering work. Brian persuaded us that social carnivores were just as interesting as primates, and that there was still more to learn about lions. It was a change of direction, but we were tempted!

So in 1974 we joined the Serengeti Research Institute as lion biologists, thanks to support from the U of Cambridge. Our main mission was to census the lion population, as National Parks feared that lions were decreasing (they weren’t!). We also compared the lives of lions in different habitats (Serengeti Plains where prey abundance is seasonal, and Ngorongoro Crater where prey is always abundant). And we investigated lion pride dynamics – why do some individuals leave, and others stay?

Imagine being part of a community of scientists studying every aspect of the ecosystem. We had a house in the centre of Serengeti and a Land-rover to go wherever we wanted, and we spent our days and nights with the great tawny cats.

Sometimes humans and lions are attracted to the same campsites

It was remote, but fortunately we were both used to that. Every month we made a supply run – either to Arusha or Nairobi, each at least 200 miles away, mostly on dirt roads. This took 2 days each way, plus several days of shopping and socializing. We learnt a lot about fixing cars, often in beautiful remote settings with primitive tools.

Jeannette changing a flat tire

David on safari on Lake Manyara NP

 There was much less technology then. We had basic maps but no GPS, radio or mobile phones or internet. There were no computers, though we had cutting-edge hand-calculators. Radio-telemetry was in its infancy; we built our own radio-collars and darted and collared a few lions, but for most of our study we had no air support and ground-to-ground range was poor, so we had to rely on careful searching to find the lions – scanning with binoculars, driving, staying out at night to listen for roars. We identified the lions from natural markings and close-up photographs, on film of course. We developed a symbiosis with cheetah biologists, George and Lory Frame, photographing each others’ study animals whenever we saw them and trading ID photos to increase our sightings. We learnt as much as we could about what all our colleagues were doing, and often participated in ecosystem-wide aerial animal censuses.

We tried various methods of counting lions, including aerial and ground transects and individual recognition. The latter proved the most successful, but it was hard work to identify all the lions in our 1000 square study area. In addition, every second month we’d spend a week in Ngorongoro Crater. After finding as many lions as we could there, we would follow one pride for 4 days and nights, to observe their activity, range and hunting success. We did the same with a comparable pride living at Sametu on the Serengeti Plain. The story of the Sametu pride unrolled like a soap opera, and we couldn’t resist writing a book about them. “Lions Share” tells their story, but also incorporates much of what we knew about lion behavior and about the ecology of Serengeti. (Out of print, but look on Amazon).

Eventually we had to leave, and our friends Craig Packer and Anne Pusey took over the Serengeti Lion Project. Craig amazingly kept it going from 1978 to 2014, and Snapshot Serengeti is an offshoot of what has become one of the world’s longest running wildlife studies.

After writing up our 4 years of lion data, we returned to Tanzania in 1982 to work in conservation education; university teaching, producing guidebooks and interpretive displays, and guiding safaris. We built our home near Lake Eyasi, and experienced years of village life and culture clash, but that’s another story (in preparation). In 2003 we moved to Tucson, Arizona, but I still get back to Tanzania every year, mostly leading National Geographic Expeditions.

I’m organizing my own safari to visit Serengeti and other parks in February 2018. If you seriously want to see these wonderful animals in the flesh, send me a message!