Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Category: Wild Dogs, zimbabwe | Date: Oct 31 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Good morning!

We left at 6am this morning, Rueben and I, to look for the Maera pack. Once we reached appropriate territory, every couple of kilometres Rueben would call ‘woah’ from the back of the pickup, and I’d pull over while he lifted the radio antenna to scan 360 degrees for a signal from the collared dog in the Maera pack, Alphy, the alpha male.

‘Abana signaw’, he would report in Shona, ‘no signal’. And we’d continue. Often while Rueben was scanning I’d jump out to have a quick look at the tracks of wildlife on the road. We saw tracks of Eland, Impala, Civet, Leopard, Tree Squirrel, Slender Mongoose, Aardwolf, Jackal, Zebra, Giraffe, Elephant, Guinea Fowl, Blue Waxbill, Yellow-Billed Hornbill, Black Rhino, African Buffalo, Blue Wildebeest, Small-Spotted Genet, Porcupine, Baboon, and African Wild Dog….those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head sitting here. Later we found tracks of White Rhino and Caracal. We were lucky enough to have actual sightings of a harem of Zebra, Wildebeest and a herd of Buffalo, too.

We climbed an old, empty concrete water-tank to gain height in the hope of picking up a signal. Inside, there was the greying skull of a poor monkey who had climbed in to get a drink long ago and been unable to get out. The whole place smelt of old death.

But ‘abana signaw,’ no signal.

We passed through thick elephant country; dense canopy forest of Mopane crowded with the signs of elephant: their barrel-like dung in the road in piles large enough that you feel the bumps as you drive over them, and massive branches broken off or whole trees pushed over as they fed; smaller branches stripped of nutritious bark with dextrous use of the trunk and mouth. Any moment we might put ourselves at risk by surprising a group of them at close quarters in the thick bush. But ‘abana ndzo’; we saw no elephants.

At one point we turned left at a crossroads and a short distance along the new road we stopped to check for a signal and, to my surprise, Rueben suddenly found one. He told me to turn around as our trajectory was wrong to find the dogs. As we drove back towards the crossroads, I saw something dark, long and large crossing the road, and I slowed to a halt; it was a White Rhino, and was soon followed by a second. Rueben asked me to approach them so that he could get a view; I got close in the car and one of them started to trot towards us to investigate, or warn us, but it didn’t come close. I reversed slightly to remove some branches from our view. Then as the rhinos moved away I saw someone running after them, crouching low and keen. I glanced back at Rueben, but he wasn’t there—he’d clearly jumped off the vehicle in hot pursuit of the Rhinos—luckily he knows what he’s doing as he spent years working in Rhino research before joining the Wild Dog project almost a decade ago.

A dustcloud appeared far down the road which turned out to be a group of Rhino-research scouts on their bicycles. Rueben had apparently heard on his radio that they were nearby and returned in a moment to show them the Rhino photos he’d just taken.

Back in the vehicle, we checked the Wild Dogs’ radio signal and resumed our pursuit; far down the straight road ahead there was a group of big dark things kicking up dust. Even with binoculars I couldn’t tell whether they were buffalo or wildebeest. Rueben thought that perhaps the Wild Dogs were there, harassing the beasts. I slowed as we neared them.

“Beneath that tall spring-green Mopane by the side of the road,” Rueben told me, “that’s where the Wild Dogs are.” I couldn’t see them, and neither could he, but it was the right direction for the signal and he seemed to have a hunch. Within seconds, at some hundred metres through vegetation, Rueben spotted the Wild Dogs, but they fled our approach.

Several hundred metres further on was a waterhole by the roadside, and there, our attention perked by strange wildebeest behaviour, we found the Wild Dogs again, only some 40 metres away in the feeble shade of a big Mopane just coming into leaf. As we arrived they were all on their feet, ears and noses in our direction, clearly wary. However, they relaxed a lot and more dogs came into view.

Four-ten (with the collar) and Harriet by the water-hole–

We counted 14, including 3 pups, which is the entire pack. We were able to watch them for some 15-20 minutes gaining a magnificent view and taking lots of useful photographs. Several of the adults including the alpha pair trotted to and fro, a touch unsettled by our presence, but many dogs stayed lying in the shade and several times came to the small water-hole to drink briefly, but mainly to roll about or lie in the murky water. A vulture sat in the tree above them. Alphy faced us sometimes and barked warningly. Eventually the pack moved away in a close unit heading East through the Mopane trees, one puppy trailing disractedly behind.

Cindy was loving it…

And others soon couldn’t resist…

This was a particularly good sighting, and more than enabled us to confirm again that the Maera pack is still together and all its members look fit and healthy. 

I hope all of you are too!

Roy

Tags: African Wild Dogs, conservation research, save valley conservancy, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

2 responses so far

Category: Random | Date: Oct 28 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi guys,

Paula was asking about our life at the camp….so here’s a little intro to our version of living in the African bush! 

Sometimes I feel like I’m living a civilized life, and sometimes I realise we couldn’t be further from it here in the bush in Zimbabwe. One the one hand, we are privileged to live in a house—it has doors that more-or-less close, and sometimes windows that shut.  It has a backyard with a lawn and a fence around it. Sounds quite citified, doesn’t it?

Inside the lounge/office/dining room (note the radio for communications) :-

But we have a family of wild Warthogs that nip under the fence to graze on the lawn most of the day, and Monkeys and Baboons pass through the garden too. At night Grey Duiker and Bushbuck take the Warthogs’ place, and we see their eyes glowing ghostly in the beams of our flashlights….or is that the eye-shine of a Civet? Inside the house there are all sorts of strange noises that have convinced previous inhabitants that it is haunted. I am warming up to the idea myself. Certainly we share the house with a variety of non-humans. Bats are among them, hanging from the rooves of the bedrooms and leaving little piles of dung on the floor. Last night I was enjoying the song of a particularly loud cricket, only to find when I went to the shower that the reason it was so loud was that it had decided to use the bathroom as a resonating chamber. Everyone’s house has spiders, but perhaps not as many ants’ nests as we have—a couple in the kitchen, a major ant metropolis under this desk, lots elsewhere—and though we’ve tried evicting them, they’ve lived here a lot longer than us and always come back quickly.

There are some lovely lizards here too, and I’m still on the lookout for the snakes and scorpions that I hope I won’t ever get to meet.

And as soon as you open the garden gate, there are the elephant tracks from last night, and apparently sometimes leopard footprints too. When I got up this morning I walked around the outside of the garden fence and found tracks from last night of Jackals, Porcupines, Civets, a Wild Cat, Impala, Genets, Kudu…as well as the Elephants and a variety of ground birds. Of course, I could go on…

Last night I was checking my email (itself surreal in the bush) from the ranch’s office which is maybe 60 metres from our house. It was dark. I heard a leopard ‘coughing’ outside. That and the fear of startling an elephant made my flashlight seem much too dim on the rather unnerving walk home. Rosemary reminded me that you simply do not walk outside the house in the dark in the African bush. In fact, you dont really want to walk outside of your mosquito net at night either…last night I was beseiged by a menacing malarial hum all around my bed…

In Africa, the nature still rules the night. It reminds us that humans haven’t always been the King of the Jungle, and that there are places where other animals still rule the roost. But when daylight comes, enduring the fears of the night seems worthwhile when the long, welcome sunbeams pour into a symphony of tropical bird song. And the friendly Warthogs are back on the lawn. What a world to wake up into!

–Roy

Tags: conservation, life in the bush, research, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

One response so far

Category: Uncategorized, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe | Date: Oct 26 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi Folks,

Today we were blessed with an especially good sighting of the Bedford Pack—about the best view of them we’re likely to get when it’s not the denning season.

We were driving back through the Savé Valley Conservancy after a reconnaissance trip to the Gonarezhou National Park when Rueben, one of our scouts, banged on the roof of our pickup to get us to stop. Although we’d been travelling at some 60 or 70 kph, he had spotted Wild Dog tracks on the dirt road as we whizzed along. He’d also spotted some vultures circling not far from the road and after calculating the number of dogs and pups present from the tracks he could see, we grabbed our cameras and GPS units and followed him into the forest to find out what the vultures had spotted.

A few minutes walk into the trees, we found the fresh remains of a mature impala ram that the Wild Dogs had already almost totally devoured. Their tracks were all around it and although it had been killed very recently, every vertebra had been cleaned of meat already and the only thing intact was the head (although the vultures had pecked out its eyes). We took photos and GPS readings and attempted to locate a collared member of the Bedford Pack, Spanners, as we strongly suspected it was this pack who had made the kill. However, we could not find any signal using the antenna. Rosemary tried standing on some rocks to gain elevation in hope of picking up the signal, but without any luck.

Instead, we followed the tracks on the ground which led us towards the Makore River, but then we lost the trail and there seemed to be Wild Dog tracks going in every direction. What’s more, we couldn’t pick up any signal from the collar no matter how hard we tried. Perhaps the dogs had already moved far from the morning’s kill.

So Rueben and I climbed the Mkondo Hills nearby to search again for a radio-collar signal. None on the first hill—none on the second—but at the top of the third and highest hill, we suddenly picked up the ‘blip…blip’ from Spanners’ collar. Rueben estimated that the Bedford Pack was 5-8 km away and from the direction, that they were likely to be in dry bed of the Makore River after all, despite our failure to locate them there earlier.

So we drove bumpetty-bump down the rough dirt roads back to the Makore River and this time, a little way downstream, Rueben picked up the signal clearly from his perch on the back of the pick-up. Then we spotted them in the river-bed, again accompanied by a circling column of vultures. They were obviously well-aware and wary of the vehicle, but it causes them much less disturbance than a human on foot, and we were able to approach close enough to see that they were feeding on another kill, and to identify individuals and get some good photos.

As they moved off down the river-bed, we followed them (sometimes getting a bit stuck in the sand when the 4-wheel-drive didn’t perform well) and after a short distance we found the whole Bedford pack either playing in the river-bed, lying in holes they had dug in the sand to cool off (the holes fill with water from below the dry river bed), or feeding excitedly on a THIRD kill of the day—this time a young warthog. The feeding Wild Dogs were wagging their white tails and often tugging on different bits of the carcass, like a tug of war, until it broke into more manageable chunks which they could carry off and enjoy.

After we got a good enough view to count them properly and see that the entire pack was still alive and apparently healthy, we left them to continue their way down stream and we went back to identify the second carcass, which we found surrounded by vulture footprints. It was a yearling impala ram with not a shred of meat left on it. Clearly, a pack of 29 dogs with 19 growing pups like the Bedford Pack can’t afford to waste any food. It didn’t appear that the vultures were going to get many left-overs, either!

This was my first decent sighting of African Wild Dogs in the wild, and I was struck by their close social organization—moving very much as a united and cooperative pack—and the rather artistic beauty of each Wild Dog’s unique fur colours. Although it seems unlikely outside the denning season, I really hope to be able to report some more sightings as successful as this one, and to show you some more pictures of these rare creatures.

More soon,

Roy

Tags: conservation, hunting, puppies, vultures, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 26 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi guys,

We have a new assistant on the wild dog project - finally!  I’m very excited - I’ve been struggling to keep up with the workload (as you may have noticed from some of the infrequent and hurried posts recently), so it’s great to be joined by Roy, who’ll be helping out for the forseeable future.  Here is his introduction below (he’ll be writing lots of posts from on too). 

Rosemary xx 

Hi folks, 

I’d like to introduce myself… My name is Roy B. Ashton, and I joined the Wild Dog Project on 13^th October. I’m originally from England, but have spent much of my adult life living in the USA where I did a Masters degree and spent a couple of years training to be an all-round naturalist and nature educator. I have a degree from Cambridge University in Geography (emphasizing biogeography, ecology, and environmental studies), and I’m also a trained Safari Guide in South Africa, and a qualified Tracker with a Level III Track and Sign certificate from both the US and South Africa. Wildlife has been my longest standing interest throughout my life, and so it’s a privilege to be able to work with this project, and to study Wild Dogs in more depth and contribute to their conservation as the most endangered large carnivore in Southern Africa. I am also delighted that tracking (that is, footprints!) is a useful tool on this project as this is one of my particular passions.

I arrived here in Zimbabwe just a couple of weeks ago, and I was last here in 1995; it’s clear that life has become much more difficult in this country since then!  We only have electricity sometimes, so keeping food fresh is a challenge (fridge often off), as is cooking. Fortunately I am comfortable with a materially simple life with few comforts, and we’re blessed at our base with delicious clean borehole water (a rarity in this area) and a lovely hot shower heated by a wood-fire, and boons like those really help!

Among many other things, I will be writing the blog often now too, so I hope you enjoy the entries and please feel free to send any questions.

Best wishes in your direction,

Roy

One response so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 22 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

I’ve had a few requests recently for a blog on the issue of wildlife conservation and the poaching problem in Zimbabwe in general.  This is a really important topic, and I will try to devote more time to it in future.  For now - here is a summary of some of the problems facing the wildlife in the Save Valley Conservancy and Zimbabwe in general…

Poaching for meat in Zimbabwe represents a severe threat to wildlife populations throughout the country. The collapse of the economy, high levels of unemployment and food shortages mean that there is a huge demand for meat, and large numbers of unoccupied young men ready to exploit the opportunity to make some money and food through poaching. The land reform programme, settling thousands of small scale farmers on former game ranchland also contributed greatly to the levels of poaching.

On most game ranches that were occupied by small scale farmers following the land reform programme, wildlife has been completely eradicated. Most poaching for bush-meat is done with wire snares, which are particularly undesirable from an ecological perspective. Snares can result in the removal of large numbers of animals quickly, and can deplete wildlife populations severely within weeks if allowed to proceed unchecked. Snares are unselective, and kill a wide range of mammals, including animals not specifically targeted by poachers, such as wild dogs and lions.

A wild dog killed by a snare

Snares are hard to find and thus hard to control. Snares are wasteful – poachers often set them and then fail to check them, resulting in the death of animals which end up just rotting in the bush. Finally, snares are inhumane. Animals are caught in snares when they put their head, or a limb through the wire noose, which then pulls tight as the animal attempts to escape. The animal then dies through asphyxiation or through dehydration. In many cases, animals manage to break the snares, leaving them to walk around with a cutting ligature on a limb, or dragging a broken branch to which the snare was attached.

A lion caught in a snare - an unnecessary waste

In the south east Lowveld, our study area, wild meat poaching has resulted in dramatic declines in wildlife populations over the last few years. In Save Conservancy, our focal study area, almost 30,000 snares have been removed by anti poaching game scouts in the last 2.5 years. Unsurprisingly, in the parts of the conservancy worst affected by poaching, wildlife populations are declining sharply.

So what can be done to address the bush-meat trade? Poaching is always likely to be a problem in the current economic environment, where poverty is extreme, employment opportunities are few and food is short. Preventing poaching will be impossible unless there is an improvement in the political and economic situation. However, in the meantime, several steps can be taken. Firstly, there is a need to realign land uses where people have been settled in wildlife areas, and to provide a degree of separation from agriculture and wildlife. Where people live in wildlife areas, protecting wildlife is very difficult – as is protecting crops from damage by wildlife. Secondly, there needs to be a major effort to provide financial stake-holdings in wildlife ventures for communities, so that they gain benefits from wildlife which act as incentives for them not to hunt. Thirdly, there is a need for improved anti poaching security – and a change in the penal system to provide greater protection for wildlife. At present, the fines for poaching are less than the money that can be gained from killed one impala.

The 1990s was a period of unparalleled recovery and expansion of wildlife populations in Zimbabwe. The 2000s have been a period of unparalleled decline, driven by large scale bush-meat poaching. We need to do everything we can to reverse the current trend and get Zimbabwe’s wildlife - one of its greatest assets - on the increase again.

Rosemary

Tags: bushmeat, conservation, poaching, snaring, wildlife extinction, zimbabwe

7 responses so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 20 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

As you know, the wild dogs have now finished denning and have resumed their nomadic lifestyle, moving vast distances all over the conservancy.  Much of our time is spent climbing up and down hills radio tracking to try to locate our collared dogs and then trying to get a look at them - easier said than done in some of the vegetation and terrain around here!

Anyhow, we recently managed to get close enough to our Bedford pack to take some pictures - the first we’ve got since they left the den. 

 The Bedford Pack on Mokore Ranch - 9 adults and 19 pups

 It’s a pretty big pack now that the pups are up and running with the adults… It was 32 dogs initially, but is now down to 28.  One pup disappeared before they left the den, and 3 adults are missing as well now.  We hope that they have simply split off from the pack, rather than anything worse, but we have failed to pick up any sign of them.  Racoon (the young collared female) is one of the missing three, so hopefully her collar will lead us to them and help shed some light on what has happened to them.

The other packs are proving equally difficult to get close to or to see well, but as of last count, every dog was present and correct.

Back soon,

Rosemary

Tags: conservation, puppies, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

3 responses so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 14 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Me again 

I’ve been told I have to ‘link’ to things in this blog… Unfortunately it takes me hours just to log onto this website to write a post in the first place, so I’m not sure I will have too much time to spend trawling other websites to find things of interest to ‘link to’. 

Anyhow, I thought I’d practice while I do have time.  This should be a link to the conservation organisation that I work for: African Wildlife Conservation Fund.  Check it out - it’s a really great, small, hands-on organisation.

Rosemary

Tags: African, Conservation Fund, wildlife

One response so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 14 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi guys,

I think I mentioned in a previous post that we’ve been doing a spoor survey over the past few weeks; looking along the roads for the tracks of Africa’s large carnivores.  We’ve found the tracks of pretty much everything; lions, leopards (lots), wild dogs, cheetahs, spotted hyenas, brown hyenas, civets, african wild cats, honey badgers and porcupines.  We even saw an actual cheetah the other day (!), which was very special as they are so rare. 

This is a family I saw earlier this year on the road

We also bumped into a black rhino yesterday whilst looking for tracks.  He’d been de-horned by the rhino team here in an effort to prevent poaching.  A sad, but necessary thing to do.  Hopefully he will at least survive, despite not having a horn.

Still another 10 days or so of early starts and spoor transects…

Back soon,

Rosemary

Tags: African carnivores, cheetahs, leopards, lions, spoor, tracks

2 responses so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 11 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

As promised here are some pictures of the 2 litters of pups at the Nyarushanga den.

Three of the big pups:

A pile of the big pups with one little one right in the centre… look for the small ears!

And some of the littlies (with a big pup on the right)

All these photos were taken by Rueben, one of our scouts, when he went to the den sight to take down the camera traps.  We got a couple of small digital cameras very kindly donated to us, and they have made a massive difference to the project as our scouts can now take photos too, many of which turn out to be good enough to use in our photographic identification database.  On that note, if any of you have old cameras which you no longer use, and want to put them to good use, we could definetely use some more.  Either post a comment with your email address, or email me at rosemary@africanwildlifeconservationfund.org .  Thanks!

I’ll post again soon with news from the spoor survey, which is going well.

Back soon,

Rosemary

One response so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 09 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

I have so much that I want to write here, but am so busy at the moment that I just dont have time.  Lots of 15 hour days, starting at 5:00a.m. with spoor transects and usually ending after 8:00 p.m. in the office dealing with the never-ending influx of emails.  In the middle of the day we’ve been out looking for our collared wild dog packs, tracking spoor to find new packs, discovering a new den, trying to collar another dog etc.  It’s all positive and good but exhausting!  And SO HOT!

The Nyarushanga pack (Mina’s pack) has SEVEN small pups, as well as their six big ones - we’ve known for a while now that they had a second litter, but not how many pups.  I think we should re-name them the super-dog pack!

We found a new den yesterday as well.  It’s very late for the dogs still to be denning, but hey, none of the dogs here seem to be following the rule book anyway!

Must go now, but will try to post some pictures soon - so much going on!

Take care, and I’ll be back soon,

Rosemary

4 responses so far