Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Category: Random, Uncategorized, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe | Date: May 05 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

I just came back from a trip to Gonarezhou National Park; one of Zimbabwe’s biggest national parks and certainly the most wild and remote area in the country.  The purpose of the trip was to do a recce for a forthcoming spoor survey we intend to carry out to investigate the status of wild dogs (and other carnivores) in the park. 

 Our bush camp

I was with a lowveld local – Clive Stockil – who probably knows the park better than anyone else, and we really did some proper exploring!  Some of the tracks we used had only been mapped again last year after 30 years without being used.  And here I use the word ‘tracks’ in the loosest possible sense – I certainly couldn’t see any evidence of a route through the bush, but fortunately Clive seemed to know where we he was going and we ended up emerging unscathed at the other end of the park!

We also managed to cross the Runde river – one of the biggest obstacles to working in the park – and were the first vehicles across this season.

We were rewarded at the other side by views of the famous Chilojo cliffs – truly spectacular.

We were very excited to pick up on a good number of wild dog tracks in the park, as well as tracks and other evidence of lions, hyenas and many of the smaller carnivores.  It will be very interesting to see what we find when we start working there properly later this month.

Back soon,

Rosemary

Tags: Gonarezhou National Park, spoor, Wild Dogs, Wilderness, zimbabwe