Author: Mark Owens

Deception Valley, in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, had no road running to it and the nearest settlement was eight hours away. Mark Owens and his wife Delia Owens drove in during 1974 with a third-hand Land Rover and stayed close to seven years, studying brown hyenas, jackals and desert lions that had barely encountered people before. Cry of the Kalahari, which appeared in 1984, sets that fieldwork beside the ordinary problem of surviving on very little water and almost no money. It took the John Burroughs Medal in 1985 and has been translated into seven languages. Owens, born around 1944, took a BS and an MEd at Georgia, where he met Delia Dykes in a protozoology class before they married and left for Africa. From 1985 to 1997 the two ran the North Luangwa Conservation Project in Zambia, work that fed their later books The Eye of the Elephant and Secrets of the Savanna. They shared the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 1981 and were made Knights of the Golden Ark in 1994.