A Century of Photographing Lions in National Geographic
From the first image of a lion in a 1907 story on "big game" in Africa to recent features on conservation and habitat loss, we've long been fascinated by these iconic felines.
Male lions, for all their bluster and might, mostly depend on females to do the hunting. So when an eight-year-old male named Hildur picked up the scent of blood early one evening, he leapt to his feet. “He probably hadn’t eaten in two weeks,” recalls Michael Nichols, a former staff photographer and editor-at-large at National Geographic. “He took off running for five miles until he got to this pride that had killed something.”
As Hildur swiftly passed through the day’s fading light, his ribs sharply visible against his tawny torso, Nichols—hanging out the passenger window of a vehicle driven by his wife, Reba Peck—snapped photograph after photograph. One of those images made it into a 34-page feature in National Geographic. Published in 2013 with text by David Quammen, the story gave readers an intimate glimpse into the short, often brutal—but occasionally triumphant—lives of Serengeti lions.
Nichols and his editors selected photographs for the story that were not only aesthetically appealing and technically refined, but that also revealed something about the latest science on lions and their key roles in ecosystems. “This wasn’t an exercise in just photographing,” Nichols says. “We were fully intent on telling you what lions are all about, based on what had been learned from the research.”
Nichols’ feature is one of 17 that National Geographic has published about lions since the magazine’s founding in 1888. The stories chart decades of growing scientific understanding about the big cats, from their complex social habits to their influence on prey species. They also reflect ever-evolving norms in the way many humans perceive lions—from an earlier colonial mindset that saw lions as fearsome creatures to be pursued as big game, to a more nuanced perspective that regards them as an imperiled species occupying an increasingly crowded and complicated world.
From Spectacle to Science
The first lions to appear in National Geographic’s pages arrived in 1907, in reprints of a set of plates published in a book by a wealthy young German, C. G. Schillings, who had “set out to photograph the big game of Equatorial East Africa,” as the magazine explained. Schillings managed his two lion photos by tethering live oxen and donkeys as bait, and then waiting in a blind for his flash to fire in the dark.
The first National Geographic feature explicitly about lions, published in 1954, similarly exoticized both lions and the Maasai people in Kenya who live alongside them. Edgar Monsanto Queeny—the story’s author and then-chairman of the chemical company Monsanto—was determined to document a Maasai lion hunt. So he contracted 21 Maasai men to partake in a baited hunt. Their pay, he explained, would depend on the quality of images that Queeny and his team were able to capture. “If they speared a lion in the open where we could photograph it, the group was to be paid 600 shillings, or about $4.00 each,” Queeny wrote. “But if the lion ran into the bush where we could not photograph the spearing, the pay would be reduced to 100 shillings, or 69 cents each.”
The story resulted in the deaths of an unspecified number of bait animals—including zebras, topis and wildebeest—and two male lions. A photograph of a slain lion and of the Maasai’s “bent and bloody spears” appeared in print, as did graphic descriptions of the hunt.
Fifteen years later, a new National Geographic story marked a sharp departure from Queeny’s piece. The author and principal photographer was a young biologist named George Schaller—now considered by many to be the most important animal researcher of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, Schaller’s contribution brimmed with scientific insight, much of it gleaned from the three years he spent studying the comings and goings of roughly 150 Serengeti lions. Schaller presented the “king of beasts” not as the pinnacle of the animal kingdom, but as a species that was struggling just like any other. He described the revered predators as scavenging on rotten carcasses to get by, lying down in submission before a mob of harassing hyenas and failing to consider the wind direction when trying to sneak up on prey.
At a time when predators were being targeted and extirpated in many places around the world, Schaller’s 1969 story also included a revolutionary message. While lions “have been condemned for the destruction they are said to cause to wildlife,” he explained, his research indicated that lions in fact keep herbivore populations in check, preventing overgrazing. “The lion reigns not to the detriment of the Serengeti,” Schaller wrote, “but as an integral and valuable part of it.”
National Geographic’s subsequent coverage continued to center the emerging science on lions, from a story about lion mating and parenting, to one that shone light—literally—on what lions get up to after dark. The pieces also began speaking to the stories of individual animals like Hildur, and highlighting intriguing differences in morphology and behavior between lion populations in Africa and Asia. A 2002 feature, for example, explored the mystery of why male lions in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park grow little or no manes. Another story, published in 2006, profiled a pride of lions in Botswana’s Okavango Delta that had built its entire life around a single herd of Cape buffalo. Many of the females in that pride had developed “weight-lifter physiques,” as author Dereck Joubert wrote, from charging through the marshy terrain in pursuit of their large prey.
Such coverage helped bring attention to critical research programs, says Craig Packer, a leading lion biologist and National Geographic Explorer who has been featured multiple times in the magazine, including in a 1992 story that he photographed and wrote himself, detailing his detective-like efforts to trace how a 1960s disease outbreak left Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater lions dangerously inbred. After the Quamman and Nichols story came out, Packer and his colleagues were able to raise funds to keep a critical camera trap project going, and to recruit many new participants to a citizen science network.
Professional photographers brought the work of Packer and other researchers to life, depicting their feline subjects in ways the public had never before seen. Those images were almost always hard-earned. Nichols took five years to complete his 2013 lion feature, which highlighted some of Packer’s long-term findings, including that lions evolved to live in groups primarily as protection from other lions. Among the various obstacles he faced were months of negotiations with authorities in Tanzania to get the permissions needed to access a remote section of Serengeti National Park. He also had a special vehicle designed and built in Kenya with infrared lights that would allow him to get close to his subjects at night.
In the end, Nichols spent 11 months in the field, producing hundreds of thousands of images for a feature that would ultimately include just 13 photographs. “It was a monumental effort to do this,” says Nichols. “It sounds excessive, but that’s what it required.”
Fighting for Survival
Most National Geographic lion stories were produced in the 20th century and early aughts, when the species’ numbers in Africa were still thought to be high. The coverage in those years mostly reflected this relaxed state of affairs for the big cats. “In those days, you didn’t have to worry about them,” Packer says. “It was really just like, here’s a complicated species that lives complicated lives, and that is really cool.”
But in the 1990s, “the lion numbers declined by about half in the wild,” says Peter Lindsey, director of the Lion Recovery Fund at the Wildlife Conservation Network, a nonprofit organization that supports conservationists working on the ground. A turning point for the magazine came in 2001, with the publication of story about conservation threats to Asiatic lions, a small, isolated subspecies that at the time numbered just 300 individuals in India. (Today there are nearly 900 Asiatic lions in India, but people and lions are increasingly clashing—as described in a 2026 National Geographic story.)
In the following decade, the magazine turned its attention to the crisis facing African lions, in a 2013 feature by Quammen and photographer Brent Stirton. Their story, published as a companion piece to the one by Nichols and Quammen, highlighted the fact that lions had already disappeared from about 80 percent of their range. It also emphasized the human cost of living with lions—conveyed through a powerful photograph Stirton made of Yusufu Shabani Difika, a Tanzanian man who lost both his arms in a lion attack.
The story also examined the commodification of lions in South Africa, where ranchers are legally allowed to breed the animals to be shot in fenced enclosures. Stirton joined an American bow hunter on one of these so-called canned hunts. “We came around the corner and there was this lioness lying on the ground, still groggy from what looked like a tranquilizer,” he recalls. “There was no imminent threat, but the hunter just shot her a couple times and I thought how shameful it was.” The story brought heightened attention to the canned hunting industry, Stirton says, and likely contributed to ongoing discussions in South Africa about banning the practice.
Lion populations now hover somewhere between 20,000 and 23,000 animals, and the species occupies only around 7 percent of its historical range in Africa. And the pressures on lions are only set to intensify, Lindsey says, due to a number of factors: human and livestock population growth, habitat destruction, governance challenges, snaring, loss of prey species, and targeted poaching. For lions and other species, there are also “massive funding shortages for conservation,” Lindsey adds. “We’re probably entering a period of maximal pressure for Africa’s wildlife.”
