Capturing the Beauty of Africa’s Wildlife and Fighting to Save It | Nat Geo Live

Derek Joubert: Anybody who's spent time under the stars like this, in Botswana really understands. Anybody who's listened to this call and knows it will know why we fell in love with Africa. ( leopard growls )

Beverly Joubert: And if the night sounds go quiet, it won't only be the leopard and the lions that we will be losing. It will be pretty much everything, all wildlife and a huge part of our own souls. So this is a pivotal moment in time, and sadly, the battle is against ignorance and greed.

Dereck: In Africa, this battle's gonna be fought around three major species. Elephants that we're losing at a rate of five an hour, lions that we're losing at a rate of five every day, and the rhinos, we lose at one every 6.3 hours, every day. When these animals go extinct people will stop coming and indeed, communities will suffer. In fact, whole economies will go down. ( audience applause ) And so, what we like to face on is the beauty. John Keats wrote that "Beauty is truth and truth is beauty." And that's what we embody in all our work, in our films. And the empathy that we have when something unfolds in front of us.

And this little scene happened a couple of months ago. Two lionesses wanted to cross the river with their cubs. But of course, they saw the ripples of a crocodile going by. And you could feel the tension. And then of course, a little later, hippos came by. So this really freaked the little cubs out and they didn't wanna go. ( audience laughter ) But, the lionesses were determined they needed to get across. And so, they managed to get in the water and they got some of the cubs to follow with them and straight away, the little cubs dodged to their side of the bank again. This took 12 hours, the whole day and eventually, the lionesses got the cubs to go in. But, only when they were midway did they realize that only four cubs were with them. But, they had to keep going forward. And so, they went forward got to the opposite side of the bank, deposited those cubs only to hear on the other side, the other cubs were calling.

And so, they had to re-confront that crocodile infested river and go back again. And of course, the cubs on the other side were thrilled to see their mothers and wanted to play. But, the cubs--their mothers now heard the other cubs on the other side and so they were in a dilemma and they had to try and sort this out. They crossed it seven times that day. And eventually at dusk, they crossed the one last time. ( audience laughter ) And as they crossed the one last time the two little cubs refused to go and they had to leave these two cubs on the other side and they went.

And obviously, the tension in the vehicle between Dereck and I was extreme. So, it was now gonna go into a 24 hour journey for these cubs. And we waited and they waited and at early dawn, the two lionesses came back. But this time, they were almost glued together for their own protection and they were so silent.

And this is what happened. ( instrumental music ) ( audience applause ) We were thrilled. ( audience applause ) So, we use beautiful stories like this sometimes to get our message across. And in this case, we tweeted this we used Instagram, we used it on Facebook. It went out to two million people immediately because everybody was just engaged with this.

We realized just the other day that something quite magical has started to happen. And in fact, people are now taking to the streets. This is a march for lions. A global march that takes place in 32 cities across the globe right now. Who would ever have thought that something like this could ever even happen?

So, Beverly was talking about the ignorance and greed. Something that happened in Kenya recently is really fighting ignorance. As we stood at these piles of ivory being burned we stood in silent memory of the elephants that we've known and the ones that we will never know.

Beverly: And I think, it's important to know that inside these piles of ivory, 11 piles of ivory was a lot of confiscated big cat skins. Lions, leopards and cheetah. What's happening to elephants is happening to the cats. And then who would've thought that the military would be working with us to protect rhinos to relocate them to a safe haven in Botswana? So, the goal is to combat greed and to secure large protected landscapes.

Derek: With the big cat work we've had the opportunity to really focus on what works and what doesn't work. And we've come down to the notion that there are four major causes of declines. Twenty five percent of the declines on the cats is habitat loss. So, it's ultimately important to protect wild landscapes. Poaching is another major pillar of these declines. And so, we spent four and a half months paddling up the river from the Okavango to the northern river systems in the northern part of Botswana, checking on poaching.

The good news is this is the highest density of elephants in the world and the poaching is very low. The bad news is, they weren't always happy to see us. ( audience laughter ) ( instrumental music ) ( audience laughter )

Beverly: So, we've spent the last 35 years filming and focusing all our attention on the big cats. Protecting these magnificent creatures. How can you not be in awe? How can anybody not be in awe of this amazing lion? But, they've led us on a journey. So, six years ago, we were shocked when we discovered that we were losing 95 percent of all these cats in just 50 years. That's alarming.

And so that's where we co-founded the Big Cat Initiative with National Geographic. And as you can see, we now have great progress. We have 91 projects in 27 countries. Many of them are right through Africa. We've managed to give out over three million US dollars in grants. So, all our goal is to now protect these last living and thriving big cats. We need to be successful.

One of the other big pillars of decline is hunting. So, we still lose 660 largely male lions a year to the hunting industry, and a lot of that comes into the USA. One point two million trophies in the last 10 years into the United States. So, we've reached out and we've tried to do whatever we can in this regard. And we've spoken to governments around the world.

We're already starting to see some very, very interesting things at this crossroads. The US government has announced that they will be restricting lion trophies coming into the United States. Similar conversations are happening in Australia in Netherlands, the European Community. Everything is now starting to close down.

We've spoken to airlines. We started this conversation with airlines. There are 42 airlines today that refuse to carry hunting trophies. So, we are having quite an impact and that's what we're so pleased about.

And then, we need to look at the successes in Africa. There has been some policy changes in governments. Botswana stopped all lion hunting and then in 2011 stopped all leopard hunting. Twenty-fourteen, they decided no hunting, completely shut down. Uganda followed in the footsteps of Botswana and they stopped big cat hunting. And now, all hunting. South Sudan followed and they have now stopped all hunting.

A little different with South Africa. South Africa has put a moratorium on leopards, for a year. But that shows that we can't be complacent we need to drive forward. The fourth big pillar, of course, is communities that live next to these big wildlife populations and are now in conflict with them.

We have a number of grantees that are working with communities largely to reduce the conflict with cattle communities like the Maasai, for instance. One particular innovative project that we came across is in redirecting this young warrior instinct to go out and to kill a lion. And we're trying to find with them new ways to direct that energy.

Even though, it's a very, very ancient activity. ( chanting ) ( instrumental music ) So this is a race against time. What we have to do is stop all killings. We have to stop all conflicts and we need to mount a major campaign to stop all the trade in animal parts for us to be successful.

Who would've thought that within a year of Cecil, the lion in Zimbabwe being killed there would be marches in the streets there would be government policies being changed there would be airlines stopping trophy hunting? And so for us, there's never been a time when the path in this crossroads has been clearer.

-Thank you very much. -Thank you. ( audience applause )