Everything you wanted to know about the social behavior of lions,
primates, naked mole rats, and more, in this engrossing East
African saga by a noted field biologist. Packer's (Dept. of
Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution/Univ. of Minnesota) narrative
covers a two-and-a-half-month mission to Tanzania's Serengeti and
Gombe National Parks and to Ngorongoro Crater. On his 16th trip to
Africa, Packer and his crew follow, tag, and test the Serengeti
lions for parasites. The author muses on lion sociality. Nomadic
males will invade the predominantly female prides and kill all the
cubs in order to father their own: "Every lion in the world has a
father who is a murderer." Females band together for protection
against such raids and to guard against competing prides, resulting
in a division of territory that he calls "the balkanization of the
Serengeti." Packer revisits Jane Goodall's famous primate research
center on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Braving the largest number
of poisonous snakes anywhere in East Africa, he slithers through
the dense jungle while baboon chasers position themselves to catch
stool samples. Then Packer visits the floor of the 2,000-foot-deep
Ngorongoro Crater, which teems with wildebeest, zebra, antelope,
and their predators. Packer's narrative waxes eloquently about the
vastness of the migrating herds across the great spaces of the
Serengeti. He includes horrific tales of murderous attacks on
tourists by bandits. He laments the population pressures
compressing the borders of the parks and the severe depletion of
wildlife by poachers. He does not suffer fools gladly, rails
against the corruption and inefficiency of local bureaucracies, and
quite justifiably complains about the ghastly condition of East
African roads. Although he somewhat murkily invokes the spirit of
Conrad, his final point is worth noting: Humans, unlike lower forms
of life, are capable of improving their society. For both the
general science reader and the armchair traveler, an informative
and exciting safari. (Kirkus Reviews)
Craig Packer takes us into Africa for a journey of 52 days in the
autumn of 1991. But this is more than a tour of magnificent animals
in an exotic, faraway place. A field biologist since 1972, Packer
began his work studying primates at Gombe and then the lions of the
Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater with his wife and colleague
Anne Pusey. Here, he introduces us to the real world of fieldwork -
initiating assistants to lion research in the Serengeti, helping a
doctoral student collect data, collaborating with Jane Goodall on
primate research. As in the works of George Schaller and Cynthia
Moss, Packer transports us to life in the field. He is addicted to
this land - to the beauty of a male lion striding across the
Serengeti plains, to the calls of a baboon troop through the rain
forests of Gombe - and to understanding the animals that inhabit
it. Through his narration, the reader is encouraged to feel the
dust and the bumps of the Arusha Road, smell the rosemary in the
air at lunchtime on a Serengeti verandah, and hear the lyrics of
the "Grateful Dead" playing off bootlegged tapes. "Into Africa"
also explores the social lives of the animals and the threats to
their survival. Packer grapples with questions he has passionately
tried to answer for more than two decades. Why do female lions
raise their young in creches? Why do male baboons move from troop
to troop while male chimps band together? How can humans and
animals continue to coexist in a world of diminishing resources?
Immediate demands - logistical nightmares, political upheavals,
physical exhaustion - yield to the larger inescapable issues of the
interdependence of the land, the animals, and the people who
inhabit it.
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