New to the Crater

A zebra foal only a few days old stands at the edge of a safari track in Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, her ears still washed in the rust brown that newborn zebras carry before their stripes darken to black. Her mother stood a few feet off, unbothered, in a part of the Crater where zebras have grown used to vehicles idling close by and see little reason to run. I kept the engine off and stayed low in the seat, and she held her ground long enough for me to work the frame at 600mm without pushing her back toward her mother. Plains zebra are common enough that it is easy to take them for granted, but the species has been listed Near Threatened since 2016, its numbers down close to a quarter from where they stood two decades ago. This one had been alive a matter of days.