SES Elodie Sandford Explorer 2017

SES Elodie Sandford Explorer 2017 Alex Braczkowski has been following and filming tree climbing lions in the Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda since October 2017, and anybody who follows him on Instagram is sure to have been wowed by the stunning images he has been posting.

He and his team have so far identified 32 individual lions as part of a new lion survey across the Kasenyi and Ishasha sections of the national park. Alex will be analysing this data to come up with an estimate for the entire 2,000 km2 park! Alex is supported by the Sandford family and his Elodie Sandford Award funded the majority of the 80 camera traps he will be setting across the park as the second phase of his PhD research.

"We're trying to update large carnivore numbers across a really big area and the SES funding for my PhD research has meant that I not only get really great shots of lions and leopards living in a unique environment (Candelabra and fig tree forests) but has also meant we can set 80 camera traps across the park to get the first numbers of leopards and update lion and hyena numbers taken 10 years ago! Uganda is a case study of a rapidly expanding human population in Africa (it will experience a 5x increase in the next 35 years) - we need to figure out how big cats and other carnivores can live alongside people!" said Alex in Kampala."

ALEXANDERBRACZKOWSKI WEBSITE and ALEXANDERBRACZKOWSKI INSTAGRAM

Story by Henrietta Thorpe