Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Category: Wild Dogs | Date: Mar 05 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

I found the Mapari pack yesterday, for once in a very open area, so managed to get some great views of them.  I spent a long time with them, both in the morning and in the evening just before they went hunting.  A couple of the adults were getting very frisky and I wonder if this will be the next alpha pair (the previous alpha female was killed in a snare). Such a privilege to watch this kind of behaviour…

Then in the evening, the pups were the playful ones - two of them spent about 5 minutes holding onto each others tails and going round and round in circles - it was so funny I actually cried laughing!

The Mapari pack still has all six adults but only 8 pups now: unfortunately 2 are missing - Dudu and Trinity.  Pups of that age shouldn’t leave the pack for any reason, so unfortunately I suspect they have been killed, but you never know and if I’ve learnt anything by working with wild dogs it’s that you can never predict anything!  I’ll let you know if we see either of them again, but in the meantime, we have the 6 adults and Loopy, Biscuit, Milo, Roxy, Macbeth, Simba, Twinspot and Mishmash.

Back soon,

Rosemary

Tags: African Wild Dogs, conservation, hunting, playing, zimbabwe

3 responses so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Feb 06 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Just a very quick thank you to Ludovic who very generously donated U$55 to the project.  Thank you so much Ludovic - we appreciate your support enormously.  And a second thank you to all those who donated in November and December to help our snared pup.  It’s good to know people care. 

Rosemary  

Tags: conservation, donations, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

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Category: Other wildlife, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe | Date: Jan 15 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

Internet been down for a while, so forgive the long gap between posts.  It’s been an interesting week catching up with the wild dogs and other matters in the conservancy… I’m very sad to report that Squeaker the baby warthog didn’t make it.  He seemed to be well on the way to recovery and was scooting round the lawn with youthful abandon, but then suddenly got sick again and didn’t pull through.  Sad though it is, at least he died being cared for and with company, rather than a slow, lingering death from dehydration stuck in the mud.

As for the wild dogs, unfortunately we still haven’t managed to locate the Maera pack which is the pack with the snared pup.  We have spent many hours of many days searching for them, but with no luck.  They move such vast distances at the moment – due to the widespread availability of water and the abundance of impala and wildebeest calves, so I’m sure they are just eluding us! 

We did however find the Mavericks pack recently – the sole remaining pack in the south of the conservancy and discovered something very interesting. The two males in the pack (two brothers) have been joined by a new female…. none other than Mina, the secretive alpha female of the Nyarushanga pack!!  Mina was last seen at the Nyarushanga den in the very north of the conservancy in August last year.  The pack didn’t leave the den until October, and it was presumed Mina was still with them, although we never saw her again.  Unfortunately we never managed to collar that pack before they left the den, and have since lost track of them.  Imagine our surprise therefore when one of them showed up 60km south with a completely different pack!  It was like seeing an old friend again – I recognised her straight away because she has very distinct white markings.

Anyhow, it’s good news for those dogs, because the other individuals were all related so there was no chance of breeding (and indeed they did not den in 2008).  Hopefully this year they will den, and Mina will have some more pups to augment the rapidly dwindling population in the south. 

Back soon,

Rosemary

Tags: alpha female, conservation, snare, warthog, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

4 responses so far

Category: Other wildlife, Random, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe | Date: Dec 18 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

Sorry for keeping you all in suspense over the fate of the baby warthog…!  Fortunately, this story is one that has a happy ending, so keep reading.

This is a photo showing ‘Squeaker’ when we first found him… You can see from the first picture how hard he was to spot…

This closer-up photo shows just how stuck and muddy the little fellow was.

I managed to wade into the mud (very nearly getting stuck myself!) and pull him out, and Misheck and I washed the worst of the mud off with some fresh water we had in the car.  Unfortunately his back legs didn’t seem to work at all, but otherwise he seemed to have quite a fighting spirit. 

Having absolutely no idea how to raise a baby warthog, I took him over to some friends who very kindly helped me get some rehydration fluids down him, and then provided me with some powdered baby milk.  I took him home and put him in a dark, cushioned box with a couple of sarongs for him to ’burrow’ into.  And then fed him with baby milk by pipette once every few hours…. 

The next day I took him to another ranch in the conservancy, to a very kind lady who has a great deal of expereince raising orphaned animals of every kind.  Despite my best attempts at physio (!) his back legs still were not working and he was really very weak. I have to admit that I didn’t hold out too much hope for him, but if anyone could pull him through it would be Anne.  Anne immediately took him under her wing and before I had even finished explaining his presence, she had listened to his chest, daignosed pneumonia and rushed off and fetched antibiotics, aspirin and a proper bottle of milk for him. 

He was touch and go for a while, but now seems to be improving steadily and getting around just fine, despite his dis-functional back legs. I’ll give you an update on him from time to time, but I’m sure he will now enjoy a good life in Anne’s tender care (with other baby warthogs and an orphaned bushbuck for company!).  

Squeaker dozing in the shade

Back soon,

Rosemary

Tags: conservation, warthog, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

5 responses so far

Category: Wild Dogs, zimbabwe | Date: Dec 05 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Dear friends,

Third time lucky! After 3 days’ worth of attempts, we were finally successful, yesterday, in installing a collar on a member of the Mapari Pack, a male Wild Dog called Darkie. Since Sandy’s sad death by snaring just over a month ago, we have had very little information about the Mapari Pack, as there has been no radio-collared individual in the pack to help us locate and study them.

Around 1^st December, a pack of Wild Dogs was spotted quite close to our research base. They were resting in the shade by a water-hole in the heat of the day, and stayed there long enough for us to receive the message and reach that location. It turned out to be the Mapari Pack, travelling unusually far south, and that and subsequent sightings have been the best views we have had of the pack since the denning season, so we have in the last couple of days been able to build up a database of individual ID photographs for all the pups as well as the adults. It turns out that currently the Mapari Pack comprises a fascinating mixture of adults originating from the Star Pack, ‘Leon’s’ Pack, and the Sango Six-Pack within the last 6 months. This provides us with fascinating information about the mobility of Wild Dogs.

We were blessed to receive the assistance of the Tikki Hywood Trust who were generous enough to volunteer their time to help us with the darting when one of their licensed team members (Ellen Connelly) was down in the conservancy.  Without their generous donation of time and expertise, this darting would have been a lot harder to organise and we may have missed this valuable opportunity.  Trying to find un-collared packs in not easy!!

The Mapari Pack have been quite relaxed around our vehicle as we’ve approached them for darting attempts the last couple of days. We were able to get within the 25 metre darting range and shoot a dart at Darkie, who was in an appropriate position. He moved as soon as he heard the dart gun’s ‘pop!’ and so the dart hit him in the tail rather than the muscle of the back leg. However, somewhat to our surprise, he was staggering a few moments later and the immobilisation drugs soon took full effect, allowing us to install his collar, take hair and tissue and blood samples, and weigh and measure his body and teeth, all the while keeping his eyes covered with a blindfold and spraying him with cool water to prevent overheating.The rest of the pack moved off slowly as we approached the immobilized Darkie:

It was a busy scene with everyone helping as we did what was needed:

When he shook his head to shake off the water-droplets, we knew he was coming round from the ketamine—and in moments he had leapt up and run away, a very fast recovery. For a couple of minutes he was disoriented and looked dizzy, but he was soon able to move in a straight line and he moved around the water-hole looking for the rest of his pack. We left him lying in the shade near where the pack were when we found them.  He was reunited with the rest of his pack in a short time, as we returned to check on the pack a couple of hours later and found them all lying together, with Darkie, in the shade of a big baobab.

This morning Darkie was behaving normally, and with the aid of his new radio-collar, we were able to locate the Mapari Pack and watch him and the others playing and resting in the Msaize River.

Back soon,

Roy & Rosemary

Tags: collaring, conservation, darting, immobilisation, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

5 responses so far

Category: elephants, zimbabwe | Date: Nov 05 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

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

Tags: African Elephants, conservation, electricity in Zimbabwe, elephant damge, elephants, human-elephant conflict, human-wildlife conflict, zimbabwe

2 responses so far

Category: Wild Dogs, poaching, zimbabwe | Date: Nov 03 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Dear readers,

Our scout Misheck radioed us 2 days ago to report that he’d picked up the signal of the collar on Sandy, a member of the Mapari Pack, coming from OUTSIDE the Save Valley Conservancy. He traced it to someone’s house in a village to the north-east—one of the mud-brick round thatched huts that most rural people here live in. We suggested he go close to the house with his antenna to make sure the collar was inside. Here’s what the collar looks like:It’s possible that the Mapari Pack were just moving through the area of that village, having wandered outside the Conservancy as they are free to do. However, this seemed unlikely, and the implications were obvious and sad: the Wild Dog Sandy had been killed in a snare and the poacher had brought the collar back to his house, not knowing that it would lead us to finding him out.

Tags: conservation, poaching, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

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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

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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 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