Two and a half million years ago, in what is today Northern Tanzania, the top blew off a gigantic volcanic mountain leaving behind one of the biggest craters in the world. Over the millennia the crater became a national park for wildlife. Herbivores followed vegetation to the Ngorongoro and predators followed herbivores. Men followed, too, hunting for the tusks of rhinos and elephants, and the coats of the zebra. Rangers, photographers, and anthropologists came, too, to the place that many call the Garden of Eden. Reinhard Kunkel's beautiful, often astonishing, sometimes startling images, alongside landscapes of a primeval grandeur, make this book a triumph of wildlife photography.
Reinhard Kunkel has been photographing there since 1973. He has lived with and shot the land and the animals - the lions, elephants, eagles, buffalo and hippopotamuses -- for the last thirty years. He has shot them mating, raising their young, killing their prey. He has watched herds of buffalo charge and scatter lions, followed the egrets searching for insects in the steps of the rhinos, stayed up nights waiting for the female rhino to accept the advances of the male, observed jackals and vultures staring each other down in confrontation over a kill, and the flamingoes feasting on the abundant blue-green algae. Unrivalled in the richness and diversity of its animal and plant life, Ngorongoro has been called the eighth wonder of the world.
The original edition of this book was published in the United States in 1992. Updated with new photographs and extended by a new 16-page signature on the Maasai, it is an unrivalled work of design and production. Limited to 5,000 copies world wide.