Tracking lions, photographing bats, collecting insects, bringing elephants home: it’s all part of a day’s work in Gorongosa National Park. This vast wilderness in Mozambique—including savannah and montane rainforest—was ravaged by civil war in the 1980s and 90s. However, a unique and ambitious 20-year-effort spearheaded by Greg Carr through the Gorongosa Restoration Project—and partnering with the Mozambique government—is working to restore this rich and little-studied African wilderness. Most recently, Carr recruited not only one of the world’s top biologists, but one of its best minds—E.O. Wilson—to survey the park’s tiny inhabitants, the insects. Wilson fell in love with the park.
“Anyone witnessing the rebirth of Goronogosa cannot escape appreciating the magnitude of the accomplishment by Greg Carr’s team and the people of Mozambique,” Wilson wrote in his book, Window on Eternity: A Biologists Walk Through Gorongosa National Park. “It is one thing to draw a line around a beautiful natural area, declare it to be a national park, then add the amenities necessary to serve the public. It is entirely another thing, at a higher order of magnitude, to restore a damaged park to its original health and vibrancy.”
Now, a new series of documentary shorts, dubbed Gorongosa Field Notes by the E.O. Wilson Foundation, highlights the work of biologists, photographers, and field assistants at the newly established E.O Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory to restore the lost wildlife of Gorongosa and study what is already there. The state-of-art laboratory is the first of its kind in the East African country and hopes to train a generation of Mozambican scientists and conservationists.
“Even though we hear daily about environmental problems and loss of biodiversity, it is important to remember that there are success stories as well. We can ‘re-wild’ and reclaim disturbed wilderness areas for Nature,” Greg Carr told mongabay.com. “Gorongosa is an example of a national park that has a greater abundance of wildlife now than ten years ago, and could perhaps have all of its species intact through this century and beyond.”
Gorongosa Field Notes: Tracking Lions and Their Cubs from EOWilson Biodiversity Foundation on Vimeo.
Gorongosa Field Notes: Capturing Photographs of Bats in Flight from EOWilson Biodiversity Foundation on Vimeo.
Gorongosa Field Notes: Murky Depths and Mysterious Ecosystems from EOWilson Biodiversity Foundation on Vimeo.
For the full series: Gorongosa Field Notes
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