Curtis Abraham
From My Archives
Richard Despard Estes with wife Runi, Tanzania circa early 1960s
The late American wildlife biologist and conservationist Richard Despard Estes was a world authority on the African wildebeest, or Gnu as it is also known. He was also very knowledgeable about their epic annual migration across Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park ecosystem (including the Ngorongoro Conservation Area), which is an extension of neighboring Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve.
In 1962, Estes began his pioneering field study of Africa’s most prolific antelope following undergraduate studies at Harvard and a doctorate in vertebrate zoology from Cornell University in upstate New York. He became one of only a handful of foreign researchers to live on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater, a World Heritage Site.
Behind the wheel of his 1958 Land Rover pickup, and often in the company of Runi, his Austrian-born wife whom he met and married in Tanzania (she later assisted his research by translating German literature dealing with animal behavior), Estes traversed the open plains, montane grasslands and lush forests of the Serengeti making discoveries not only of the wildebeest, but insights into their interconnectedness with other wild fauna and flora in the Serengeti ecosystem including the soil itself!
“I read many of the Estes papers and he certainly was seen to be the expert for many years. He did do good work and the Serengeti surely benefited from his labors,” the late Kenyan paleoanthropologist and wildlife conservationist Richard E. Leakey, told me back in 2019, three years prior to his death. Leakey only met Estes when he, Leakey, was a teenager at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania where Estes visited occasionally at the research camp of his legendary parents, Louis and Mary.
“Dick was one of the first biologists to initiate long-term field studies of large terrestrial mammals,” says Gary Galbreath, a Chicago-based zoologist and paleontologist. “His emphasis on careful data collection over long periods of time, and his combination of interests in behavioral adaptation, demography, and conservation biology, has resulted in a remarkably thorough understanding of an environmentally key species…The vast Serengeti ecosystem itself is today, thanks to Dick and others, one of the best understood tropical ecosystems on the planet.”
Estes is the author of The Behavior Guide to African Mammals and The Safari Companion (both books are used in training and certifying wildlife tour guides all over Africa( according to Runi Estes, the former has sold 30,000+ copies, and the latter sold 52,200+ copies as of 2018). “The Gnu’s World”, his magnum opus, was published in 2014 and chronicles important aspects of the life of the wildebeest; from their environment to mating behavior to their relationship with other wild fauna.
At 10-years of age, dreams of Africa’s wildlife set his imagining alight. His family: a lawyer father, homemaker mother, and elder brother were driving from Memphis, Tennessee to Dedham, Massachusetts, but enroute they stopped at the American Museum of Natural History in uptown New York City. Here he saw the Akeley Hall: a cluster of eight taxidermied African elephants stand in its center, poised as if to charged surrounded by twenty-eight life-size scenes from the continent’s plains and jungles.
It was then and there Estes decided to go to Africa.
“I was fascinated with the diversity of animals there and wanted to learn more about them,” said Estes in 2019 interview at his home in the US state of New Hampshire. “I did not know then that I could make a career studying African animals.”
Estes graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with a degree in sociology (author George Plimpton and diplomat Henry Kissinger were classmates), but it was only the discipline of study that he was able to take away and into the relatively new discipline of ethology (the science of animal behavior was no more than two and a half decades old when Estes began his wildebeest studies in 1962).
In 1958, he travelled to Burma (Myanmar) to conduct a 2-year wildlife survey and although he describes the Burma years as a detour to his main objectives, the great diversity of wild fauna was a constant fascination. There were dangers though.
“One day I was sitting at a waterhole and sensed that a tiger was circling me,” remembers Estes. “I still have the teapot from a different person's neighboring camp that was upended by a tiger [that] jumped over a log, picked up a person in its mouth, and ran into the forest with him.”
En route to Burma, Estes had the opportunity to spend a summer at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Bavaria, southeast Germany, and studied with future Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz (Lorenz along with Carl von Frisch and Niko Tinbergen would later win the 1973 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for establishing the science of ethology). He would meet other influential biologists including Ernst Mayr, the renowned Harvard zoologist and one of the founders of the Modern Synthesis of biology.
At Cornell University, Estes proposed a multi-species study of five ungulates including elands, zebras, Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles and wildebeest in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, but the enormity of the task had explained why it never been previously attempted (for example, eland antelopes were to nomadic in their wanderings and the technology of radio tracking collars and immobilizing drugs were still in the future), so it was the wildebeest that became his main focus.
“Wildebeest were the most numerous--and I suspected, the most ecologically important--of the antelopes,” Estes mentioned back in 2019.
Estes cites the territorial behavior of the males, which he first observed in Ngorongoro Crater to be his most significant discovery in his more than a half century of field research in east Africa
“Why, I wondered, would these individuals, members of a species whose habit of gathering in dense concentrations proved they were highly sociable, isolate themselves like this? Could they be defending territories?”
He added:
“Oddly enough, the first behavioral observation I made as I gazed into the void of Ngorongoro Crater became the subject of my doctoral dissertation-the territorial behavior of wildebeest.”
Este’s research shows us just how wildebeest create and maintain the ecology and evolution of the Serengeti-perhaps the world’s largest ecosystem. The gnus churn the soil with their hooves and nourish it with their urine and dung. Males bashing bushes with their horns in territorial displays help keep the savanna from growing into forests. Even a component in the wildebeests' saliva has been found to stimulate grass to grow. And because the animals move on after grazing, (unlike cattle) the grasses grow back, stronger than ever.
Dick Estes in later years
Starting in the late 1970s, at the Mbalageti River in the Western Corridor of Serengeti National Park, Estes followed radio-collared wildebeests and discovered for the first time that the route and pace of the migration was far more variable than previously thought. The wildebeests travelled not in one great mass but in large separate herds occasionally numbering in the hundreds of thousands and taking separate routes no less.
Predators and scavengers make a feast of fallen and weak members of the annual migration but what do the hundreds of thousands of zebras, Thompson and Grant’s gazelles and other antelopes get out of it?
“I counted twenty-eight other species of mammals that can thrive in Serengeti because of the wildebeest migration. But new studies suggest that number may be too low” said Estes.
Recent field studies have shown that even aquatic micro-organisms and fish (nourished by the carcasses of gnus that die crossing rivers) to giraffes (whose babies suffer less from predation when the wildebeest migration sweeps through their territories) benefit by the presence of vast herds of migratory wildebeest.
"Wildebeest are even more important to the ecosystem than I could have imagined when I began my work in 1962,” says Estes.
"Dick is a head-strong scientist with a mischievous streak. He is incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable about African Wildlife, and was always keeping me honest making sure I quoted factually correct information,” says Joshua Peterson of Dorobo Safaris in Tanzania. Dorobo, founded over a generation ago by Peterson’s father and two uncles, organized and outfitted student groups from the University of Delaware in the US, which were led by Estes.
Peterson added:
“He would bristle whenever someone mentioned anything derogatory about the Wildebeest, reminding them that they were the most numerous and successful ungulate in the Serengeti,” remembers Peterson.
Estes’ also has affection for Africa’s other antelope species. For example, the bongo was another victim of habitat destruction and poaching in Kenya. The Rare Species Conservatory, the group is essential for reporting what is happening in the field among all antelopes and which Estes chaired/co-chaired for almost three decades, contributed bongos to the Jacksonville Zoo, located at northeast Florida, USA-one of the forty-seven zoos that supplied bongo for repatriation to the Mount Kenya Game Ranch in 2004.
Like all of the Earth’s biodiversity hotspots, the Serengeti faces numerous human-made threats. For example, foreign plants are taking hold where native grasses once flourished. Poachers snare 100,000 wildebeest a year in Serengeti alone. Herders' animals compete with native animals for graze; climate change skews rainfall; tourists' vehicles compact soil and carve ruts into grasses, and every year, as Africa's population is projected to double in the next 20 years, more houses, roads, fences, and farms crowd the land the animals need to survive.
According to Estes, there will be serious environmental, economic and social blowback for Africans living in the shadow of the Serengeti.
“When an entire ecosystem collapses, humans-who grew up in this ecosystem-will profoundly feel the loss.”
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