Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Hi Folk,

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Rosemary

Hi folks,

I was driving up through the Save Valley Conservancy the other day, when I spotted a lionness near the road.  I got my camera out and reversed back to where I had seen her, to be greeted by an amazing sight…  A pride of eleven lions, eight of whom were posing beautifully for this family portrait;

In total there were 2 adult females, 2 subadult females, 4 subadult males, and 3 cubs.  After a minute or two, they all got up and walked off, but luckily the bush was open enough for me to be able to follow them.  I was alone in the car, and spent a blissful hour with the pride, who were very relaxed with the vehicle and stayed all around me.

It was that magical time of the evening when the light was lovely and rich, and the relaxed nature of these beautiful animals afforded me some lovely photographic opportunities;

I was also treated to a thrilling sound display as several members of the group started roaring; first one, who was answered by another on the other side of the car, and then several others joined in.  A truly fantastic priviledge to see and hear these magnificent beasts at such close quarters.

Hi Folks,

I’m just back from another 3 week field stint in Gonarezhou which I will write about soon.  But I just wanted to post some of these photos of lions that were seen at the Mapura den on Chishakwe Ranch in Save Valley Conservancy a few weeks ago.  It was a pride of 7 lions, who visited the den a couple of times.  Here are some of the curious youngsters investigating the den hole where the pups sleep.

Fortunately all the pups survived, but one of the pack’s adult males (probably the alpha male) was unfortunately killed. He was found a couple of hundred meters from the den.

Nonetheless the pack seems to be holding together okay.  They have two litters of pups but are no longer den bound, so I’m not sure how the little ones will do.  Just hope they don’t meet these lions again any time soon!

Back soon,

Rosemary

Hi Folks,

As you know I am briefly back from a few months of fieldwork in the stunning but wild Gonarezhou National Park.

We were doing the annual carnivore spoor survey as well as looking for wild dog tracks that might lead us to finding a pack, or better yet a den site.  Some of the roads were a little tricky to navigate… but we got through in the end:

We found ourselves in some beautiful places along the way – this is one of my favorite views in the park.  It also made a good lunch spot and a great place to track from!

We were fortunate enough to see quite a lot of wildlife in the park, including many, many elephant herds, zebras, giraffes, eland, jackals, ostrich, buffalo, impala, wildebeest, one leopard and  three porcupines!  And of course an abundance of incredible bird life.

I love porcupines, so it was a real treat to see them in the day;

We didn’t pick up as many lion tracks as we would have hoped, although we did hear them on a couple of nights, and it seems their population may not be picking up as much as we thought.  Hyenas we heard every night – that’s one species that certainly seems to be doing well in the park!  Especially from this campsite, where they were all around us from evening until morning.

And of course the wild dogs… we still have a way to go to fully understand what the park’s population is, but signs are encouraging.  We found tracks throughout the area we were working in, and plenty of signs of successfully breeding packs.  Hopefully over the next few months we will be able to establish whether these dogs are in fact linked with the population in Kruger National Park as well.

Back soon,

Rosemary

A few weeks ago when we went to the Crocodile pack den we saw lion tracks there.  We checked the cameras and sure enough, we saw that a pair of lions had been to visit.  First though, there were a bunch of great pictures of the pups, playing and lazing around the entrance to their den:

Photos from the infra-red camera trap them showed what I always dread seeing…. lions – and right at the entrance to the den:

Fortunately however, a few hours later, pictures from the same camera showed all nine pups alive and well.  Whew!  Here they are being suckled by mom.

The following week they were all still at the den, none the worse for wear from the lions visit

Back soon,

Rosemary

Hi folks,

I have some friends with me at the moment from Guruve Ltd – ethical promoters of African art.  Having been to Africa for 12 years, Tim hasn’t ever seen a lion! So, as you know, I am running a lion project here as well as the wild dog project, and have a few collars left to go on, so we gave it a go with Tim & Emma to see if we would be lucky.

We set up a bait in the very south west corner of Chishakwe Ranch – where the wild dog project is based.  We had a great scout, Witness, with us, who had seen lion tracks in the area the day before, not far from a lovely little dam.  So we set everything up and started calling….

After about 1 and a half hours we had had no response other than a peacefully browsing herd of eles in the background, but just then, in answer to a lion roar that I had been playing over the loud speakers, the bush erupted in a roaring duet from either side of the car! That woke everyone up!

The first group of lions that came in looked like 3 adult females but we couldnt see them very well as they stayed well in the background, showing no interest in the bait.

After another half an hour or so of trying to bring them in, we were just discussing whether to pack up for the night when we saw one of the females (or possibly a new female) come out of the bushes with a young adult male with her.  Although she was still wary, the presence of the male emboldened her and after a while she came up and started feeding on the bait.  Tim and Emma were both hugely excited – finally a proper sighting of a wild African lion – albeit an eerily red one in the red-filtered spotlight!

But we don’t do things by halves here (:)) so after a few minutes of watching the lioness I darted her so that we could collar her.  The dart hit well and she went to sleep not far from the bait, which was great.  The collaring went well and we were pleased to note she was a very healthy lioness who appeared to be quite heavily pregnant.

The reason we are collaring these lions is for part of a conservation-research project; to try and determine the impact of different hunting strategies on lion demographics and behavior, and also to try and reduce some of the human-lion conflict occurring on our boundary areas.

So, Chishakwe is clearly the pace to be for some excitement – and Tim and Emma were thrilled with experience!

Back soon,

Rosemary

Hi folks,

This is a bit of a depressing and slightly gory post, but I think it’s important to show all side of the story in our efforts to conserve the wild dogs out here in Zimbabwe.  Although we’ve had lots of puppies born and lots of good news to report, unfortunately we’ve also had quite a few dogs killed recently – and mostly by lions.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve found 4 wild dog carcasses, three of which were killed by lions.  The fourth carcass was too old for cause of death to be ceratin, but damage to the skull suggests possibly a lion attack as well.  Two of the definite lion kills were of known dogs from the Mapura pack; an old male called Nyaminyami and a yearling female known as Tramp.  Fortunately (if we are to try and find a silver lining in this), the attack happened away from the den, when the dogs were out hunting, so their pups were not harmed and their den not disturbed.

The other dog definitely killed by lions was an adult male from the Mapari pack (we suspect) but we were not able to identify him.  The post mortem showed that he had had his spine broken by the lions.

The other carcass was too old to be identified, or for cause of death to be reliably established, but we believe it was a member of the Nyarushanga Pack which had been denning not far from where it was found.  We have yet to see that pack well enough to see which, if any, dogs are missing.

At the same time all this was happening in Save Valley Conservancy, we also found our collared wild dog in Gonarezhou dead, having been caught in a snare.  I’ll report on that in a separate post, as she was showing some extremely interesting movement behavior before she was killed.

So all in all a depressing couple of weeks, but just serves to highlight how important it is try to mitigate human threats, so that the combined impact of that and these natural deaths is less severe.

Back soon with better news I hope,

Rosemary

We had a bit of a shock when we visited the Mambira Pack den site a few days ago and found our camera trap bitten, broken and covered in salivary mud.  It could only mean one thing…. LIONS!

Fortunately the camera had still been working at the time and we could extract the SD card.  These were the last photos on the card………

Fortunately however, when we had first arrived at the den, we had seen both pups and all five adults, so it looks like the lions failed to get any dogs.  Whew!!

It’s still a bit worrying that the pack only has two pups, but ever since they first emerged from the den there have only been two.  It may just be that this first time mother only had two pups to start with, or else something happened to the rest of the litter in the first three weeks of their life.  We’ll never know about that, but at least we do know that both remaining pups survived this lion visit, so just maybe they will do okay after all.

Hi folks,

Apologies for being quiet on the blog recently without any explanation – it’s a pretty busy time here at the moment, and while we have lots of exciting things to report, I’m just not getting the time to do it.  Anyway, here I am at my desk, and the reason we’ve been quiet for so long is because we’ve been working in the beautiful and remote Gonarezhou National Park, where I am now running the Gonarezhou Predator Project.  We were hoping to find the den sites of the two main packs of wild dogs in the park, and possibly even collar them.  We also wanted to check up on our collared lions and download their collars, amongst other things.

Well, it turns out we were being a bit optimistic with the wild dogs.  Despite endless hours every day looking for tracks and following all signs of dogs, we failed to locate either pack.  It’s not the easiest terrain for tracking wild dogs, and roads are few and far between…

We did however learn a lot more about the dogs and their behavior from the spoor, so although we never saw any wild dogs, it’s been a very informative 10 days.  Rueben has, as always, been a star, and worked tirelessly in all conditions trying to locate the dogs

On several occasions our tracking brought us down to the edge of the Runde River – no shortage of signs of hippos and crocs:

Crocodile tracks – of a monster croc!!

We’ll try again with the dens and collaring in August.

We were much luckier with the lions, managing to pick up all three collared groups without too much effort, and downloaded the two GPS collars without incident.  The other group, with a VHF collar, we found near a road so we waited there till after dark in the hope we would see them, which indeed we did.  It seems our collared lioness is currently with one subadult male – the other seven members of the pride we saw the following day when downloading the GPS collar.

So, we won with the lions but it’s definitely 1:nil to the wild dogs this time.  We’ll try again in a couple of weeks.

Back soon,

Rosemary

Hi folks,

A couple of weeks ago we went to the Bedford Splinter Pack den site, only to find it abandoned.  We looked around but there was no recent sign of any wild dog activity so we checked the camera trap to see if that would shed some light on what happened.  Unfortunately, because it was not an infra-red camera we were unable to establish the reason they chose to move dens.  But we did get some great shots of the alpha female carrying the pups away to their new den.

It may well have been lion disturbance or something like that – because I switch the flash off on these cameras when I put them at the dens, any night time activity is simply recorded as a black photograph.  And there were more than 100 of these blank, black photos the night before they moved dens, suggesting perhaps a nocturnal visitor which scared them off….  This is an image captured at one of last years dens.

Infra-red camera traps cost US$200 each – if anyone would consider sponsoring the project enough to buy one (or even go towards buying one) we would be very grateful.  They are extremely valuable tools and the information we get from them is exceptionally useful.  Without these, the lion activity at den sites is going to go pretty much unrecorded unfortunately.  We have 3 and need at least 4 more.  If you can help, please click on the DONATE button on the right hand side of this page or go to our project home page by following this link.

Thank you,

Rosemary