2016 I’m Liomba-Junior Mathe, and I come from Hwange, a small mining town located in South-Western Zimbabwe. I grew up with my two sisters who are both teachers, and my mother works at a local hospital as a nurse. Having attained a University degree in BSc Biological Sciences, I then joined the Hwange Lion Research […]
Its not just my Scottish roots remind me of the power of the Auld Alliance, writes David Macdonald in reporting a fascinating outcome of a collaboration between WildCRU and the French CNRS: one of the exciting things about our work in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, is that while the WildCRU team led by Andrew Loveridge […]
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 […]
The collected musings of WildCRU’s Founder and Director, Professor David Macdonald, Professor of Wildlife Conservation, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. David Macdonald explains how the WildCRU’s long-term study of lions and the people living alongside them in Hwange NP, and the team led by Andrew Loveridge, has revealed how predator ecology and animal husbandry […]
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, […]
I first joined WildCRU in 2010 as a volunteer pilot and field assistant for the Hwange Lion Research Project where I was responsible for tracking radio-collared lions and supporting the field team with data collection. I then went on to complete a BSc in Conservation Ecology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa which included a […]