This summer I'll be investigating Tanzania's best locations for the endangered African wild dog.
Today there are common in only three areas.
Tanzania hosts one of these, as well as having lesser numbers of dogs in three other parks. If my scouting trip is successful, we will be offering a wild dog trip in late August-early September of 2002. Besides wild dogs, we'll of course also be filming lions, elephants, game animals, and other predators, but our focus will be to film this most endangered but charismatic animal, the 'painted wolf,' the wild dog. Our hopes will be to film another lion-buffalo encounter, one of the true classics of wildlife interaction and predation, but we're sure to see plenty of cats including lions, cheetahs, and hopefully leopoards, as well as the smorgasbord of wildlife species common to the Masai Mara. Babies are generally common, since most feline predators go into heat during the peak food times, during August and September, when the gnu herds arrive in the Mara.