Sign up for free

Newsletters

Once a month
get new photos
and expert tips.

Photography
Main Photo Galleries Wallpapers Photo of the Day Photographers Photo Tips Buy Prints

Lioness at Borehole, South Africa, 1996

A lioness drinks from a rock-ringed borehole in Kalahari-Gemsbok National Park, a 3,700-square-mile (9,600-square-kilometer) slice of desert in South Africa's Northern Cape Province. Lions had all but disappeared from South Africa by the turn of the 20th century due to unbridled hunting, but the seeds of a remarkable comeback were planted in the 1890s with the country's first game reserves.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "A Place for Parks in the New South Africa," July 1996, National Geographic magazine)

Photograph by Chris Johns