This is the question David Macdonald and the team at WildCRU ask in a paper published today – and what we have in mind is harnassing the colossal global interest in Cecil the Lion as a force for the conservation of lions, and indeed big carnivores and wildlife more generally. To judge by another remarkable publication, […]
The really important thing about Cecil the Lion, killed in an apparently illegal trophy hunt last July, was not just that Oxford University’s WildCRU team had tracked his behavior by satellite since 2008, but even more importantly because he was part of a dedicated long-term study of the whole population of lions. Now the WildCRU […]
These are frantically busy days for us in Oxford as Andy Loveridge and I plan the future of our Hwange-Okavango lion project at a time when so much is changing for lion conservation – much of it stimulated by Cecil. So, for us, it was a delight to get cheering news from the field where […]
As the Christmas holidays approach, David Macdonald has more good news from Cecil’s pride Followers of our lion study in Hwange will realise that the WildCRU team is striving to monitor the private lives of the lionesses and cubs now overseen by the aging male, Jericho, Cecil’s former coalition partner. For some time we have […]
Last week Xanda was seen mating repeatedly with lionesses from the so-called Backpans Pride – pregnancy in lions lasts about 110 days, so all being well Cecil’s grand offspring should be around in March. Actually, as followers of our News Items will remember, while Andy Loveridge and I started the Hwange Lion Project in 1999, […]
David Macdonald reports that after a few days concern that Jericho had not been seen for a while (the same old needle-in-a-haystack problem) and hadn’t been moving, on the morning of the 3rd November our Field Coordinator Brent Staplekamp tracked him down, replete from gorging on a baby elephant that had been killed by a […]
When the Vice President of the Ty Company that makes Beany Babies arrived at WildCRU’s headquarters in Oxfordshire, I did not fully appreciate the fame of these soft, cuddly toys, but within minutes I learnt that almost everybody had delighted in them as children. How wonderful, therefore, to be told that the company’s enthusiasm for […]
I reported recently that while our field team had seen the spoor of the lionesses and cubs from Cecil’s pride, and thus believed all was well, the lions had evaded sighting in the thick bush. Now we have a message from Brent Stapelkamp in the field that he found the cubs and their mothers, replete […]