(lively music)
(dramatic music)
(speaking Portuguese)
- Armies had to eat, elephants were killed,
tusks were sold to buy guns.
So, everything just pretty much got wiped out.
(tense music)
When I got here, nothing was known about lions.
There'd never been any formal research on carnivores.
So people had casual observations about how many lions
and where, but we really had no data.
I thought I saw something back there.
The first thing you wanna do is count,
you wanna know how many and where.
Where is everybody?
But we had a hell of a time in the beginning
actually finding lions in this wilderness.
It's mostly roadless, it's long-grass habitats.
So we worked in the beginning just to be able to see lions.
He's a beautiful lion.
And then, we took it a step further
and began to put GPS collars on prides and coalitions.
So, groups of females, groups of males.
And those, in turn, took us deeper into the story.
And what we quickly found is that lions
were still being killed.
(lion roaring)
People were setting wire snares in the landscape
to catch warthogs and waterbuck, and buffalo,
but they were also, they were catching lions.
Lions are bycatch in those traps.
Jinga lost his foot in a gin trap in February.
And the numbers were showing one in three
were either maimed, like losing actual limbs,
or killed in these snares.
I came here as an ecologist, as a scientist.
Start the timer.
But quickly had to switch gears because when we saw
the trends for lions here and other species,
we had to intervene.
That was the leap that we made as a team.
We went from being scientists, purely scientists,
just collecting data to intervening and really trying to get
the population jump-started.
So, we'll collar him so we can monitor his progress
and keep treating him.
So, we had to stop illegal hunting.
We had to create a refuge for these species
to naturally recover.
(dramatic music)
(speaking Portuguese)
The rangers are the ones on the ground.
And we put technology in their hands,
high-resolution satellite imagery,
and we paired their patrols with GPS data
we were getting from the collars.
So, those satellite collars that are on lions
send us positions every few hours.
So we know where lions are,
we know where the core habitats are.
And so we know where to focus strategic patrols.
In the first two years,
we saw a complete turnaround in the situation.
Lion poaching declined by 95%.
We haven't had a lion snared in over a year already.
And believe me, I look.
(upbeat music) (speaking Portuguese)
- In the past three years we've had 13 cubs
and seven of those have been female.
And that's the beauty of lions.
If you give them the opportunity, they grow.
They breed almost every two years.
The survival is very high in Gorongosa.
There's a lot of food, there's a lot of space.
So, they've done very well.
(tense music)
We understand from the science and the data
that we've collected, that we could have three times as many
lions in this park than we currently have.
And so that's a target, that's a goal.
And so, we use the science and the data
to really guide us towards those.
(tense music continues)
What we're trying to do here is heal the ecosystem,
put the pieces back together.
(tense music continues)
The lions took us straight to the heart of a problem.
And once we solved their problem,
it laid the ground for all these other species
to come back too.
It really was just a matter of letting nature
do what it does best.
And we did that by just taking the human factor
out of the situation.
So where before humans were having a negative impact
on populations by setting snares, by shooting animals,
you remove that and you just step back,
and you let nature take its course.
And in a system as robust and resilient as Gorongosa.
you can let that happen.