Acclaimed Lion Conservationist Paola Bouley on Her Second Chance: ‘It Feels Like a Homecoming’
Bouley’s new project at Macossa-Tambara in Mozambique is part of an effort to double the African lion population by 2050.
The post Acclaimed Lion Conservationist Paola Bouley on Her Second Chance: ‘It Feels Like a Homecoming’ appeared first on The Revelator.
Ecologist Paola Bouley recently spent a day with local women in central Mozambique as they whirled around in colorful skirts, dancing near ancient baobab trees as part of a community ritual. The next day she heard zebras, saw evidence that an elephant had passed by, and followed large lion pawprints down a forest path in central Mozambique.
Bouley with lion tracks. Photo courtesy Macossa.org
The day stirred up echoes of her childhood, when she first felt an innate draw to the natural world. As a 10-year-old in apartheid South Africa, she preferred climbing trees in her backyard, sitting on rock outcrops with her dogs observing the animals.
But the neighborhood around her was rapidly suburbanizing. The untouched landscape was soon paved over.
“I found refuge in nature,” she says. “So when the development happened, I had this feeling of loss.”
Today Bouley finds herself back in nature, helping lead a team of Mozambican and international conservationists and scientists rehabilitating the Macossa-Tambara region, an ecosystem the size of Yellowstone National Park. Centered around a river basin, the area supports lions, leopards, pangolins, a vast forest, and 40,000 people.
“When you’re in an area like Macossa-Tambara, you feel very whole,” says Bouley. “It’s the birthplace of humanity. We all have roots in a place like this.”
Bouley became the codirector of Macossa-Tambara in 2023. Her goals there include supporting efforts to double African lion populations by 2050.
In many ways that’s a return to form. Macossa-Tambara sits to the west of Gorongosa Mountain and Gorongosa Park, where Bouley first earned international recognition for her efforts conserving lions and other endangered species.
But the journey between the two sites posed many challenges and nearly pushed her out of conservation altogether.
Gorongosa Park
Bouley found her way to Mozambique through a series of magnetic pulls.
After moving to the United States for college, Bouley studied engineering with a plan to become an astronaut, but she says she left classes feeling that she was being pushed into a soulless military-industrial complex.
A chance poetry class returned her to her interest in the natural world, and she switched majors to biology with a focus on marine conservation. In graduate school and afterward, she worked on a program that conserved a nearly extinct salmon population in the San Francisco Bay.
But missing her native continent — and grappling with persistent seasickness that made being on boats challenging — Bouley returned to Africa in 2010 to work on a large carnivore project in Zambia.
In 2011, when she was waiting to board a flight in a small airport for a holiday in Mozambique, an old park warden asked her if she was going to Gorongosa Park.
Bouley had never heard of it.
Gorongosa Park in Mozambique had once been seen as a crown jewel of Africa. Then its war of independence from Portugal and subsequent civil war — spanning the 1960s to 1990s — ravaged the ecosystem.
Gorongosa was an epicenter of resistance. During the war animals were caught in the crossfire, leaving the park barren.
But the worst part for the park came after the war, a period marked by further unrest that enabled a trophy hunting free-for-all as foreign and national wealthy hunters descended on the land to kill what they wanted, whether for ivory or food.
During this difficult transition period for the country, rural people in poverty and in desperate need of cash would set snares and steel door traps, mainly to kill animals and sell bushmeat to buyers in the city. The traps were meant for warthogs, waterbuck, and antelope, but lions frequently traversed the same trails.
By the time Bouley first heard of Gorongosa, the lion population there had fallen to just 30 big cats, many of whom bore permanent injuries from traps and snares. Common sightings included a lion without a paw or a three-legged lioness hopping around with her cubs because a snare or steel jaw trap had severed her limb. Some lions had gnawed off their own limbs to handle the pain.
But in 2007, after three years of negotiation, the Mozambican government inked a deal with an American tech entrepreneur named Greg Carr to fund the rehabilitation of Gorongosa, an effort called the Gorongosa Restoration Project. Gorongosa also received significant investments from other donors, including the governments and taxpayers of the United States, Norway, Ireland, Canada, and Portugal (according to an email from Carr, he and his contacts via outside fundraising fund the majority of the park’s efforts today). At the time many hoped the infusion of money would lead to jobs for the local community and renewed conservation of the wildlife.
Rehabilitating the Lions
In 2012 Bouley was still traveling back-and-forth between California and Africa. One of her former professors volunteered to connect her with Princeton ecologist Rob Pringle, who was on the board of Gorongosa. Pringle was working closely with Carr who, after pioneering voicemail technology and making many millions in tech, became a powerful name in conservation and human rights spaces (Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights is named after him).
That year, while still a graduate student, Bouley made her first trip to Gorongosa to meet Carr and the local team and embark on a large carnivore rehabilitation program as part of her doctorate to study the restoration of lions. Bouley remembers landing and being “whisked away” by Carr’s entourage, which included a filmmaking crew and biology and conservation legend E.O. Wilson.
By 2014 she’d begun an intended five-year fellowship program at the University of California Santa Cruz, splitting time between California and Gorongosa to focus on the lion population with an academic lens.
One day she heard about a mother lioness named Helena and her cub; a couple of months later, Helena was killed by a snare. Bouley realized then that there wasn’t much she could do in California to help, so she decided to forgo her fellowship and embark on lion recovery at Gorongosa full-time.
Helena and cub before her death. Photo courtesy Paola Bouley.
When it came to the lions, Carr recognized the potential for saving large carnivores. He put his weight behind the project and gave Bouley autonomy to implement her program.
Bouley transferred from the science department to the conservation department, which she says had completely collapsed. She found that wildlife rangers had no training and were being paid close to nothing.
Bouley took on a highly operational role, and their first conservation plan was to put satellite collars on the lion prides. Lions are surprisingly difficult to locate, especially with so few remaining in the 1,500-square-mile park, and the collars would allow Gorongosa to track where families moved — or if they stopped moving.
Snares remained a big threat to the cats at the time. Bushmeat sellers would place traps near watering holes and grazing areas where prey such as waterbucks and warthogs would dwell, but lions also seeking those prey often stumbled into the traps. They even trapped humans; Carr himself got snared one day while he was hiking.
The team needed a veterinarian to subdue the lions and put on the collars, so Carr called in a native Mozambican named Rui Branco to partner with Bouley. The lions slept by day, and at night the conservation team would use a dart gun to safely tranquilize the lions and collar them. If a collared lion’s signal went static for more than 24 hours, Bouley’s team would know whether the animal had been ensnared and could send a rescue team.
The collars worked: Branco and Bouley found themselves all-too-frequently called out to rescue snared lions and other animals. Bonded by the intimacy of treating and de-snaring maimed animals, they would go on to forge a close friendship that ultimately developed into a romantic partnership.
Branco, who saw the need to empower and manage local rangers, soon became the head of law enforcement in the park. He also felt that foreign hunting, conducted legally in certain areas, needed to be controlled to meet conservation goals.
Bouley, working alongside a team of Mozambican rangers and in partnership with Indigenous communities, launched a range of initiatives that included addressing elephant-human coexistence, first-response during the unprecedented devastation of historic Cyclone Idai, and providing support for communities during multiple severe drought and famine periods.
It paid off. They removed more than 20,000 snares and reduced lion deaths by 95%. Today, as a result of that work, the population in Gorongosa has grown to more than 200 lions.
They also eliminated the poaching of elephants over multiple years, established the nation’s first pangolin rescue and rehab center, and laid the foundations for and reintroduced populations of endangered painted wolves, leopards, and hyenas. During that time the number of large mammals in the park surged to more than 100,000 — up from fewer than 71,000 in 2014.
The efforts earned Bouley and Gorongosa international acclaim. But behind the scenes, long-brewing concerns had started to boil over.
Problems in Paradise
“Greg Carr did it,” announced CBS News anchor Scott Pelley.
In 2022 Pelley toured Gorongosa Park for 60 Minutes, a follow-up to a 2008 story about Gorongosa. The satellite collar program had been successful for years in monitoring lion families. But in the 13-minute report, Bouley and Branco were nowhere to be seen.
Bouley says they’d resigned the previous year after clashing with Carr over what she describes as his increasing centralization of power — and the organization not doing sufficient work to protect women.
According to Bouley and people with familiarity of the culture at Gorongosa over the years she was there, this was indicative of another problem: Carr maintained a team of highly paid white male foreigners as senior leaders, including two communications leads, the head of science, and the former head of finance. Locals like the Mozambican rangers were paid far less than expats, a problem that Bouley said she raised frequently with leadership.
Sources say some foreign leaders had a long leash. In 2021 an American employee — now no longer at Gorongosa — was found to be having a relationship with someone who reported to him. He was asked to leave the organization. According to an email written to Bouley by a Gorongosa employee, that employee “kept a journal” about his alleged “sex addiction,” divulging that he “has slept with many of his employees.” According to Bouley, multiple Mozambican women in mid-management positions under the supervision of this employee had suddenly resigned before he was let go.
Despite the former employee’s transgressions, tax records show that the Carr Foundation paid him a consulting fee of $136,000 in 2023 after his departure. Carr says the man’s knowledge of “carbon credits” was critical to a program that would net the park $30 million, so the payment was part of ensuring that intellectual property wouldn’t be lost.
In response to questions about Gorongosa’s sexual harassment policy, Greg Carr wrote over email: “It is a fact that we support women’s rights and we have a strong anti-harassment policy, and people are terminated immediately who violate it. There has been no exception to this.” He cites the fact that this employee is no longer with the organization is a prime example of their anti-harassment policy.
In 2021, faced with the options of reporting their concerns to Carr, human resources, or the Mozambican government or silencing themselves, Bouley and Branco decided to resign.
In an email to Branco on Sept. 3, 2021, Carr wrote about Bouley’s “anger,” writing “she is not the same person now that I met 10 years ago in Chikalango who was happy and enthusiastic about studying and protecting lions. I want that Paola back again. That Poala [sic] was my friend.”
Bouley in an email says, “I have since owned being ‘combative.’ I believe being combative and ‘not a team player’ in an org plagued with racism, abuse of women and Mozambican employees, and bullying is not only a good thing to be, but the right thing to be.”
Changes at Gorongosa
People familiar with the organization say that Carr formed a new oversight board in late 2023 and early 2024, placing Mozambicans and women prominently in leadership positions.
But Bouley remembers one time when Carr told her it was the “Machiavellian in me” that put Bouley at the top of an organizational chart to show a face of women in leadership. Bouley left the meeting disturbed by this tokenization of women.
Over email, Carr shared that “99% of our employees are Mozambican.” The current president of Gorongosa, Aurora Malene, who joined in 2021, and director of human resources Elisa Langa, who joined in 2020, are both Mozambican women. The current head of conservation and program director are Mozambican men. In Carr’s words, he spends most of his time on the “outside” fundraising, and that his giving is “unrestricted” — meaning that the money is in the hands of the leaders who are accountable to the board and the Mozambican government.
Carr shares that Malene is one of the most talented leaders he knows, and that the “Machiavellian” comment was meant ironically. “She’s the boss, and she’s amazing.” He admits that pay equity has been at the forefront of his mind after Bouley left, citing several examples of Mozambican women whose salaries have doubled or tripled since becoming employed with Gorongosa.
We spoke with several current Gorongosa employees. But almost a decade ago, during Bouley’s time there, getting people to go on the record about work at Gorongosa without explicit approval was more difficult. When journalist Stephanie Hanes embarked on a book called White Man’s Game, which showed the darker underbelly of conservation efforts at Gorongosa, several staff at Gorongosa signed ghostwritten letters to the publishers that Bouley now describes as “smearing” Hanes and her work.
Bouley sent Hanes two letters at the time that painted Gorongosa in a positive light. She tells me she “felt pressured” to sign the letters at the time to continue with her work, adding “those who refused to sign were quietly dismissed from his project.” Bouley has since apologized to Hanes for signing those letters.
Carr says in an email that Hanes last traveled to Gorongosa 18 years ago and that her reporting is not connected to practices today.
Under the new leadership, Carr and the female Mozambican leadership team say that the organization is building a hospital in Gorongosa with a hospital and women’s health center, as well as scaling an after-school program to steer at-risk girls away from child marriage. He says the organization is fully run by Mozambicans to whom he has deferred power, and that six out of seven of the people on the board are Mozambicans.
Bouley, remembering her own “Machiavellian” placement on the organizational chart, wonders if this is good marketing and a “facade,” and questions whether the changes have genuinely taken place for the purpose of prioritizing Mozambicans or women as leaders in the organization.
In a Zoom conversation, Gorongosa president Malene reiterated that “our policy is zero tolerance for women abuse but also for any kind of disrespect.” Supporting girls’ education and protecting girls is their north star, and they also reference their community ranger work to distribute food to people currently experiencing hunger.
A New Beginning: Macossa-Tambara
After leaving Gorongosa Bouley had what she calls “limiting beliefs” about what she could achieve next. She was unsure that she could build anything of value again in conservation, worried that her passion could be weaponized against her — and that there would never be anything like Gorongosa. She began working with the Malamba Coastal Collaborative, helping communities to strengthen governance of coastal and marine areas. One area of focus is the Inhambane Seascape, which according to Bouley is under severe threat from oil and gas prospecting and heavy sand mining extraction.
Then, in 2023, the Mozambique government identified a territory double the size of Gorongosa Park in need of restoration, in a region called Macossa-Tambara. There was a high level of poaching in Macossa, especially among the elephant communities and in communal grazing areas. But Macossa remained a critical habitat for pangolins, lions, elephants, and endemic species of zebra and buffalo.
Bouley and Branco, along with a coalition of local Mozambican and international conservationists and scientists, applied to manage the land. In 2024 they won a 15-year extendable agreement with the government to restore and protect a block of land called C13, an area of 1,900 square miles. They then forged an agreement with neighboring block C9, based on their belief that the environment needs to be collectively managed rather than in blocks (or coutadas), which were imposed on the people by colonial, imperial Portugal in the 1920s.
Since then the Macossa-Tambara project has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, allowing the team to hire local staff on the ground and create a fully functional camp with tents, Wi-Fi, energy, and bathrooms. Their partners include the Lion Recovery Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Network, Women Together, and the Mozambique Wildlife Alliance.
Today an estimated 30-50 lions call the greater Macossa-Tambara landscape home. The team believes that with its vast and intact Miombo woodlands, riverine and savanna habitats, and a shared boundary with corridors connecting to national parks, the landscape has enormous potential to support a robust population of lion, prey, and other wildlife.
Despite the poaching pressure, Bouley says it’s not uncommon in Macossa-Tambara to bump into a lion on foot.
“You have to turn on all of your senses, walking through lions, elephants, snakes, and warthogs,” she says “We recently walked into a lioness with cubs, with zero room to run. She roared at us — it was overwhelming and goes right through your bones and into your blood, you think this might be the last moment of life.”
Bouley says lions can be very forgiving, contrary to what mainstream media has us believe. “We usually get many signs before we are ourselves in danger. But we have to tread carefully in some of these places.”
Two greater kudu at Macossa. Photo: Paola Bouley
Associação NATURA, the nonprofit receiving the grants for Macossa, is the only Mozambican-led NGO in Mozambique to ever win a tender for such a project. Bouley, Branco, and their team work directly with local communities on youth well-being and health services, fully supporting a vision where Mozambicans lead.
“There is a high-level of eco-literacy among Indigenous people,” says Bouley. “They know the land more than any of us.”
Malene of Gorongosa says in an email that local people in Macossa are starving, and that “it is no longer considered morally correct to focus only on wildlife.” Bouley shares that one of their most critical projects now is helping communities manage elephants who move through agricultural fields that are also elephant corridors. Because endangered species can move in and out of areas where communities eat crops, the animals can fall quickly out of favor with people whose entire year of food is in those fields.
The team is working on a proactive approach here rather than “old defensive modes,” says Bouley, so conflicts between people and elephants can be prevented before they arise. This includes landscape planning and zonation, to avoid development in the middle of elephant corridors, and deterrents like beehive and chili fences — tactics that Malene and Langa at Gorongosa share.
The Macossa team’s vision is to create a living space where native Mozambicans can authentically lead as environmental leaders, health experts, and peace-building educators. Bouley says that stands in stark contrast to some other conservation efforts. “Even if you’re trained and have degrees, you’re always under an expat or foreign organization that earns 4-10 times the amount that you earn,” she says. “You never have the space to be leading.”
There are moments where Bouley feels blown away by the beauty and immensity, but she also describes a fast-paced and demanding environment where they’re responding to needs of the team and engaging in community development with the approximately 40,000 Indigenous people in the region.
Bouley says Macossa has also provided a comforting space for her and helped to fill the void of what she’d lost.
“We had been so rooted in Gorongosa, I felt like I left part of myself there,” she says. “To be back in a landscape that felt so familiar, it felt like a homecoming.”
Previously in The Revelator:
Giraffes for Peace
The post Acclaimed Lion Conservationist Paola Bouley on Her Second Chance: ‘It Feels Like a Homecoming’ appeared first on The Revelator.
