Dereck Joubert: Botswana has many faces. But the part of it that we love most is in the Okavango, in the northern regions, where there are rolling plains at Kalahari sandveld, a huge variety of wildlife — big herds of elephants, probably one third to arguably half of the world’s elephants there. And for me, it’s the smell of the wild sage, and the elephant dung, and the mud, and the flood that just conjures up that wild place.
Beverly Joubert: And then putting us into our work there. We truly are discovering things that have never been seen before, especially the nocturnal work. We were working with 30 lions in a pride and a hyena clan of about 40 or 50, and they would come in and challenge the lions at nighttime. And we were watching battles that we had never, ever dreamt would happen. And in fact, I mean East Africa, when we spoke about it to the other scientists, they said, “It’s impossible. We see lions and hyenas lying together in the shade during the day. It could never happen.” And that’s really when we picked up cameras. We decided we had to document everything we were seeing so that it was really evident to all scientists through Africa.