Dereck and Beverly Joubert have been called the power couple of the conservation world, and rightfully so. Their love story led to a four-decade-long extraordinary work dedicated to nature’s fiercest felines — big cats.
It all started with Dereck and Beverly not only falling madly in love with each other, but also with the wilderness and wildlife of their birthplace, Africa.
“Beverly is quite feline and I fell in love with Beverly first of all, and I was quite worried about getting scratched in the beginning and so you have to deal with these things with some love and some caution,” Dereck told The STAR in a recent virtual one-on-one. “But we met in high school, and we wanted to go out and really discover Africa together. As soon as we were out of university and college, we went out to discover this continent that we were born on.”
Starting out in the early ‘80s after a couple trip to Botswana, the husband and wife’s journey as explorers, environmentalists and filmmakers has since been teeming with romance and adventure in the world of lions, tigers, leopards and cheetahs.
“To understand any natural ecosystem, you start with the top predators… If you want to look at the Arctic, you look at polar bears. If you want to look at the jungles of Asia, you look at tigers. And so in our context in Africa, we wanted to look at lions and then try to understand those,” said Dereck on how they began their careers studying, photographing and filming lions. “And once we took a stab at that, we realized that this was a subject that’s much bigger than just understanding them. We basically dedicated the rest of our lives to that.”
Dereck and Beverly are still at it 40 years after.