Large African Carnivores

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

Cheetah family - July 2008

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 to “Large African Carnivores”

sheryl, washington, dc, on 14 Oct 2008

Lovely cheetah family - I hope they’re still alive and well. Same for the black rhino …

So, is the spoor survey very detailed and tedious? It sounds like it might be and the fun part is putting the data together for a report. But I’ve never done a spoor survey so I’m probably wrong!

zimbabwewilddogs, on 14 Oct 2008

Hi Sheryl,

Yes, it can be tedious when we dont see a lot. But we only do it between 5:00a.m. and about 9:30a.m. because after that the light is too bad, so the rest of the day is free to do other things, which is good.

We aim to drive 1km for every 6 square kilometers of area, so for the conservancy as a whole, we need to drive around 400km (and then have to repeat it all once more)!

Max speed is 15km per hour, so it’s taking a while!

Putting together the data for the report is certainly interesting and it’s fun seeing how the results match what we think to be the case (in terms of numbers of animals).

I’m sure the cheetah family is doing OK. I have a cheetah researcher coming to stay in the next couple of days, so hopefully eventually, when he starts working here, we’ll know more about the cheetahs here.

Rosemary xx

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