"One of the other jackal pairs... began calling east of the Twin Acacias, their strident, quavering, and strangely melodic cries ringing through the valley. We fell silent, moved, as always, by the mournful sound. I t seemed to come from the very heart of the desert - the cry of the Kalahari."
In 1974, husband-and-wife Mark and Delia Owens, freed from academia and tired of the humdrum existence, decided to cut their teeth as field biologists. Selling everything that they owned, they picked up stakes and relocated to Botswana, driving off into the heart of the Kalahari Desert. With almost no money, no connections, and no real idea what they were doing, they set off to see what they could learn about the wildlife of the hauntingly beautiful, yet harsh and unforgiving, landscape.
The Owenses eventually found success as biologists, making several significant discoveries and writing papers. This is not the summation of their scholarly work. Instead, Cry of the Kalahari is a memoir of their struggle to survive and prove themselves in one of Africa's great wildernesses. The Owenses immersed themselves in the world of black-backed jackals, desert lions, and brown hyenas, with the carnivores often settling into their campsite. So removed were they from human habituation that many of the animals had likely never seen humans before and showed a degree of tolerance and fearlessness that the biologists never expected to encounter. Whether it was hyenas interrupting them in the bath or waking up in the morning surrounded by lions, the Owenses certainly got what they came for - an unobstructed view into the lives of Africa's carnivores.
As is often the case in this field, the line between study and activism began to erode over the course of the book. It proves impossible for the biologists to not be made aware of the threats which face their study subjects and not to take steps to address them. Those steps would place the Americans in conflict with the powerful Botswanan beef industry, eventually (outside the scope of this book) resulting in their expulsion from Botswana and moving their operations to Zambia. Even more poignant is the conflict between wildlife conservation and big game hunting, touted by many African governments (and not entirely unjustly) as a source of revenue needed to sustain the impoverished countries. In one of the saddest passages of the book, a favorite study subject of the Owenses is killed (legally) by hunters - very shortly after they'd recounted that animal's story to those same hunters over a friendly dinner.
The Cry of the Kalahari is an excellent recap of conservation of magnificent animals that are already surviving just on the edge of a perilous landscape. Our actions as humans - whether killing them directly, altering the landscape with agriculture, or draining water resources - can make what it already a precarious balancing act an impossibility to survive.
Wildlife conservation in Africa is often portrayed as the conflict between European and American outsiders and African people, sort of a neocolonialism. In that light, it would be irresponsible of me, perhaps, not to mention that the Owenses later came under controversy on account of their shoot-to-kill policy towards poachers, ending the killing of a Zambian poacher years after the events of this book. The family is still wanted for questioning in Zambia pertaining to the shooting.
Turning back to the book itself, the narration is split, with some chapters being told from Mark's perspective, others from Delia's. On top of the animal aspect, the book is a good read filled with action and danger, from venomous snakes to bushfires to plane crashes. There is plenty of emotional drama as well. Anyone who has ever devoted themselves to the difficult cause of wildlife conservation will recognize the gnawing doubt and uncertainty of the work, which often feels like an impossible, thankless task.
This book recently came back to my mind when Ms. Owens (they are now divorced) had her first fiction book, Where the Crawdads Sing, turned into a movie. I've always thought that few natural history/field biology sagas would be better suited to a silver screen adaptation than Cry of the Kalahari.
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