Chapter 1: What inspired Alex Braczkowski to work with big cats?
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Alex Brazkowski spends a lot of his life around big cats, but he's only been really scared once. On that day in Uganda, Alex was tracking a pride of rare tree climbing lions. He was in his little Suzuki Jeep without proper doors. And as night began to fall, the lions came down from their trees and became very interested in Alex.
Alex is a conservation biologist and a wildlife cameraman with National Geographic. He's documented leopards in India, jaguars in the Amazon and lions in Uganda. And one of the lions there that has a special place in his heart is known as Jacob. And if ever there was a cat who really did have nine lives, it would be Jacob, who survived being poisoned, trapped, snared and gored by a buffalo.
Hi, Alex. Hi, Sarah. Hi. You grew up in Africa on the continent that's home to these amazing mammals. But where were you born?
I was born in a little town in Greece, in Athens, called Attica.
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Chapter 2: How did Alex's early experiences shape his career in wildlife conservation?
Yeah, my parents were refugees from Poland and they fled to Greece. And, yeah, I was born along the small little seaside town, yeah.
Do you have any memories of Greece?
Mainly animal and beach memories, actually. So dolphins and, yeah, small cocker spaniels. That's really the only thing I remember, yeah.
So that's where you were when you were born. How did your family end up in South Africa?
Yes. So they were basically trying to find a way to to kind of rebuild their lives after the fall of communism. And in 1993, it was basically a toss up between either Canada, Australia and South Africa. And they managed to get a little window to to become doctors in South Africa. And that's where they went. Yeah.
And so where were you based there?
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Chapter 3: What unique behaviors do tree-climbing lions exhibit?
Johannesburg, first in a little place called Rosettenville and then later Parkhurst before moving down to the town of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal.
Lots of people, Alex, who devote their working lives to animals the way that you do, they're often being drawn to them from a very young age. Like some of their first memories seem to be about trying to trap reptiles or chase after the family dog. Was that the case with you?
Yeah, so those memories from Greece was actually, yeah, it was actually a dolphin that had washed up on the beach. So I don't know if that kind of spoke to me as a little, you know, probably two or three year old. But then later it was snakes that sort of drew me, you know, working at the Johannesburg Zoo as a volunteer. Yeah, there was always something, either keeping a snake or...
There was always some kind of animal link throughout my childhood.
Tell me how you ended up working as a volunteer at the zoo in Johannesburg.
It wasn't a particularly joyful story. I was quite a naughty young boy. It was grade eight at De La Salle Holy Cross College. And I was very naughty. I got into an altercation with my algebra teacher at that point, and I landed up throwing a ham sandwich.
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Chapter 4: Why is Jacob, the three-legged lion, a significant figure in this story?
I got expelled. And, yeah, while my parents were looking for a new school for me, I decided to volunteer at the Johannesburg Zoo.
Ham sandwich. Well, it could have been worse. I thought you were going to say I let you through a chair at the algebra teacher. Ham sandwiches. Thankfully, it was a soft landing, I assume. Yeah. How did your parents react to that? I mean, immigrant doctors, I guess they had pretty high expectations for their son. How were things at home when that happened?
I think they were pretty, pretty lousy growing up in terms of sort of my academic background. I was certainly a late bloomer on the whole science and conservation biology front. It only happened when I left school. And I kind of got into an awkward position because of my inability to get good marks, especially in maths.
Chapter 5: What challenges do lions face in their natural habitat?
I wasn't an immediate fit for the zoology program. So I actually couldn't get into university.
So tell me about the volunteering work then where you had this practical experience with animals at the zoo. What kind of animals did you work with when you were just 12, 13?
Yeah, it was chimpanzees. And then also at the reptile section with a guy called Andrew Pringle. So I was working on snakes, but mostly just chopping up vegetables and fruit for the chimpanzees. Yeah. So it was, yeah, but I, You know, for any youngster, those kinds of imprinting memories of being close to animals, especially large primates, are pretty special.
Instead of going straight into university, you went to Game Ranger School, which sounds sort of wildly exciting. What happens at Game Ranger School?
Yeah, so that was at the Southern African Wildlife College. It's actually still available to anybody who might be listening and who might be interested. It's actually a wildlife campus that's located on the edge of the Kruger National Park in South Africa, our largest and wildest national park in South Africa.
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Chapter 6: How does Alex document and study the behaviors of lions?
And Basically, it was about a year-long course teaching, you know, students from all sort of walks of life on how to track animals, basic biology and conservation, and also even showing guests what to and what not to do around wildlife on safari.
And even as a young guy, teenager still, I guess at that point, 18 or so, Was it being out away from other people, away from the cities and suburbs, being in the wild that was part of what was drawing you as well as the animals themselves?
Yeah, I think so. And yeah, just, you know, there's, I think increasingly there's fewer and fewer, you know, wild spaces. And what I mean by wild spaces, I don't necessarily mean where people are not found. There's a lot of places where you find people in wildlife living together across the world. What I mean specifically is this idea of big fierce animals living with us.
So things like elephants, things like, You know, Cape buffalo, African lions, leopards, tigers, whatever they might be, those are becoming rarer. So I think that was the drawcard of the Wildlife College was the ability to live alongside things like elephants.
You did then end up at university, at the Nelson Mandela University. What was your campus like?
Yeah, that's one of the academic sort of gems of South Africa that not many people know about.
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Chapter 7: What are the conservation efforts surrounding tree-climbing lions?
They know about the University of Cape Town, but they don't know that there's a smaller campus about 300 kilometres east called the Nelson Mandela University School of Natural Resource Management. And what's incredible about this place is it's nestled into the heart of the Cape Fold Mountains and also some of the last temperate forests of South Africa. So you have...
Yeah, a campus that's actually also got big animals living on it. So you've got leopards running around there. You've got caracal running around there.
Running around the actual, like, past the library.
So there's a little, there's a campus section called Fern Tech. It's like where the furniture training, the equivalent of TAFE, takes place. And there's been leopards that have been photographed on camera traps right there.
Amazing. Are they dangerous?
No, not at all. These particular leopards are very interesting because they're about half the size of leopards across the majority of continental Africa. So traditionally, leopards will sort of males will get up to about 85, 86 kilograms, females maybe 45, 50.
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Chapter 8: What future does Alex envision for Jacob and his pride?
These ones are literally half that. So males will seldom get to over 45 kilograms and females maybe 22, 25 kilograms. So these tiny little, you know, diminutive leopards running around the campus.
Yeah. What did you come to appreciate about leopards living so close to them during that time? Alex, what did you learn about them as a species?
Yeah, so at that point, there wasn't a lot of knowledge known specifically about what they are eating there and also some of the interactions with people and also how many they live. So, you know, at that point, we were basically after every...
campus class that I would have, I would go out with a little backpack and try and collect the droppings of the leopards, try and find them to see what they were eating. Yeah. So that was one of the things I was doing. And what were they eating? So in that particular area, because there's forest, they're actually eating bush buck.
So it's a medium-sized ungulate that weighs about 45, 50 kilograms. And also, ironically, these small rats called flay rats. They live in the sort of swamp and the grassland areas around the campus.
So here you were doing academic work, I guess, starting to research these big cats and other animals of this part of Africa. How did you get a foot in the door first off with National Geographic?
Yeah, so that was really the workings of one man initially called Steve Winter. So he's National Geographic's arguably the premier big cat photographer. He's been working on big cats for over 25 years for the magazine. He's just embarked on his latest Asiatic lion story. And we met in 2012 when I was actually doing my master's fieldwork on leopards in a game reserve called Pindah.
And I guided him around for just a week, showed him some of the leopards, showed him some of the wildlife. Just he was taking photos at the time. And then later, a couple of years later, I needed a job and I was just looking. I was contacting people and I said, hey, have you got anything going on? And he's like, yeah, I'm about to embark on the biggest magazine story on leopards ever done.
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