For more than a decade, visitors to Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park would notice that one lion stood out from the rest—an enormous male with a long, shaggy black mane. The lion so endeared himself to tourists that he was given a name: Cecil.
These days, following the international uproar over his killing death, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of Cecil.
But lions have been killed by trophy hunters before and surely will be again. So what was it about Cecil that struck a chord with the international community?
"Cecil was the ultimate lion," says Brent Stapelkamp, a field researcher with Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), who knew Cecil perhaps better than anyone else. "He was everything that a lion represents to us as humans," Stapelkamp says. "He was large, powerful, but regal at the same time."
And Cecil was close to humans, too. Stapelkamp has been studying the lion since 2008, and Cecil and his pride had been part of an ongoing research project with Oxford since 1999.
Indeed, part of what made Cecil such a favorite among tourists on safari was the way he became accustomed to people.
Stapelkamp says Cecil would allow vehicles to get close to him, sometimes within just about 10 meters, "which made photography and research very easy."
Inside a Lion Pride
Stapelkamp once found Cecil and around 20 other lions from his pride feeding on the carcass of an elephant. It was a banner day for observation, and he remembers taking over 500 photos.
"He was receiving a lot of attention from both his females and his cubs," Stapelkamp remembers.
"He later fell asleep on the carcass with his head on the elephant's chest while the rest shared the meal."
Cecil wasn't just a good photo op.
"The collaring of lions like Cecil have given us a vast amount of knowledge about lions and their behavior in the environment," says Stapelkamp.
For instance, tracking the lions of Hwange National Park revealed that some of the animals range over long distances—even swimming across rivers that get in the way.
Stapelkamp says one of the WildCRU-collared lions traveled around 240 kilometers from Hwange National Park to the city of Livingstone, across the border in Zambia. It seems the lion attempted to swim across the Zambezi River, which is notorious for its white-water rapids.