We have a new project vehicle on its way!

This is a very exciting month for the project…

On the 11th of Feb, we hope to take delivery of a new project vehicle!!

This is fantastic news, because our old project vehicle ‘Steve’ as he bizarrely was known was becoming a complete pain! Steve is a Series IIA Land Rover, produced in 1972… And by his 36th year, he was really starting to give us hassles. For a start, as a short wheel base he was just too small…and if we needed to go anywhere with the team of trackers and all their kit, then it would be one heck of an uncomfortable ride…as you can see from the pictures!!

But worse, Steve was incredibly unreliable and on a few occasions got us in all sorts of trouble. In the picture above, Stephanie and I had gone for a sundowner after work at a beautiful place about 3 km from where we live called ‘Moon Rock’. To get up moon rock, we’d have to engage 4 wheel drive low range and drive straight up the huge granite kopje (outcrop). Problem is, on that occasion when we got in the car to drive home, the car wouldn’t move and made a terrible racket…

I looked down with horror to see that the universal joint on the rear prop shaft had sheared…

This was terrible news, because although home was only 3 km, we would have to walk past a waterhole in an area that is teeming with elephants and other big hairy animals. And, we didn’t have a torch. But it was freezing cold, being winter, and we were hungry. So, we made the school boy error of starting to walk home. Unsurprisingly, (and probably luckily) we only made it about 200 metres, before we heard a branch of a tree cracking nearby…which is the unmistakable sound of an elephant at supper…at which point we retreated at haste back up moon rock to our old wreck of a vehicle…

At that point, I started assuming that we were up there for a very long, cold and hungry night. Until I had an idea…

In the car, we had a piece of PVC piping that I use to store our 1:50 000 maps (that we use for pin pointing incidents of bush meat poaching on). I looked underneath the car, and placed the piping across the bottom of the car, resting on the back leaf springs. I then tied the rear prop shaft gently to the pvc pipe using a piece of old inner tube (or reken as it is known in Zimbabwe). That way, the prop could still rotate, but it wouldn’t flail around wildly. I then put the vehicle in four wheel drive so that the front wheels were engaged and gave it a try…and, to our huge relief, the vehicle worked!

We had to drive home at about 5 km per hour, but that didn’t matter…driving through that pitch black bush full of elephants just felt so much better than walking….and, as you might imagine, supper that night tasted awesome.

Hopefully, with the new pick up, those kind of experiences will be a thing of the past. They better be, because this year we will be doing a lot of our work in the vast, wild Gonarezhou National Park. And if we break down in there we will have big problems… So I think its time for Steve to retire..

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In the last few blogs, I have spoken quite a lot about the threat to the wild dogs posed by snaring. So I thought Id give some more information on snaring in general, and not just how it relates to wild dogs. On seeing the threat posed to wild dogs through snaring, a lot of our work has focused on addressing that threat specifically: trying to understand how the bush meat trade works, what impacts it has on wildlife populations, and what solutions exist to address the problem.

Snaring is generally done by poachers who hunt meat for personal consumption or for sale. Across Africa, there is an enormous bush-meat industry, where animals are killed and then sold in villages and towns, and along highways. Sometimes the meat even finds its way to European cities such as Paris and London which have large African populations. Bush-meat poaching, along with habitat destruction, probably represents the most severe threat to wildlife in Africa today. The problem is particularly severe in West and Central Africa, but parts of East and southern Africa are also severely affected. Whereas the threat to wildlife from bush meat poaching has long been recognized for West and Central Africa, the severity of the problem for East and southern Africa is only beginning to be recognized. Bush meat poachers use a variety of methods, from shotguns, nets, and gin traps, but most commonly snares. Snares are usually made from steel wire, which in many areas, is extremely abundant: poachers just steal it from game or cattle fencing. Where fencing is scarce, poachers often steal copper wire from telephone lines, or improvise using other materials. When hunting using snares, the poachers will set lines of typically 10-30 snares along game trails, and especially those leading to water which have high volumes of wildlife traffic. Animals walk through the snare and are then generally captured around the neck, waist or leg. The animal then typically tries to escape by pulling, which cases the snare to tighten, cutting into the flesh of the animal. The animal is then either killed by suffocation, or through lack of water.

Snares are cheap, and in areas with lots of fencing, can be made in abundance. One of the findings of our study has been the need to seek alternative fencing materials to use for the construction of game fences. Those comprised of steel wire and/or barbed wire provide an essentially limitless supply of wire for snares.

Snares are extremely indiscriminate, and virtually all wildlife species are affected, from small antelopes such as duikers, to elephants which are frequently caught around their trunks, resulting in horrific wounds. Another problem is wastage. Poachers often fail to remove their snares when they are finished, or check their snare lines infrequently, with the effect that wild animals are often caught and then rot in snare lines and are never used.

An additional worry is that when animals are caught in snares, the carcasses attract predators which are then at risk of being caught in the snares themselves. We found this lion caught in a snare, for example..

Snaring is extremely effective and if allowed to continue unchecked, can decimate wildlife populations very quickly. The problem is that snares area cheap and easy to produce, and they are also really difficult to find. Often, the first sign of a snare line is vultures circling above a carcass below..

So how do we reduce the impact of bush-meat poaching? Well, I believe that a four pronged approach is needed. Firstly, it is vitally important that local people benefit financially from the presence of wildlife, such as through tourism opportunities. If they benefit from wildlife, they are likely to want to protect it. Secondly, it is important that alternative protein sources are found to reduce reliance on bush-meat. Thirdly, education and outreach efforts are required to increase understanding of the negative impacts of snaring, and how loss of wildlife can foreclose important options for development in future. Finally, there will always be some need to police wildlife populations. A minority of individuals are always likely to take a chance and poach to boost their personal incomes. So while a particular community may benefit from wildlife and protect it, one or two individuals may well keep poaching so that they get income from tourism and poaching. The best way to police wildlife is through the deployment of anti poaching game scouts (which may be from the neighbouring communities), who then sweep the area for snares.

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This year, during the denning season, we want to attach radio collars to as many packs as possible.

This will be crucial in terms of enabling us to determine the home range size of the dogs, and also to keep a close tab on how the wild dogs are doing. If we can keep a close tab on the dogs, we would be much more able to pick up on threats such as an outbreak of disease, and to get a clearer idea of how the dogs are being affected by other threats such as snaring. Disease is a big worry, as the population in the neighbouring Malilangwe Trust wildlife area was wiped out with rabies last year. Similarly, wild dogs are often caught in snares. Mostly, when dogs are caught in snares, they are killed. Snares are made of steel wire making it almost impossible for the dogs to escape. A dog caught in a snare typically pulls to escape, which causes the snare to tighten like a noose around its neck, leg or waist.

The dog in this photo was killed in a snare, and didn’t manage to escape…

Sometimes though, the dogs manage to bite through the snares, enabling them to escape. The problem though, is that the noose part of the snare normally stays tightly bound around the animal’s neck, making it impossible for it to eat and cutting into the flesh. On several occasions we have seen terribly emaciated dogs with snares on their necks. Recently, we managed to purchase a dart gun and so we will now be able to dart dogs with snare wounds, remove the snare and apply anti-biotics.

The dog in this photo was caught around the leg by a snare, which we managed to remove, giving it a chance.

However, if we can put collars on more packs, we will be able to keep a much closer eye on them and pick up much more quickly if a dog gets caught on snares, giving us more of a chance to dart the animal and remove the snare.

To attach collars, means that we need to raise money to buy them. There are two kinds that we are looking at, one is a simple VHF collar that transmits a signal that is picked up by a hand held receiver. The other is a GPS satellite collar which takes multiple GPS locations per day, which are then stored on board the collar. If we get to within 50 metres of a dog with a GPS collar on, we can then download the data. GPS collars are extremely useful in terms of enabling us to see where the dogs move at night (when we are unable to follow them) and the extent to which they use land occurring outside of the conservancy. When the dogs leave their regular haunts, it is sometimes very difficult to find them using a VHF collar, as the signal can only generally be picked up from 1-2 km. With a GPS collar however, the positional data stored on the collar will tell us if the dogs have moved outside of their normal range. VHF collars cost about 500 US, whereas GPS collars are around 2,500 US. This year, we hope to attach at least two collars per pack, or 18 collars in total. Of these, we would like to have at least 5 GPS collars. This means, that we need to raise in the order of $19,000 for collars. So…any donations to help us buy a collar, or collars would go a long way towards helping us keep up with the dogs and would be hugely appreciated..

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Finding the dogs using trackers…

This year, as we have done for the last three years, we plan to try to locate all of the wild dog dens in Savé Valley Conservancy. The dogs den down and have their pups starting in around May. They stay at a den for a period of about 3 months or so (sometimes moving the location of the den a short distance within that time). They have large litters, averaging around 10 pups. Normally, one pair breeds and the other dogs help to raise the pups by guarding the den or by providing food to them. The dogs in the pack are usually closely related to the breeding pair (often as brothers or sisters) and so by helping raise the pups they in fact pass on some of their genes. Due to the large litter sizes, a pair of dogs simply can’t raise pups alone. In fact, raising large litters is so demanding that packs below 4-5 individuals usually fail to raise pups. When the pack goes out hunting, one dog usually stays at the den to guard against spotted hyaenas and other predators. There’s not much the guard dog can do if the den is visited by lions though..

The denning period is a very useful time for us, as it enables us to count how many wild dog packs there are, and to get photographic records of all of the packs. At the moment, we only have two of the nine wild dog packs radio collared, which means that we have to find the rest of the packs by using experienced trackers who follow the wild dog spoor. We normally gather reports of wild dog sightings on the conservancy radio network, and then go to the area in which the dogs were seen and follow the tracks. Ruben, featured in the photo below is our most experienced tracker. He has worked with wild dogs for 11 years now and has an amazing ability to find them. His greatest strength is that he understands their behaviour and will often leave the spoor trail and move ahead predicting where he thinks the dogs will be. Often, he then runs into the spoor trail again, saving hours of tracking that would have been needed had he followed the dogs on their circuitous route to their final destination.

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Identifying wild dogs by their coat patterns is an important research tool that we use. For example, by comparing photos of dogs from our study area in Zimbabwe with those from Northern South Africa and south east Botswana, we hope to work out the extent to which the populations in the three countries are connected, and whether they can be considered to constitute a single population. A colleague of mine working on wild dogs in South Africa was recently sent photos of a dog seen 250 km from where she worked. Using photographs confirmed that it was one of the dogs from the reserve where she lives that had moved all of that distance.

You will be able to see how easy it is to tell different individuals apart by looking at the dogs in this picture:

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This is Peter Lindsey here writing for our first blog for Wildlife Direct.

I will start with some background information, and then over the next few days try to provide some more details of the specifics that we and of the challenges we face and experiences we have out here in the bush.

We are running a conservation project on African wild dogs in south eastern Zimbabwe. Wild dogs are Africa’s second most endangered carnivore. As few as 5,750 of these animals survive and viable populations persist in only 8 of the 39 countries in which they once occurred. We study wild dogs in one of their most important strongholds, in southern Zimbabwe. The focal area for our study is Savé Valley Conservancy, which is a conservation area of about 3,500 km2 in size.

Through our work in Savé Valley Conservancy, we hope to increase our understanding of some of the primary threats facing the species throughout their range and to develop tools to help conserve the species. These threats include the incidental capture of wild dogs in snares set by bush-meat poachers (who usually try to catch antelope species), diseases such as rabies and canine distemper, and habitat fragmentation.

In Savé Conservancy, the wild dogs face an additional threat from a rapidly increasing lion population. Lions kill both adult wild dogs and pups when they get the chance, and tend to force wild dogs into less than ideal habitats. In the case of Savé Conservancy, that could mean forcing the dogs into areas with a higher risk of being exposed to poachers’ snares, or disease-carrying domestic dogs. As with the wild dogs, lions were previously eradicated from the area by cattle ranchers (before the conservancy was formed) and then naturally re-colonized the area. The number of lions in Savé Conservancy is increasing rapidly and we are working to assess what impact these changes will have on the dogs.

In addition to our work in Savé Conservancy, this year we plan to extend our project to figure out how many wild dogs remain in the southern half of Zimbabwe. Southern Zimbabwe is an exciting place for conservation, as two enormous Transfrontier conservation areas are being developed: the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA) in the South East, which will link Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe with Kruger National Park in South Africa and Limpopo National Park in Mozambique; and the Shashe Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (SLTFCA) which will link conservation areas in south western Zimbabwe, north western South Africa and south east Botswana. We plan to assess the status of wild dog populations in the Zimbabwean portions of these transfrontier conservation areas, and to determine to what extent populations in Zimbabwe are linked with those in neighbouring countries. We will achieve this by developing a catalogue of photographs of wild dogs. Wild dogs have unique coat patterns and individuals are easily recognizable. By sharing photographs with researchers working in neighbouring countries, we will be able to work out if dogs from Zimbabwe are moving into those countries and vice versa. If the wild dogs in northern South Africa, eastern Botswana, south western Mozambique and southern Zimbabwe are linked, then the area would comprise one of the largest remaining populations of wild dogs in Africa.

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