Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Hi folks,

I recently went to one of the wild dog dens and found it to be abandoned.  This isn’t all that unusual – the dogs will move the pups at various stages throughout the denning season as they grow or as the parasite load builds up in the den.  But not usually when they are as small as they were… So I wondered what had happened, but fortunately I had had two camera traps up at the den over the time they moved.  Here is story told by the cameras:

Adults and pups relaxing and playing at the den site:

And then, that night, our other (infrared) camera recorded this…..

A lion at the den!  The dogs moved the next day, but that was not the end of the activity at the den site…. The cameras captured the following as well, after the dogs had moved.

A warthog visited…..

Followed by….

An elephant! Who came rather close to the camera…

So! That was all a bit of excitement at the den, but a shame that the dogs have moved.

Unfortunately, I’ve been away for a couple of days and so havent yet located the new den.  I really hope all the pups are still alive. There were six, but the few pictures of the dogs captured on the cameras after the lions visit show only three pups.  Lions are the greatest cause of natural mortality for the wild dogs and kill both pups and adults.  I hope this one was just passing through, although the response of the dogs leads me to think there may be more to it.  I’ll find the new den in the next couple of days and let you know how many pups remain. 

Back soon,

Rosemary

Hi folks,

This is the first appeal I’ve ever put out on Wildlife Direct, but the time has come to ask for some help.  As you all know, the desperate situation in Zimbabwe is resulting in, amongst other things, a huge amount of wildlife poaching.  Much of this is for commercial purposes by persistent poachers and the level at which it is occurring is currently unsustainable.

As you’ll have seen if you are a regular reader of this blog, wild dogs are severely threatened by snaring, not only in the Save Valley Conservancy, but throughout the country.  But it is not only wild dogs that suffer.  Snaring is an indiscriminate killer – between August 2001 and October 2008, 5,981 animals of 30 different species were killed in snares.  These included endangered African wild dogs, lions, leopards, cheetah, sable  buffalo, wildebeest, nyala, impala, kudu, zebra, giraffe and even elephants.  On one occasion, one snare line killed 18 individual animals. 

 74,390 snares were recovered between August 2001 and October 2008

Almost the biggest problem with this method of poaching is the wastage.  Of the 1,421 animals killed in snares during August 2005-November 2008, 58.8% were found rotten or scavenged, 27.3% were recovered by the ranch or taken to the police as evidence and only 13.9% were extracted by illegal hunters.  This is a truly shocking waste of the wildlife resource.

However, the deaths in snares are only one part of the story.  Many animals manage to break the snare wire and free themselves, but continue to carry the snare around their neck or leg or trunk.  Many of these die and go unrecorded, and many end up being shot because of their injuries.  Others continue to suffer from these horrific injuries until they die.  

This is where we come in and where we can do something to help.  Although I manage the Lowveld Wild Dog Project, the umbrella organisation for our project is a non-profit making organisation called the African Wildlife Conservation Fund (AWCF).  Given my position in the field in Zimbabwe, and my qualifications and licence to immobilise wild animals, I am in a position to help AWCF with their general conservation efforts, a large part of which is tackling this poaching crisis.  If we can be on standby for anyone to call us to help to free snared animals or treat injured ones, we could do a huge amount to help the wildlife here. 

So at this point I am appealing for help.  The drugs used to immobilise wildlife are not cheap.  They are less expensive for carnivores: for enough drugs to immobilise 10 wild dogs (including the knock-down drug, the sedative and the reversal) would cost US$500, i.e. $50 per dog.  For herbivores however, the drugs are extortionately expensive.  One vial of the main knock-down drug (5ml) and its reversal costs US$600.  Depending on the species, this would immobilise between 5 to 10 animals, assuming no darts miss.  However, in addition to this drug, you need a sedative drug which costs US$106 per vial, and at least 2 vials of the human antidote (because this drugs is life-threatening to humans) which cost US$200 per vial.  So in order to be ready to help treat wounded wildlife, we need to buy at least US$1500 worth of drugs (and that’s only a start…).

A buffalo caught in a snare that had to be shot because no-one had the drugs to immobile and treat it

If anyone feels they could contribute something towards this, we would be enormously grateful and you can be assured your donation will go directly towards helping wildlife in the most direct and hands-on way.  Any extra money that is raised above what we need to buy the drugs will be put towards the anti poaching units in the conservancy, to help buy radios, uniforms and ammunition.

I’ll sign off here, because this post is long enough now, but if anyone would like more information, please don’t hesitate to ask.  And please consider helping us: I know it’s a bad time economically, but if we don’t act soon, it’s going to be too late for Zimbabwe’s wildlife.

Thanks in advance,

Rosemary        

Hi everyone,

I’ve had a backlog of blogs because we’ve had even less electricity than usual in Zimbabwe. ‘Usual’ mostly means we only get electricity some time during the hours we are asleep, which at least cools the fridge a little and charges the inverter batteries so we can use a computer during the day.

But for the last 3 nights and 2 days, we’ve had none at all. All the carefully prepared food in our fridge rotted, and I had to throw away so many hard-to-procure meals that it was heartbreaking.

It was the elephants that did it. They come here to the ranch every night, and they are always beautiful, and always very dangerous. Last night they were so close to the house I wondered if they were going to rip the holey mosquito screens off once and for all.

Here’s a picture I took the other day of some of them, near our house—

A couple of days ago, some of these elephants pushed over or pulled down the power lines. I’m not sure what their reasoning was, surely living trees are more interesting to eat, but there you are, and as one guy here said, ‘I don’t speak elephant.’

They are damaging the trees between the buildings here. Typical elephant feeding signs look like this—

Of course, I feel privileged to share this spot of the earth with wild elephants. The conservancy is one of relatively few remaining places in Africa where elephants have enough habitat and space to roam freely, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to all the trees they want to eat. A bit of this sort of damage around the houses is par for the course, then, but beyond a certain level it does become a problem to the people living here—

Last night they broke through the electric fence around the house of the landowner in two places and destroyed all her banana trees and badly damaged a big mango tree. They also broke the pipe supplying all the water to the house. If they keep it up at this rate, I don’t think anyone is quite sure what to do.

If you’re reading this, it’s proof that someone has repaired the power lines…and that the elephants have not yet pushed them down again!

Roy