Oliver Uberti is a former senior design editor for National Geographic and the coauthor of two critically acclaimed books of maps and graphics: Where the Animals Go and London: The Information Capital, each of which won the top British Cartographic Society Award for cartographic excellence.
Assisted by technologies from satellites to drones, humans can now as never before witness the daily lives of animals. For the maps in Wildhood, Uberti used geo-location provided by the scientists who tracked our four main animal protagonists. The stories of Ursula, Shrink, Salt, and Slavc would not be known without the efforts of scientists from the Antarctic Research Trust (antarctic-research.de), the Hyena Project (hyena-project.com), Center for Coastal Studies (coastalstudies.org), and Project Slowolf (volkovi.si). Uberti’s graphic illustrating the stages of wildhood is based on our interpretations of our own research and phylogenies of adolescent behavior.
Because Uberti’s images are so beautiful—and make understanding the information so effortless—it would be easy to get the impression that the data are obvious or easy to obtain. In fact, every single data point is the result of dedicated, multidecade research by scientists and their teams braving extremes of temperature, terrain, distance, and resources all over the globe. Although technological advances give a new perspective, observing animal behavior in the field still depends on the passion and commitment of human individuals.
With their telltale juvenile leg spots fading away but still visible, these adolescent lions are firmly in the midst of wildhood. This image captured them on their home range in Kenya’s Masai Mara, inspecting a camouflaged camera mounted on a remote-controlled ground unit by award-winning, UK-based wildlife photographer Angus Stead. Curious and oblivious to possible risks, this feline trio crept right up to the rig, intrigued by the novelty, egged on by their peers—classic wildhood behavior. Stead’s lion’s-eye view gives us all a glimpse of what it’s like to be, even for a moment, the object of an adolescent lion’s attention.