Cecil the lion became a worldwide celebrity a year ago this month, for a horrible reason.
The lion, who lived in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, was killed by a Minnesota dentist and big-game hunter. The international animal-rights community was outraged. New legislation has been proposed and enacted since then to ban hunting and the transport of hunting trophies.
Long before the world knew Cecil, Brent Stapelkamp knew Cecil. Stapelkamp until recently was a lion researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. In that capacity, he kept an eye on the activities of the lions in the 14,651-square-kilometer national park.
“I spent many, many happy hours in his company watching and photographing him and his pride,” Stapelkamp wrote in an email interview from Zimbabwe. “I changed his [GPS tracking] collar the last time in about October of 2014 and so was the last man to touch him alive.”
Stapelkamp photographed Cecil numerous times, as well as other animals in the park. An exhibit of 27 of those photos is on view starting this week at Six Summit Gallery in Ivoryton. Stapelkamp will be present at the opening reception on July 23 and will give a presentation. All photos in the exhibit are for sale in limited editions.
Stapelkamp saw Cecil alive for the last time in May 2015.
“I was racing to the other side of the park to catch and collar another lion, … when I decided to take a short-cut,” he says. “There in the road were Cecil and Jericho. I was really pressed for time but the light was exquisite and they were looking beautiful so I spent about half an hour with them.”
Jericho, who was once Cecil’s rival lion but who made friends with him out of necessity, is seen in a few photos in the exhibit. So are Bush and Bhubezi, two brother lions who stole a lioness from Cecil and then fought over who got to keep her. So is Lucky, a lion whose name didn’t protect him from being caught in a poacher’s snare and killed. Lionesses, monkeys, cubs, giraffes, elephants, cheetahs, birds and other animals were captured by Stapelkamp’s camera.
Sometimes the animals are seen in the wild, sometimes alongside railroad tracks or on the road with bicyclists, a sign of encroaching human contact with the animals.
“My focus has always been wildlife although I now find images that show the modern context to Africa’s wildlife more interesting,” Stapelkamp wrote.
In his job, Stapelkamp kept track of the GPS readouts that came from the collars he put on the lions, and he knew that this encroaching human contact often turned dangerous. (In 2011, poachers killed nine elephants, five lions and two buffaloes. In 2013, dozens of elephants were killed by cyanide poisoning in their water hole by poachers who wanted their ivory.)
“I was monitoring his collar daily and realized that it had stopped working. I thought the battery had died. Then two days later a guide came to say that he’d heard a lion was shot,” he says. “I checked Cecil’s latest data and the pattern suggested something suspicious so I alerted the authorities and passed on the last GPS locations for his collar. I was angry as hell because we had seen this many times before and had expected it to happen to him deep down.”
Laws have been passed in some countries to protect animals from hunting. Stapelkamp hopes the international outrage will help put an end to lion hunting. Meanwhile, he says, not much has changed at Hwange. However, Stapelkamp, who left his job in Hwange in April, says life has changed for Jericho.
“Hunters avoid him like the plague,” Stapelkamp says. “Jericho is certainly not the lion he used to be. He doesn’t stick around vehicles as he used too but slinks away. His pride has done an amazing job to stay safe and are flourishing.”
Six Summit is in Ivoryton, a section of Essex that got its name by being a center for ivory imports. Leo Feroleto, the owner of Six Summit Gallery, has become involved with foundations like the African Wildlife Foundation and the Darien-based Friends of Animals to protect animals from hunting and poaching.
Feroleto asked other artists from the area to create artworks to complement Stapelkamp’s photos. Eileen Fields made sculptures of lions, small ones in bronze and large ones in tiger-eye alabaster. Other artists contributed other photos of lions and drawings and paintings of lions.
A portion of the proceeds of the sales of some of the items will go to the African Wildlife Foundation.
CECIL THE LION’S KINGDOM will be at Six Summit Gallery, at 6 Summit St. in the Ivoryton section of Essex, until Sept. 23. The opening reception on July 23 will feature a talk by photographer Brent Stapelkamp at the Ivoryton Congregational Church, 57 Main St., at 6:15 p.m., followed by a reception at the gallery, which is down the street. Tickets to that event are $25 at shop.sixsummitgallery.com. More information: sixsummitgallery.com.
