GALLERY X EXHIBITIONS
Mara-Serengeti: A Big Cat Paradise
The Mara-Serengeti in East Africa is an ancient land of startling beauty. It is a world of natural splendour that Angela and Jonathan have been fortunate to witness on a daily basis for much of their lives, recording its every mood and nuance in words and photographs. Here you can step back in time to when man was an integral part of nature and wild animals roamed free for as far as the eye could see. Mara-Serengeti is home to the great migration of wildebeests and zebras, whose nomadic wanderings define the extent of the 25,00 sq km Mara-Serengeti ecosystem straddling the Kenya/Tanzania border.
Watching from the shadows are the silent predatory cats, crouched among rocky outcrops or hunkered down in the grass, adding palpable tension to the scene. A leopard peers golden-eyed from the dense canopy of a fig tree, while a pride of lions stakes out a favourite ambush site close to a river. Meanwhile, a mother cheetah sits motionless atop a termite mound, elevated 2 metres above the grass, her sharp amber eyes picking out the distant shapes of wildebeest calves and gazelles. It is this—Africa's sublimely beautiful big cats—that has been the dominant theme of Angela and Jonathan’s work over the past 45 years. In 2021, increasingly concerned for the future of places like the Mara-Serengeti, they founded the Sacred Nature Initiative based on three pillars: inspire, educate, and conserve. It is a global mission highlighting the importance of entire ecosystems. As Angela says, “If we want to save iconic species like lions, we need to ensure they have somewhere to live.”
