Maasai Mara Guides & Camps - Reducing Visitor Impact On Lions
Last month National Geographic released 'Lion', a four-part series we spent four years making. As you can see from the TX cards, it was a mighty team effort led by BBC Studios.
Since it started streaming on 20 August it has held a place in the Global Top 10 for over two and a half weeks unbroken, peaking at #2 worldwide, and it's sitting at 8.3 on IMDb.com and 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm proud of all of that, but after four years with these lions what I really care about is what happens next. I believe every film we natural history storytellers make should have to leave something behind.
Everyone seems to think lions are doing fine. They're not: the population has fallen by around 50% in the past 25 years, and the pressures are not the ones people imagine.
We found Kio smaller than a bag of sugar, on wobbly legs, and unlikely to make it: half of all lion cubs don't survive their first year. He did, in a landscape where pressure on lions has been a constant. The hardest of it is conflict with livestock, a genuinely complex problem for the communities who live alongside these animals and not one I'm qualified to pronounce on. It's what the Mara Predator Conservation Programme, at Kenya Wildlife Trust, works on every day.
There's another pressure, though, and this one I'm part of. Every lion in the Mara has a daily audience of vehicles, phones and long lenses, people who have travelled a very long way to see something. We watched the pride's cubs unable to get to their mothers, the cars too crowded around a kill. It was incredibly hard to witness. And Kio's audience is bigger than most now that people know his name, which is our doing. I don't have a tidy answer to that. The attention a series like this creates is the same attention that helps pay for a place to be protected, but it isn't free, and the lion doesn't get a vote.
So it's genuinely encouraging that the Disney conservation arm is continuing its support for the Wildlife Conservation Network's Lion Recovery Fund, and I hope that support reaches organisations like MPCP who are doing the work on the ground. But funding isn't the only lever, and after four years of watching how people behave around these animals I keep coming back to the visitor side of it. I'd like to hear from people working on this already: guides, camps, researchers. What can we do to make the predators' lives less hemmed in?
And if you haven't met Kio yet, Lion is streaming now on Disney+, Hulu and National Geographic.
nationalgeographic.com