About Richard Estes

A strong interest in animals fostered by my parents became focused on African large mammals when I was exposed at age ten to the dioramas in Carl Akeley's African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. The highly realistic portrayals of large herbivores of the East African plains, with stuffed animals and collected native plants in the foreground against a painted background of a real African landscape, were totally unlike and infinitely richer than any familiar American scene. Just an hour or two of gazing at those landscapes implanted the desire to enter these scenes, to sit on a kopje overlooking the African plains and just watch what all the antelopes and zebras, the buffaloes and elephants, jackals, lions and hyenas were doing.

Twenty-two long years passed before the dream came true. By then, I had completed my college education (Harvard 1950), where confronted with the pre-med curriculum, I had given up the idea of becoming a biologist; until four years post-graduation a book by Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring, showed me there was a whole field that fit my interest in animal behavior.

But first I spent four years as a journalist/photographer (Yankee Magazine, Dublin, NH), marking time while searching for a job in an African park; spent three years researching and writing a book on the US East Coast (never published); went overseas for the first time in 1958 ­ not to Africa but to Burma, where I spent two years on a wildlife survey. En route, I had the opportunity to spend four months studying ethology with Konrad Lorenz at the Max-Planck-Institut für Verhaltensphysiologie, in Bavaria. This experience convinced me to pursue a PhD in ethology, as soon as I returned from Burma.

On the way home from Burma in 1960, I met with Niko Tinbergen , co-founder of ethology and co-Nobel Laureate with Lorenz, who agreed to accept me as a doctoral candidate at Oxford. But there was a hitch: the University wouldn't permit me to do my dissertation research in Africa. As earning a PhD was secondary to studying African large mammals, I decided to try my luck at the four American universities with ethologists, to whom Tinbergen wrote recommendations. I soon learned that I would have to take science courses I had finessed in college before I could be admitted to a graduate program in zoology. But after only one term as a special student, I was rescued by a Cornell professor, Bill Dilger, who persuaded the graduate school to accept me as a provisional PhD candidate. All I had to do was maintain a B+ average or better in the courses my three faculty advisors prescribed.

Hitting the books again after a lapse of 10 years was hard enough, but not as hard as getting a grant, which were normally awarded only to post-docs. Proposals submitted under the name of one of my professors didn't fly either. However, my proposal to make a comparative behavior study of ungulates in Ngorongoro Crater was promoted by the Chief Conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority, Henry Fosbrooke. He persuaded his Ministry to offer an annual stipend of £1000 to undertake the proposed two-year project. It was just enough, added to $1000 granted by the New York Explorers Club, to send me on my way. So in September 1962, I flew to Nairobi, bought a 1958 Land Rover pickup and proceeded to Tanganyika ­ renamed Tanzania following independence a few months earlier.

Six months later, while living on the Crater floor in a leaky old tent, I learned that the last grant proposal I had submitted, to the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, had been awarded. Now I could afford to erect a prefab one-room cabin in place of the tent, build a kitchen of bamboo poles equipped with a paraffin fridge, and employ a cook and assistant. Being permitted to live on the Crater floor for a total of three years (counting follow-up research in 1973), the first European to reside there since 1928, was the experience of a lifetime and well worth the wait. Partially screened under giant fig trees beside the Munge river, my camp was surrounded by plains teeming with 25,000 ungulates.

My research focused on the behavioral ecology of the wildebeest, the keystone species in the Serengeti ecosystem, with a resident Ngorongoro population of some 14,000. As a secondary study, I made a comparative study of Grant's and Thomson's gazelles, and I also took advantage of the opportunity to observe the hunting behavior of a pack of wild dogs that spent a year in Ngorongoro in 1964/65. Forty-three years later I'm still studying the wildebeest and, with the completion of my final research project in 2004, on the reproductive physiology of the Serengeti population, am starting a book that will include practically all that is known about this extraordinary antelope.

During all this time, the study and conservation of African wildlife has been my main occupaton, as an independent researcher supported by research grants (mainly from the National Geographic Society), except for an eight-year interval in the 1970s as curator of mammals at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Although I only managed to spend a total of 15 years doing field work, including two years studying sable antelope (1968-70), two years at the Serengeti Research Centre (1979-81), and half-time from 1996-2002 continuing research in Ngorongoro and the Serengeti, I was busy reading and writing about African mammals in-between times. Conservation of African and Asian antelopes has been my main volunteer effort, as Chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Antelope Specialist Group from 1978-2004. Details are included in my CV.

As a means of getting back and forth to Africa, and earning extra income, I have led somewhere between 30 and 40 safaris, most recently in August and December 2004.

The best thing that happened to me while doing my dissertation research in Ngorongoro Crater was meeting a lovely Austrian girl who became my wife. Infected with the African virus as young children, our two offspring, now in their thirties, are both pursuing careers in African wildlife ecology and conservation biology. They are presently doing their dissertation research, Lyndon on bongo antelope in Kenya and Anna on the Seregenti elephant population.