A Tale of Conservationists and Poachers

Many of you will recall the book "Cry of the Kalahari."

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The New Yorker, gives his view of what happened to Mark and Delia Owens. An excerpt:

Despite penury, loneliness, and drought, they established a viable research station, and, over several years, they gained the trust of several prides of lions and clans of brown hyenas. In the manner of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Joy and George Adamson, the Owenses spent thousands of hours recording the smallest details of their subjects’ behavior. Early on, Mark Owens went to South Africa to learn how to pilot small airplanes, and the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which became the Owenses’ most important sponsor, gave him money for a single-engine Cessna. He used the plane to make aerial surveys of the Kalahari’s wildlife, and he and Delia conducted close observation of the social life of hyenas, learning about their surprisingly communal behavior. By writing about the exploits of these predators in vivid and accessible prose, they attracted popular attention and funding for their work. They cultivated reporters who came to Deception Valley, and told their story not as one simply of carnivore research but as a tale of young love in a hard land.