Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Category: Gonarezhou National Park, Other wildlife, zimbabwe | Date: Oct 30 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

Apologies for the deviation from wild dogs - yet again!  I just had to share this story with you.

The Zimbabwean lowveld has been struggling with some major bush fires in the last month.  Much of the southern half of the Save Valley Conservancy was burnt, tragically including Senuko Lodge which was one of the most stunning places it’s possible to imagine. 

Gonarezhou has also been fighting fires… In the process, Hugo and Elsabe van der Westhuizen from Frankfurt Zoological Society (which works with the Zimbabwean Parks and Wildlife Management Authority to help conserve the Gonarezhou ecosystem) noticed a baby porcupine fleeing from the fire.  He had badly burnt feet and was never going to beat the fire, so Hugo (amidst much cursing I would imagine!), used his shirt to grab the spikey little fellow and took him back to their camp for rehabilitation.

He adapted well to his new home, enjoying the darkness of his box during the day time and coming out at night to potter around and eat the offerings Elsabe put out for him (porcupines are naturally nocturnal).  He seems to be particularly keen on potatoes, apple and sadza (the local staple food of maize meal).

With the use of gardening gloves and oven gloves (!) we managed to treat the wounds on his feet and give him an injection of long-acting antibiotics - no small challenge, I might say! He seems to be a lot better already, and his feet are healing nicely.

Bless him!

I’ll let you know how he does and how his re-introduction back into the bush goes. 

Rosemary

Tags: bush fires, Gonarezhou, porcupine, zimbabwe

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Category: Carnivores general, Gonarezhou National Park, Other wildlife, Wild Dogs, lions, zimbabwe | Date: Oct 29 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

I’m finally back from three weeks in the wilderness of Gonarezhou.  As you will see from the last two posts, I did actually have a few days at park HQs in the middle of the stay, so this is the story of what happened in phase two of the trip…

After a few days of ‘admin’ at HQ, I set off once again with Rueben and a National Parks research assistant Julius, for the three hour drive across the park into the eastern area where we were hoping to find signs of wild dogs, and if we were lucky to get a collar on to a lion.  The first evening we were there, we drove out to a stunning water-filled pan full of birds and surrounded by groups of impala, warthogs, baboons, zebra, wildebeest and even the rare and spectacular sable antelope. 

We saw no fresh lion or wild dog spoor, but it seemed like a good place for predators, so we decided to set up a calling station in an open area nearby and see what came.  To attract predators, the usual method is to play the sound of a dying buffalo calf over loudspeakers and see what comes to investigate.  In this instance, however, instead of attracting predators, we attracted a large and rather anxious herd of buffalo, come to save their calf!! 

They were very persistent and we could do nothing for the next hour or so, until they moved off to drink.  After that, our call-up attracted 3 black-backed jackals and a civet, but no larger predators…  

At least until I changed tactic and played a lion roar, at which point an immediate and very load answering roar told us there was in fact a lion not too far away!! Although the moon was only half full it was bright enough for me to make out the lion through binoculars – a beautiful male with a half-black mane.  Great!  It was wonderful to know he was around, and we decided we would try to lure him to bait the following night to try to collar him.

As it turned out, he could not have been more co-operative!  Early the next morning, I was woken up at 4:30 by the sound of a lion roaring.  I got up to investigate, and there was the lion strolling along past the camp (maybe 150m away)…  So I flung on some clothes, jumped into the car, prepared the drugs and a dart and went after him.  We followed him for a while but then lost him in thick bush, so decided rather to wait for the evening when lions become active again.   We called him again, and he came to the bait around half past eight.  I managed to dart him, and discovered (to my great surprise to say the least!) that he already had a very old, dysfunctional collar on.  Bizarre!!  This turned out to be from the wildlife reserve neighbouring the park, in which he had been collared in 2002, and from where he went missing in 2005! It turns out he is 10-11 years old, which is OLD for a lion, and evidenced by his very worn teeth.   

Despite this, he was in good condition, albeit slightly thin, and it will be great to be able to keep an eye on him now that he is collared.  The collar will hopefully also prevent him getting shot on one of the hunting concessions outside the park.  We also took some blood samples to be able to test for various diseases - Bovine TB is a particular concern, and for genetic analyses to help us establish whether there is any inbreeding in the lion population in the park. 

We are doing all this work (by the way) because there are worryingly few lions in Gonarezhou National Park, which should be a prime area for the conservation of the species, and we need to find out what factors are keeping their population so low, so we can try and do something about it.  Lion and wild dog populations are also linked in many ways, so getting an idea of the abundance and distribution of the lions in the park also has key significance for understanding wild dog populations. 

On that note, we also found evidence of more wild dogs in the park, which was extremely encouraging, and which I will report on in a separate posting. 

Back soon, 

Rosemary

Tags: call-up stations, Gonarezhou, lions, sable, Wild Dogs

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Category: Carnivores general, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe | Date: Oct 11 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

This blog will be quiet for the next couple of weeks I’m afraid: I’m going into Gonarezhou National Park to see if we can find some lions (no tigers or bears hopefully) to help some vets who want to survey the lion population for bovine Tuberculosis (bTB).  Obviously this is largely a disease of bovids, but lions can get it from eating infected carcasses and it has been a big problem for the lions in neighbouring Kruger National Park in South Africa. 

The lion population in Gonarezhou seems to be very low at the moment, and we will be starting a project to investigate why this might be, alongside our work on the wild dogs in the park.  Helping the vets with the bTB survey and getting some collars on at the same time will be a good place to start.  It will be no small challenge though!

Anyway, I’m going down to the south of the park tomorrow where there are no communication facilities, so wont be updating this blog for a while.  Rest assured we won’t be slacking though (!) and will post again with all the news when I’m back somewhere with internet connection. 

I have Reuben with me to help track the lions and wild dogs if we do find fresh spoor, and have left Misheck monitoring the wild dogs in the Save Valely Conservancy….

Back soon (hopefully!),

Rosemary

Tags: bovine TB, bTB, Gonarezhou, lions, Wild Dogs

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Category: Carnivores general, zimbabwe | Date: Jun 05 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

Rueben and I have just come back from Gonarezhou having completed the first half of the spoor survey we were doing there.  It was hard work and involved lots of driving, but was well worth it - it’s such a beautiful place.  We picked up evidence of good populations of spotted hyenas and leopards, but very few lion tracks and not very many wild dog tracks either.  We even picked up some cheetah spoor which was exciting, as I’m told cheetah are not often seen in the park.

We drove spoor transects in both the morning and evenings on most days - when the sun is at the best angle to see the tracks in the sand - and then just camped out where we ended up or where we wanted to start the next day.  A wonderful opportunity, and magical to lie in a tent and listen to the sounds of the bush all around: elephants splashing through the river, hyenas making a kill, nightjars singing and owls hooting. 

Elephant tracks crossing the dry river

As always, the scenery was stunning….

 and the wildlife was special.  (Nyala calf)

We were also lucky enough to see several herds of buffalo, elephants, hyenas on two separate occasions, and even a flash of a pair of leopards running across the road!  The birdlife is awesome too.

Although we didnt see any of them, the tracks we saw suggested the park also has good numbers of the smaller carnivores - civets, genets, porcupines, wild cats and even aardwolves.  Maybe we’ll get lucky during the next stage of the survey.

We’re off back to the park on Sunday, so the blog will once again be quiet for a while…

Rosemary

Tags: Carnivores, cheetah, Gonarezhou, hyena, leoards, lion, spoor, tracks, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

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