Pride & Purpose
An extraordinary new safari goes deep into Namibia to track the rare Namib Desert lion—and to work with local communities to help save it.
By Stephen Wallis

Summer 2020

Dr. Philip Stander—Flip, as his friends call him—emerged from his truck barefoot and dusty. His khaki baseball cap, T-shirt, and shorts were stained, and he looked like he hadn’t bathed in some time. And, well, he probably hadn’t.

The expert on Namibia’s rare desert-adapted lions had been out searching for a particular lioness—officially Xpl-45, nicknamed Lovechild—for nearly two weeks. “I’ve been doing 12- to 18-hour days, covering more than 850 miles,” he said by way of introduction, extending a hand and forearm scribbled with numbers. “I’m not even sure what they mean anymore,” he offered with a shrug.

Stander has spent more than three decades tracking, studying, and working to protect the world’s only population of desert-dwelling lions—currently around 130—which make their home in the northern Namib Desert. His groundbreaking research, the subject of two documentary films titled Vanishing Kings and a book of the same name, has brought international attention to these lions, which in the early ’90s were presumed to be extinct, having been killed by trophy hunters or farmers protecting their livestock. But after evidence of lion activity was discovered in the area, Stander launched the Desert Lion Conservation Project, in 1998. Since then he has been tracking prides across the Namib, including along the desolate Skeleton Coast. After disappearing from its beaches 30 years ago, the lions have returned and adapted by feeding on cormorants and seals.

The oldest desert on earth, the Namib is an unforgiving yet spectacularly beautiful land of rock and sand, punctuated by tabletop mountains and vast undulating dunes. It’s little wonder the region has become popular with safari-goers looking for off-the-beaten-path experiences. While the Namib doesn’t support the abundant wildlife found in many other parts of southern Africa, it is home to an array of desert-adapted game, including cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, and the largest population of free-ranging—and critically endangered—black rhinos anywhere. Lions survive here by hunting antelope such as oryx and springbok, as well as ostriches, zebras, giraffes, and, along the coast, Cape fur seals. With little water available, the lions rarely drink, relying on the blood of their prey for hydration. They also kill domestic livestock, leading to conflicts with humans—the greatest threat to their existence.

What’s perhaps most exceptional about the Namib lions is their massive territories, which can span 10,000 square miles, compared with less than 100 square miles for savannah lions. They can easily cover 30 miles in a single night, often over extremely rough terrain. That creates serious challenges for Stander, who patrols the landscape in his customized Toyota Land Cruiser, a roving research center that wouldn’t be out of place in a Mad Max movie. The equipment inside includes tranquilizers and medicines, a large speaker used for attracting or warding off lions, and computers for processing data from the GPS tracking collars fitted to more than a quarter of the region’s lions. Newer satellite-connected collars make it easier to remotely monitor the animals’ movements, but many, including Lovechild, still wear older collars, which require a close range of a few miles to be tracked.

“It’s crazy how much effort goes into finding them,” conceded Stander, who is often on the move, virtually nonstop, for weeks at a time. When he is, his laundry isn’t the only thing that’s neglected. He sleeps sporadically, and he was vague about how often he eats. “I rely a lot on the kindness of others,” he said, adding, “Everything is driven by how the lions behave. It’s why I work the way I do.”

I had come to the Namib to shadow Stander in his research on a trip organized by Wilderness Safaris as part of the outfitter’s Travel with Purpose program of small-group itineraries, which emphasize conservation and community engagement. Our base was Wilderness Safaris’ Damaraland Camp, a collection of ten bungalows on a rocky slope overlooking the Huab River Valley, with rooms that were luxurious by desert standards (lack of five-star shower pressure notwithstanding), excellent food, and attentive service. But the greatest privilege was the chance to see Stander at work. For more than two decades, Wilderness has provided him with financial support and lodging, but this was the first time it had collaborated with him on a trip—“an experiment,” as Stander called it—that gave guests the chance to witness his efforts firsthand.

The opportunities Wilderness’s Travel with Purpose program offer don’t just satisfy a growing demand for deeper and more exclusive safari experiences—they support a greater mission to build community-based conservation. “Tourism gives value to wildlife,” Stander told our group of four over dinner the first evening. “It provides income and job opportunities and a whole range of other benefits to the communities. Without tourism, we would not be able to justify protecting lions in this area.”

Still, the dynamic between humans and lions remains complex—even more so amid Namibia’s worst drought in a century, already well into its second year when I visited. Cattle had been dying in large numbers, while the surviving animals were weakened and vulnerable, and with diminishing prey in the wild, lions were increasingly turning to alternative food sources, livestock chief among them.

Preventing human-lion conflict has become a priority for Stander, who has worked closely with the Namibian government and local conservancies to create mitigation strategies now being implemented. These include cladding livestock enclosures known as kraals with tarps or dark netting (when lions can’t see inside, they’re unlikely to attack) and installing warning-system towers in conflict hot spots. These structures—13-foot-high antennas with solar panels, batteries, speakers, and LED floodlights—detect when collared lions are nearby, triggering bright lights and alarms designed to deter the predators and alert residents.

One morning we joined Stander on a trip to the tiny village of Driefontein, where the first of these towers was erected. “In the past year, we’ve lost half of our 50 cows,” a woman who came to greet us told me, though it was unclear how many had died at the hands of lions. Another local recounted how lions had breached a kraal, killing the dogs guarding it and the goats inside. The story was the same in nearby De Riet, where a young man told me that “some weeks, we are losing five or more goats”—not only to lions but also to jackals and hyenas.

Sometimes the only answer is to relocate problem lions. Weeks before our visit, Stander had tranquilized three males who had made multiple attacks in Driefontein and moved them to a conservation area farther inland to avoid conflicts. That contrasts with the sad fate of five male lions, nicknamed the Five Musketeers, who were a focus of Stander’s research for years and were the stars of the Vanishing Kings movies he made with wildlife filmmakers Lianne and Will Steenkamp. Between July 2016 and April 2017, all five were either poisoned or shot, highlighting for the world the dangers faced by the Namib lions. Indeed, Stander’s work is relentless—and it doesn’t always end favorably. “But we have to do this,” he offered resolutely. “These lions belong to the world.”

While we had come to see the lions Stander so fiercely defends, we soon began to realize this would be no simple safari. Given the animals’ constant roving, anticipating and pinpointing their location can be difficult, and even with the benefit of tracking systems, there was no guarantee we’d find them. As we discovered, when you come to the Namib to see lions, you have to be flexible, patient, persistent.

On our first couple of days at Damaraland, Stander’s satellite reports indicated the nearest lions were hundreds of miles away, so we set out for the dry riverbeds of the Huab in search of other game. In these channels, for most of the year water can be found only beneath the surface, but it’s enough to support a variety of flora, notably the ana trees whose leaves and seedpods are a primary source of nourishment for elephants, giraffes, and kudu. You can’t have a more exhilarating up-close elephant encounter than the one we experienced there, when two of the giant animals approached our vehicle, not 15 minutes apart, each stopping a heart-racing few inches from our open Land Cruiser. The next day, we came upon another rarity: a pair of black rhinos, a mother and her five-year-old calf, feeding on clusters of Damara milkbush—one of the few splashes of green in this arid moonscape, its breadstick-like branches toxic to just about every other species.

By the fourth day, all of us were itching to find lions. Stander proposed a journey: We’d travel the six hours to the Doros Crater, where he hoped to find the Huab pride, a family of nine, only two of which had been collared. Stander was eager to fit collars to at least two of the group’s subadult males. “They will soon start wandering around on their own and may even disperse by mid-2020,” he explained. “This inevitably brings them into conflict with villages and livestock, and we need to monitor their movements.”
The collaring process typically begins with Stander enticing the lions into a clearing—usually by setting out prey, often a springbok or other game that he shoots nearby—in order to tranquilize the animal with a dart. Otherwise, he has to improvise to try to get a clear shot. Since the darting must be done in the evening, when the lions are active, it means working in darkness. Even though Stander, who has tranquilized hundreds of animals, has the process down cold, a lot still has to go right.

After an early breakfast, we headed out, trailing Stander, who left well before sunrise to get a head start on locating the pride. For hours we bounced over rugged tracks, traveling through a landscape awe-inspiring in its diversity, from vast fields of coppery stones and the all-black Burnt Mountain to expanses of loose white quartz that resemble, improbably, a dusting of snow on the desert floor. We stopped to look at rock carvings etched millennia ago and bundles of Welwitschia, a low-lying plant whose leaves can live for as long as 1,500 years.

It was midafternoon by the time we caught up with Stander, who had news. He had found the lions, but he hadn’t spotted any game that could be killed to lure them into the open. Nonetheless, with the sun beginning to dip, Stander led us into the Goantagab riverbed, a twisting gorge with sheer rock walls, until we came to a clearing where we found the Huab pride lounging beneath a mopani tree. Keenly aware of our presence, but decidedly unconcerned with it, they yawned and flicked their tails. It wasn’t the dramatic collaring mission we had anticipated, but it was a magnificent moment—and one that put the importance of Stander’s work into perspective.

“You’re lucky if you see two, three, maybe four lions together,” Stander told us once the sun had gone down, noting that he’d be returning for another attempt at collaring in the coming days. He will eventually relinquish much of this day-to-day fifeldwork—it’s too much for a single person, even Stander—and hand over the work of the Desert Lion Conservation Project to the locals he has been training. It won’t be easy for him to let go, something made all the more evident as we said our goodbyes. While we were off to a late dinner at Damaraland Camp, Stander was preparing to catch a few hours of sleep before heading back out into the desert again. A human-lion conflict had flared up—and he still needed to find the elusive Lovechild.

Wilderness Safaris’ Travel with Purpose trips (wilderness-safaris.com) to Namibia can be booked through Next Adventure (from $6,000 per person; nextadventure.com).