Thanks for the interest. I have been working on African carnivores for 46 years; I bought my first shotgun (Brno ZP49 in Nairobi) when I was teaching myself how to dart hyenas and they kept ending up in dense bush full of other interesting creatures. A shotgun license was easier than a rifle, but I eventually got permits for the other guns.

S&W – the sidearm is a high capacity Paraordnance .45 souped up to take .460 Rowland, which is a .45 that thinks it is a .44 Mag. No pistol is much good for large animals, but I want something right at hand when I am crouching over a lion at night, usually with all her friends and relations right there and my shotgun or rifle propped against the car. It is compensated, so very fast and controllable compared to a big revolver, but I hope never to test it from under a lion.

Stan – all the lion work is directly for conservation. I studied various aspects of spotted hyena biology for 20 years but when I got into conservation I found that no one was interested in hyenas, even though they are the most interesting animal in the world. I switched to lions before everyone else noticed that there had been a serious decline, and have run a series of conservation research projects in Kenya. Before that, no one knew anything about lions outside parks, where they are heavily persecuted for eating livestock, the reason they have been poisoned and speared nearly to extinction in recent decades. We did a great deal of work with both very traditional Masai pastoralists and modern western beef ranchers on managing cattle to protect them from predators, mostly by modifying ancient African livestock management practices. Ranches in Laikipia County are a great conservation success, with healthy populations of herbivores and plenty of predators. These may be the only ranchers anywhere who actually want to maintain large predators among their cattle.

Modern GPS collars yield phenomenal data on movements: we used to fly for hours once a month to get a few data points from VHF collars, but today I can sit at my laptop in California and see last night's movements of the collared animals (one female per pride) and where they were an hour ago. Real time movements can be checked on a website running Google Earth, so ranchers can see where the lions are this morning and direct their herders to avoid that area. GPS collars have taught us a great deal about lion habitat use, particularly in relation to human activities like cattle herding, essential to developing better ways for coexistence between livestock and lions. I am currently working with colleagues doing state of the art biology using GPS collars that also contain an accelerometer. From these they can reconstruct extremely detailed behavioral data and energy consumption (keeping fed and raising cubs is much harder when you are avoiding people and cattle all the time). The real time data show us where the animals settled down last night, and we go out in the morning to find kill remains. Huge fun.

But I have never hunted doves and miss half a dozen ducks for each one I hit. Darting lions is lousy practice for birds.