Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Category: Denning, Wild Dogs, elephants, zimbabwe | Date: Jun 25 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

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

Tags: Denning, elephants, lion predation, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

3 responses so far

Category: Random | Date: Nov 16 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi guys,

It’s not always action here at the Lowveld Wild Dog Project in Zimbabwe. The last few days have been a quiet period with Rosemary and Rueben away; we haven’t seen or found sightings of the Wild Dogs for a few days, and have spent time on ‘housekeeping’ activities such as bicycle and motorbike maintenance—transport in the bush creates heavy wear on vehicles of all kinds and repairs are often needed, despite lack of parts, so we often have to improvise.

Here’s how we pump fuel for a fieldwork trip, using a gravity (siphon) pump.

The elephants were becoming such a problem on the ranch where we stay that we had to start doing night patrols and firing warning shots to scare them off. Interestingly, on the night that we started, the elephants were suddenly nowhere to be seen or heard, and haven’t been around since. Coincidence, or did they (somehow) get the message?

The rains have come here, and there have been a couple of gorgeous torrential storms on the ranch which wipe everything clean and re-shape the sand in the roads. It seems the storms do something to the sunlight, which looks clearer and crisper afterwards.

The impala must be nearing their birthing season (usually at the start of December, when the rains have come) because I observed some of the rams starting their ‘false rut’ behaviour, when the hormones from pregnant females stimulate some mating behaviour, although the main breeding season for impala is in June-July. The males were roaring ferociously, sounding frighteningly like lions, and chasing females around.

Having said that, as I lay in bed the other night, I did actually hear lions roaring outside.

Till later,

Roy

Tags: elephants, impala, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

2 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