© Beverly Joubert / National Geographic Explorer in Residence
Joubert photographed this Botswana lioness in 2005, shooting at dusk with a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II and an EF 600mm f/4L IS USM lens with a 1.4X converter. Click photo for more images by Beverly Joubert and others.
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Beverly Joubert and her husband, Dereck, managed game lodges in South Africa for several years before joining a study of lions in Botswana in 1981. Since that time, they have gone on to stellar careers as wildlife filmmakers and photographers. While they have focused their work on a variety of subjects, it is the big cats of Africa that have always remained the center of their attention and concern.
"A hundred years ago there were 450,000 lions in Africa," says Beverly Joubert. "When we started our work in the early 1980s, research told us there were only about 50,000 lions. That's a terrible decline. In 2001, when Botswana banned lion hunting, the IUCN World Conservation Union was forced to assemble a 'best guess' of the remaining lion population. The numbers had dropped from 50,000 to less than 23,000, and continues to drop at 3 to 5 percent a year. Lobbying by hunters has led Botswana to issue licenses for its last 3,000 lions. The situation is critical everywhere, though. In one month this spring, poachers killed 17 of the last remaining 350 Asian lions in the Gir forest of India."
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For Joubert, photography and activism go hand in hand. "One single image is a stunning reminder of how important these cats are," she says. "A single lioness can be an ambassador for all lions. But it's important to follow up on the story with the fact about the unbelievably sharp drop in the numbers of these animals."
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