Knowing that no one on Earth knows where we are, or could ever find us, we feel special, as if we are the only two people in the universe.”
Now and then we wake to watch the gentle sweep of the Southern Cross through the sky. In “Kalahari Romance,” an article Mark Owens published in International Wildlife, he described his ideal day: “We land in the grass, most likely in a place never visited by modern man, and sleep in the open under the wing. 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. By writing about the exploits of these predators in vivid and accessible prose, they attracted popular attention and funding for their work. 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.
Hunter the hunted how to#
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.
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. After washing the dishes, we took sponge baths in the dishwater, then strained the coffee-colored liquid through a cloth into the truck’s radiator.”ĭespite 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. But if we didn’t watch it closely, the water would quickly evaporate or collect bees, twigs, and soil. The water from the drums tasted like hot metallic tea, and to cool it for drinking, we filled tin dinner plates and set them in the shade of the acacia. In their book “Cry of the Kalahari,” which was published in 1984, the Owenses described their dreadful living conditions: “We rationed ourselves to seven gallons of water each per week, for bathing, cooking, and drinking. The Kalahari is virtually empty of people: the Owenses later wrote of living with only “a few bands of Stone Age Bushmen in an area larger than Ireland.” The wildlife there had not been depleted by poaching, as it had been in other parts of Africa, and though the valley was in many ways an unforgiving place-temperatures can climb above a hundred and twenty degrees in summer-it was distant enough from the capital, Gaborone, to insure that they would be left alone to do their work. It was a perfect spot for the Owenses to make camp. They eventually found their way to a place called Deception Valley, in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. Mark and Delia had scoured the map of Africa, searching for a site so isolated that its wildlife would have no knowledge, and no fear, of humans. Mark, who grew up on a farm west of Toledo, Ohio, was twenty-nine, the divorced father of a four-year-old boy named Christopher. When they arrived, in January, 1974, Delia, the daughter of a Georgia trucking executive, was twenty-four years old. They organized an auction, sold their possessions, and used the modest proceeds to buy camping equipment and a pair of one-way air tickets to Johannesburg. In the early nineteen-seventies, Mark and Delia Owens, two graduate students in biology at the University of Georgia, were seized by the idea of resettling in remotest Africa. Elephants have their protectors in Zambia’s North Luangwa National Park, where poachers preyed on elephants.
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