National Geographic: African Odyssey Page #2

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them far from camp,

so they spend the night

near their last sighting.

I love this Swiss army knife.

You can't open it unless you split it.

Here, you want me to do it?

Yeah, you open it.

Which one? This one?

That one...

The woman's a genius.

Brute force.

Mark is up before dawn.

He and Delia reason

that male lions in the vicinity

may feel challenged by the sound of

another lion and come to investigate.

I don't believe this.

There's a bloody lion out here.

It's actually worked.

We ought to sit down

and make very little commotion

because he's looking at us.

Yeah, we know we don't want to

frighten him away,

now that he's here.

Yeah, let's just sit down and not move.

Male lions roar to establish claim

to a pride

and sometimes fight to the death

to defend territory.

This lion searches for the intruder.

Now Delia and Mark will try to get

close enough to dart him

and collar him with

a radio transmitter.

Then he can be tracked systematically

to determine his range size,

social contacts, and prey selection.

The lion has left the river plain.

They follow his tracks called spoor.

We're coming to the point

where he went in,

so we should see his

spoor pretty quickly.

It was up here.

He may still be in there.

Mark has seen him, Mark has seen him.

I should have marked the spot

where we lost him.

I didn't think of it.

We had him all that way.

For half the night

Delia and Mark try to get close enough

to the lion to dart him.

For three days the lion eludes them.

The crust on the sand is

bunched up ahead of the foot.

So the foot was falling quite quickly.

So you can see he was

a little bit concerned about us still.

He's here somewhere.

He's got to be here somewhere.

I wish I could find his spoor.

I just got to keep going.

I think maybe...

If we can get to that clearing

and get set up,

maybe we can attract him into it.

I don't know what good

it will do though.

I mean, he has to come up...

he has to be approachable.

Well, if we get a dart in him,

at least we can track him.

Yeah.

Frustrated in their pursuit,

they try to attract him

right up to the truck.

Ignoring Delia and Mark,

the lion trots by,

looking for his supposed rival.

Finally he realizes that the roars are

coming from the vehicle.

The lion focuses on Mark.

Head on, he presents an almost

impossible target for a dart shot.

In the twenty minute before

the drug takes effect,

the lion wanders off.

Mark follows his tracks to find him.

When lions are immobilized,

the stop blinking.

Salve keeps their eyes from drying out

We'll have to use a bigger bolt.

Delia and Mark whisper to avoid

upsetting other lions in the area.

Keep your eyes peeled.

We've got company here somewhere.

They're bound to come

over here and have a look.

Yeah, but he's fine.

I'm going to go get the

shotgun out here, Delia.

Okay.

Or you could get the dart gun.

Delia, look at the hyena.

Boy, feel the muscles in his neck.

Tooth eruption and wear help the

Owenses determine a lion's age.

He doesn't look like an old lion.

It will be interesting to compare

this measurement with the one

we took just a second ago.

Look at the size of that paw.

I can put both my hands together

and you can't see them underneath.

Mark, there's a lion right here.

Get to the car.

I'm going to back off.

If she comes in, I'll dart her.

She's probably going to find the male.

I think she has the male's scent.

Knowing that the pride

will soon break up,

Mark darts other lions to keep

track of as many as possible.

Collaring each lion

takes several hours.

As the night wears on,

Delia and Mark become

giddy with fatigue.

You've been wanting

to hit me in the nose all day.

You finally got here.

Mark, try to act like

a sophisticated scientist!

We have three lions darted.

Another pride.

One adult male and two young females,

so it was worth it.

Nights like this bring Delia

and Mark deep satisfaction.

Using radio collars

to maintain contact,

they will spend many other long

nights recording observations.

They plot lion movements

from radio data.

Through such painstaking work,

they have discovered that,

unlike lions observed elsewhere,

prides in the Kalahari disband

in the dry season,

and individual lions

range over as much as

Their movements present a

conservation problem:

Hunters and ranchers

shoot many of the lions

in the Owenses study group when they

wander outside the reserve.

The Kalahari is so dry

that most of the time carnivores

must obtain all their

moisture from prey.

The prey, in turn, get their moisture

mainly from melons,

leaves, and grasses.

Mark, look at... If we sit tight,

maybe she'll come in.

They circle a carcass several times

because they can't afford

to make a mistake that the lions

are still close by,

because lions often kill brown

hyenas in a situation like this.

This is such a rare opportunity.

I mean most people living in Botswana

have never even seen a brown hyena.

They're so rare and they're

also so secretive and shy

that usually they run off

when they see a truck.

For the size that they are,

their jaws are incredibly powerful.

Yeah. We've actually seen them pick up

a 50 pound chunk of meat and bone

and walk three of four-miles with it

before taking it back to

the communal den as they often do.

The Owenses were the first to

discover that brown hyenas

have a very complex social structure.

At the communal den related hyenas

share in the feeding of the young

and even adopt each other's orphans.

When we first began our study

of brown hyenas in 1974,

the odd sighting suggested

that they were solitary scavengers.

Yet they lived in a clan

as a group and we couldn't understand

why they were social.

And then one night we followed

a female moving one of her cubs

from her small den into

a huge communal den.

It provides a haven for the cubs

and releases the mothers

from the duty of protection.

They move from one of these

large dens to the other,

and we don't know which one of these

dens they are using at the moment.

There are no fresh bones in this.

So often a zoologist's

hops are disappointed.

The den is empty.

To anybody else this just looks

like three big holes in the ground.

But to us this is just so many...

represents so many memories and discoveries

and hard nights of

watching empty holes

and exciting nights of watching hyenas

This place means so much to us.

It may take weeks to discover

the clan's new den,

but research continuity is crucial.

It took the Owenses

four years to discover

that clan members share a communal den

That observation opened doors

of understanding to previously

inexplicable hyena behavior.

From time to time Delia and Mark fly

a town of native huts

and tourist lodges.

Here they can pick up

research correspondence

and send off manuscripts

for publication.

This is the Crocodile Farm.

Water is so precious in the Kalahari

that they always arrive weighed down

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