On a trip to Gorongosa National Park in central Mozambique, photographer Charlie Hamilton James was particularly keen to capture the park’s lions (Panthera leo) on the extensive floodplain that appears after the seasonal rains—“a feature,” he says, “that makes the park so special.” 

The floodplain attracts birds such as storks and great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus), which move through the water in coordinated V-formations as they herd fish into the shallows. Although lions are mostly nocturnal hunters, Hamilton James caught one lioness repeatedly charging at the pelicans by day. “It was a pretty unique scene, and one I have never witnessed in years working with lions,” he says. (The birds easily avoided her.)

Gorongosa, sometimes called “the Serengeti of the South,” is one of the world’s great wildland restoration stories. After Mozambique shook off colonial master Portugal in the mid-1970s, a brutal 15-year civil war followed. Perhaps a million people died. The park, which lies in the country’s center, was a frequent battlefield. Up to 90 percent of its large wildlife was slaughtered for bushmeat, or for ivory to purchase arms. The slaughter continued after the war’s end in 1992. By 2001, Cape buffalo numbers had dropped from 13,000 to 15; the wildebeest population had fallen from 6,400 to one. A 2021 study in the journal Science found that in response to the relentless poaching, the park’s female elephants evolved not to grow tusks.

Rebirth began in earnest in 2004 with the creation of the Gorongosa Restoration Project. The project is jointly managed by the U.S.-based Carr Foundation, a philanthropy, and the Mozambican government to support conservation as well as human- and economic-development activities within the park and in a buffer zone around it, employing local people as rangers, scouts, and guides with a share of tourism fees flowing to surrounding communities. After relocations of leopards, hyenas, hippos, wild dogs, elephants, buffalo, and wildebeest to the park in the years after the war, an aerial survey in October 2024 found more animals of all kinds than before the war. Gorongosa has even started to export wildlife to help repopulate other parks. 

Lions are a more complicated story. Across Africa, the animals are experiencing devastating declines, with wild populations down as much as 75 percent. Reasons include loss of habitat, poverty fueled by war, trophy hunting, and poaching for bushmeat and for Asian markets, where lion parts are used in traditional medicine and luxury products, such as lion-bone wine, among growing wealthy populations in China and Vietnam. 

But even amid such bleak news, Gorongosa is a bright spot. After the war, the park had just five or six lions. Today, it’s home to about 150 lions, and their numbers are increasing. (In 1969, before the civil war, there were about 200.) Poaching has dropped to nearly zero thanks to regular patrols and efforts to find snares. Gorongosa shows that healing the world is possible—if humans have the will, cooperation, and money to do so.