Tag archives for Tanzania
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On this week’s show, meet a woman who free-dives with great white sharks, a man who skied to the North Pole in the darkness of winter, and photographers who can turn such darkness into a colorful portrait of a world we can’t see.
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Coinciding with celebrations of Spring taking place in the Northern Hemisphere, the return of the rains to Gombe National Park has brought a spray of a different kind to brighten up the gloom.
In which I return to Gombe National Park to observe the behavior of wild chimpanzees. Luckily, I had a chance to pack this time or I really would be living with the apes.
Posted by Day 4 of Big Cat Week Closer Looks, we’re talking to a biologist who ignited a movement to end unjust lion killings in Tanzania.
Conservationist Amy Dickman knew she couldn’t help big cats in Tanzania rebound without the involvement and support of the local people. Initially communication with the rural community was strained, until they realized she had something they wanted: an outlet to charge their cellphones. Watch this week’s 3rd installment of the Big Cat Week Closer Look series!
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The king of the African savannah is in serious trouble because people are taking over the continent’s last patches of wilderness on unprecedented scale, according to a detailed study released this week. The most comprehensive assessment of lion (Panthera leo) numbers to date determined that Africa’s once-thriving savannahs are undergoing massive land-use conversion and burgeoning human population growth. The decline has had a significant impact on the lions that make their home in these savannahs; their numbers have dropped to as low as 32,000, down from hundreds of thousands estimated just 50 years ago.
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The Big Cats Initiative Grants Program seeks to identify and support projects that engage in immediate actions leading to reductions in big cat mortality. Dr. Laly Lichtenfeld, Executive Director of the African People and Wildlife Fund, has been the recipient of multiple BCI grants and provides a prime example of how the BCI and its…
New Global Land Rush Trampling Human Rights
Posted by Dan Klotz on February 6, 2012 
It is an age-old story in the developing world, one that rarely ends happily ever after. Communities without economic power that live off of land to which they do not “own” are devastated when their government transfers the property rights to wealthy outside interests, who exploit the natural resources. These land deals often result in…
National Geographic photographer Nick Nichols is working on a new project in Africa, photographing Serengeti lions. But this assignment is something new, even for a magazine known for pushing the boundaries of photography. Backed up by a team of National Geographic experts, Nichols is deploying a remotely operated miniature helicopter to dangle a camera above a pride of predator, and a toy car to drive a camera within a paw swat of the big cats. The results he hopes for: pictures of Africa’s wild lions such as no one has ever seen.
Posted by Many people believe communications technology helps the developing world by allowing people to link up with the ‘West’ and be given information and knowledge. It is often people in the developing world with the knowledge, and what technology can instead do is help them unlock that knowledge and share it with one another. Eugenio Tisselli…
Elvis Kisimir is the African People & Wildlife Fund’s Human Wildlife Conflict Officer. He is a young Maasai man, well known and respected in the Maasai Steppe where the National Geographic Big Cats Initiative and Dr. Laly Lichtenfeld of the African People & Wildlife Fund have teamed up to save lions.
While a new government statement announces the stretch across the Park will not be paved, conservationists’ concerns remain–focused on the traffic, not the tarmac.
After witnessing the world’s greatest wildlife migration along Kenya’s Mara River, the author reflects on the role of rivers in nurturing entire ecosystems. This post is part of a special National Geographic news series on global water issues. By Mark Angelo As an avid paddler and long-time river enthusiast, I’ve always marveled at the ability…
Great Migrations: Running With the Herd
Posted by Ford Cochran on November 2, 2010 Wildebeests traverse the Serengeti’s plains each year in numbers nearly too vast to count. But research shows that by forming enormous herds, they manage to make themselves scarce to free-roaming predators. By Ford Cochran The largest programming event in the ten-year history of the National Geographic Channel, Great Migrations premieres in the U.S. beginning at…
In Tanzania’s Tarangire ecosystem, lions and the Maasai people live alongside one another outside the borders of Tarangire and Lake Manyara National Parks. People and lions come into direct and frequent conflict when the big cats attack and kill the Maasai’s livestock and harm people. Intense retaliatory killing of lions occurs on a regular basis.…
Jane Goodall Institute Honors National Geographic on 50th Anniversary of Gombe Chimp Research
Posted by Ford Cochran on October 12, 2010 Half a century after beginning her storied field research on the lives of Gombe’s chimpanzees, Jane Goodall and her non-profit institute have bestowed their Global Leadership Award on National Geographic, which funded much of her pioneering work. By Ford Cochran As celebrated in the October 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine, this year marks the…
Into Africa, Outside the “Bubble”
Posted by Stuart Pimm on September 14, 2010 Managing Africa’s wildlife means taking care of animals outside national parks and, vitally, taking care of the people there, too. By Stuart Pimm Mara National Park, Kenya–I’m sitting in the bar of a game lodge perched high on a koppie. The view is outstanding, for I can see better than 180 degrees of land stretching…
Two leading conservation organizations have appealed to the Government of Tanzania to reconsider the proposed construction of a commercial road through the world’s best known wildlife sanctuary–Serengeti National Park. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) are recommending that alternative routes be used that can meet the transportation needs of…
Building better bomas
Posted by Stuart Pimm on August 25, 2010 National Geographic Big Cats Initiative (BCI) scientist Stuart Pimm ventures into East Africa to study bomas, the traditional shelters constructed to corral livestock. He visits two BCI grantees working with local herders to fortify bomas with wire and spiny plants in so-called ”living fences.” The hope is that if farm animals can be protected their owners will have…
Posted by This post is part of a special National Geographic news series on global water issues. I was standing inside a colonial-era circuit house in a sprawling, malarial city called Malakal in southern Sudan. I had come to see a man about a river, but the man, an Egyptian hydrologist, wasn’t talking. “It is forbidden,” he…
The Serengeti road to disaster
Posted by Stuart Pimm on June 18, 2010 By Stuart Pimm What comes to mind when you think of Africa? During the World Cup, perhaps thousands of vuvuzelas sounding like a swarm of very angry bees as fans cheer their team. But other than that? Surely huge herds of animals walking across vast, open plains. I arrived in South Africa, in 1996, to…
Secrets of Earth’s Deepest Volcanoes
Posted by Ford Cochran on March 15, 2010 I’ll just say it up front: National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration grantee Rich Brown did not discover diamonds on his recent research expedition to the Igwisi Hills Volcanoes in the Tanzanian highlands. Nor did he expect to find any. But the story behind his geological trek reveals the violent ways in which diamonds…
Monkeys in threatened forests are far more sensitive to fragmentation of their habitat than previously thought, the University of York, in the UK, said today. “An analysis of monkeys living in Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains suggests that the impact of external factors, such as human activity, on species numbers is felt in forests as large as…
Kilimanjaro: Push to the Top
Posted by Ford Cochran on January 11, 2010 Amid rain and snow, the Summit on the Summit team—working to raise public awareness of the global freshwater crisis—has reached its final encampment before trekking to the top of Kilimanjaro. Anticipation has some team members excited, while thin air and the arduousness of the climb has made others ill. Those who can will rise in…
Kilimanjaro: Summit on the Summit
Posted by Ford Cochran on January 9, 2010 National Geographic Emerging Explorers Alexandra Cousteau and Jimmy Chin are climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with Jessica Biel, Emile Hirsch, Lupe Fiasco, Isabel Lucas, and other celebrities to raise public awareness of the shortage of clean water across much of the planet. Ohio State glaciologist Lonnie Thompson predicts that Kilimanjaro’s legendary crown of ice could…
