Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

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 22 2009 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi folks,

I’m back briefly from the first phase of field work in Gonarezhou National Park.  We just spent 12 days working in the south of the park, attempting to find and collar lions (to test for TB), and hoping that we may be lucky enough to find some wild dogs.  We were not specifically looking for hyenas, but got to see lots of them too!!

Our approach with the lions was to look for fresh tracks along the roads, follow the spoor for a while until we could guess where the lions might be resting up, and then that night go and play lion-attracting noises on loud speakers, along with setting up a bait, to try to lure the lions within darting range… The first night we tried we attracted a hyena, a civet and a large herd of elephants who were not best pleased by the noises of squealing pigs and dying buffalos, so we had to abort our efforts rather abruptly!

The following night, we had only been calling for about 15 minutes when a beautiful lioness stalked up.  Unfortunately she came over to my vehicle which was playing the sound, rather than over to the bait where the vets were waiting to dart her!  Eventually she got the idea and went towards the bait, but by this time a large clan of hyenas had been attracted to the bait and did a very thorough job of keeping her away!  Even had we had an opportunity to dart her, we could not have done so with so many hyeanas around, as they may have attacked her once she was too drugged to defend herself and before we could get to her.  So we contented ourselves with observing the interactions for a while and then packed everything up and left them in peace.

We didnt get many other opportunities to dart lions there - although we will be continuing to try over the next week or so - but did manage to track and find a pack of wild dogs which was MOST exciting!  We found fresh spoor early one morning and followed it for a few hours until we came across where the dogs were resting.  Unfortunately, as wild dogs tend to do (!), they saw and smelt us before we had a good look at them and bounded off.  Nonetheless, from the tracks and the number we actually saw, it seems to be a good sized pack - at least 15 adults and 10 pups.  It was also the first pack of dogs I have seen in the park and was thus doubly as exciting! 

Anyway, I’ll be heading back into the park on Sunday for another week or so, to continue to look for both lions and wild dogs and will post again when I’m back.  Hopefully I’ll have some more exciting pictures to show you then!

Rosemary  

Tags: call-ups, Gonarezhou National Park, hyenas, lions, spoor, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe

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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: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 14 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi guys,

I think I mentioned in a previous post that we’ve been doing a spoor survey over the past few weeks; looking along the roads for the tracks of Africa’s large carnivores.  We’ve found the tracks of pretty much everything; lions, leopards (lots), wild dogs, cheetahs, spotted hyenas, brown hyenas, civets, african wild cats, honey badgers and porcupines.  We even saw an actual cheetah the other day (!), which was very special as they are so rare. 

This is a family I saw earlier this year on the road

We also bumped into a black rhino yesterday whilst looking for tracks.  He’d been de-horned by the rhino team here in an effort to prevent poaching.  A sad, but necessary thing to do.  Hopefully he will at least survive, despite not having a horn.

Still another 10 days or so of early starts and spoor transects…

Back soon,

Rosemary

Tags: African carnivores, cheetahs, leopards, lions, spoor, tracks

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