Here is the beautiful Rumpleteaser. What a cat! This Caracal was photographed walking down a fence late last year. It is the angle and perspective of the photo that makes it look so out of proportion.
We do not really hate birds, but they are certainly not helping us out at the moment. We have set up scent stations along our spoor count transects with delicous scent such as fermented egg and fish oil on a pad of cotton wool in the middle of an area of swept, watered sand. The idea is that animals moving along the transects will be irresitably drawn to sniff the enticing smell and so leave a record of their passing by way of footprints in the sand. We have had some problems with this such as Brown Hyaenas stealing the scent pads, and Elephants taking exception to our efforts and trashing our scent stations, but the biggest, most persitent thorn in our side is the birds whose track are obliterating the tracks of our predators before we can record what was there. The high rainfall this year has led to wonderfully large broods of game birds such as francolins and guinea fowl, but this means that large groups are out forgaing at first light and they are quite literally trampling all over my data. We are hanging crunched up tin foil above the trees but it is serving as no deterrent whatsoever. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
There is a pair of young lions that have been wandering around Venetia for some time now that have proved extremely elusive when it comes to managing to put a collar on them, so we are all extremely excited at having finally succeeded. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser are brother and sister and, in my opinion, are two of the most beautiful lions on the reserve. We bump into them from time to time, and the volunteer group were even lucky enough to see them hunting a kudu in front of their camp recently, but every time there is a vet on hand they disappear. We finally did it! Mungojerrie is now proudly sporting a radio-collar and so we will start to get to know the habits of this pair of youngsters. In the photo Mungojerrie is the young lion on the right, and his father, Thunzi, is on the left.
They have been independent of their mother for over a year, but are sticking together for rather a long time for opposite sex siblings. We know they use the fence lines a lot as we often see them there. My husband has had a few encounters with them while checking our fence on his quad bike (ATV). Rumpleteaser definitely views him as prey and wastes not time in dropping down to stalk him. Being young and subordinate, it may be that they are looking to expand their territory or are simply avoiding the older, more established lions in the centre of the reserve. Now that we have a collar on Mungojerrie, we can begin to answer some of our questions.
Azwifarwi, my very able field assistant, is working towards his diploma in Nature Conservation and as part of that needs to complete a project on animal behavior. After much deliberation, he has decided to focus his study on the pack of Wild Dogs on Venetia. The pack are somewhat more skittish than usual after having to be darted twice each for their rabies injections, and so the extra hours Azwifarwi will spend with the dogs will help to regain their trust in having a vehicle present. Even in their more alert state, the Venetia pack is an exceptionally relaxed and well-habituated pack and so offer some of the best opportunities for tourists to observe Wild Dogs in their natural environment anywhere in Africa. Trips to see the Wild Dogs are hosted by one of the dedicated researchers and guests are often lucky enough to witness them hunting. As we come into the Southern Hemisphere Winter, it is approaching the time we expect the Wild Dogs to make their den and have another litter of puppies. We are confident that the alpha female, Stellar (so named for a white star on her coat), is pregnant. There should be some interesting data for Azwifarwi to collect, along with the data collected by Kristi, the Wild Dog researcher. Last year the den was only 10 metres from the fence line with our farm, right where the cheetah family crossed over. We can hardly wait to see what this denning season brings!
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to all of you who have donated to us last month. In particular Theresa S. and Antonio Canella, but also to our anonymous donors. Your help is appreciated and we will keep you posted with the progress from the GPS collar once we have fitted it. There was excitement all round and the usual emptiness of the bush was interrupted recently by the annual Bike for Beats Mountain Bike Challenge on Venetia. This bike race in aid of EWT pits riders from all over the country against gruelling conditions involving deep sand, vicious thorns and baking heat covering over 60km of beautiful scenery in the reserve. The population of elephants are unlikely to take too kindly to cyclists in their way so there is are Land Rovers at the front and back of the riders, and a helicopter above the course ready to step in if necessary. Should there be elephants on the track, the whole race stops until they have cleared the way. Thankfully, the elephants were again very well-behaved and no stops were made. The race not only raises money for the EWT, but also gives riders the rare opportunity to explore this part of the world by bike. It was again a resounding success and we are all looking forward to next years race.
Our next door neighbours were lucky enough to have a cheetah sighting on Sunday, close to their house. They only saw one Cheetah and said she was moving quite fast, but thought it was a female. They also commented on how dark she was, which was something we noticed about the female with the cubs, so it is possible that the mother and her cubs have crossed one of the tar roads onto the next door farm. Our neighbours only saw one animal, but in the thick bush we have here, it is quite possible that the others were there, and were simply hidden. The camouflage is amazing and it really does the job. Often when out tracking, I could pinpoint the exact spot where the cheetah should be at only 10m away, but could still not see it unless it stood up. My husband was amazed when we watched the cheetahs on the fence line at how quickly they disappeared. We could hear their distinctive chirping very close by, but the cats themselves quickly became invisible. When out in the open it seems hard to believe that they can be so hard to see, as in the following photo of Dottie, one of my previous study animals.
With a little bit of cover, spotting them becomes quite a different story altogether!
Poor Barclay had a hard lesson on life in the bush this week. I am encouraging him to get out into the bush and to search around in the long grass, as he will need to do, and while he was out playing in the long grass in our yard, he had a run-in with a Mozambique Spitting Cobra. We found him with swollen eyes oozing thick yellow pus, as is typical of cobra venom in the eyes. It is a cytotoxic or cell destroying venom, which the snake uses to temporarily blind its attackers to allow it to escape. This snake is one of the most common here and Snoopy has also been on the receiving end of venom in his eyes, but made a full recovery on all occasions. We wash out their eyes thoroughly and apply an antibiotic and anti-inflammatory ointment into the affected eyes, and they soon get better. We can only hope that Barclay will have learned his lesson, and will know to stay away from snakes in future.
I took Snoopy out and we searched the road where the cheetah footprints were but sadly did not turn up anything. Snoopy and I are both learning as we go so I wondered if perhaps he was not searching properly, or was getting distracted so I decided to test if this was the case. I took him home, and went back out with a sample and threw it out of the vehicles window just off the road. I did not place the sample on foot as he may have picked up on my smell, and homed in on that. When we went back, Snoopy found the sample, suggesting he is searching correctly. This leaves me with two possibilities. Either, there really were no fresh scats there, which is a possibility because the cheetahs were looking very thin. With carnivores, they gorge themselves so at meals that you can gauge how full they are on a rating of 1-5. 5 is a very full, pendulous stomach on cheetahs, and 1 is an empty stomach that is sucked up towards the spine. I would have placed these cheetahs at about a 2, so they would have spent the past couple of days without a large meal. With this in mind, it is possible that there were no scats. The other possibility is that Snoopy is looking too specifically for the particular animals scats. My samples come from another project and are from only 3 individuals. Work in the US has shown that dogs can identify to individual level from scats. I do not think this second scenario is likely as we are both still learning and I do not think we are at that stage yet, but it is possible. To address this I will now introduce scats of different species and teach him to ignore them, and will try to source more cheetah scats from different cats.
The Cheetah family that had become split up by one of the cubs finding its way through the reserve boundary fence has been reunited. On our way to the area where they were last seen calling to each other through the fence, we picked up the tracks of the whole family walking along a road. They are all now on our farm, and outside the boundaries of the formally protected areas. We carried on to see where they had crossed onto our farm, and found holes pushed through the fence very close to where the first cub came through. The tracks on the Venetia side of the fence has been largely obliterated by guinea fowl, which come out to forage in the early morning, so we think they probably crossed over yesterday evening. The family of cheetahs are safe here, but they are unlikely to stay for long. The fence surrounding the De Beers Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve is an electrified predator fence that is designed to keep predators from crossing it, but often these animals have different ideas. Where the cheetahs crossed, they had simply forced their way through the strands of wire, rather than the more usual method of using holes dug under fences by warthogs. Our fence is not electrified on the three sides that do not form a boundary with Venetia, and so the family will have no trouble in moving on. My main concern is actually not for their safety with other farmers, but rather their safety on the road. Two boundaries of the farm are with tar roads, and while there is thankfully very little traffic, the traffic that is here tends to be going very fast. We need to know what is happening with these cats. As I have mentioned in previous postings, our habitat here is much thicker than typical cheetah habitat, with the bush being too thick in many places to hunt in the normal way of chasing down quarry with a burst of high speed. We need to know how this affects this size of the areas they cheetahs use, what they are eating, and what their survival rates are. GPS collars allow us to plot their movements accurately without habituating them, and we can even use them to collect data on what they are eating. In my experience on a previous project I worked on with cheetahs, they keep moving in the morning and evening unless they have just eaten and want to sleep off their heavy meal. By closely monitoring their movements, it should be possible to see where we think they may have eaten and respond by taking Snoopy to the site and sending him to look for the carcass. He started his career on finding the carcasses left by cheetahs in thick bush, and can be a great deal of use with this as well as looking for scats. I am going to take him out now to walk the road where the cheetahs walked this morning to see if we can find any scats. I will let you know what he turns up. The GPS collars we need are so essential to this work. Wherever possible we make our equipment ourselves and manage with the cheapest workable options we can find, but in this case we simply do not have the knowledge and technology required and will have to buy in these collars. Any help will be very much appreciated and will have a very positive impact on the work we are doing in this area.
I am in the lucky position that my husband’s farm lies directly adjacent to the De Beers Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve and falls within the greater boundaries of the Limpopo-Shashe Transfrontier Conservation Area. We have myriad wildlife species on the farm, but also farm on a modest scale with goats. Obviously there can be conflict where predators and livestock, particularly small stock like sheep and goats, are concerned but we try our best to mitigate these issues with responsible farming practices. All our livestock comes into pens at night where it is safe from nocturnal predators, and during the day when the flock is foraging, they do so under the watchful eye of Pego, our Anatolian Shepherd Dog. This is a breed that was specifically developed in Turkey to guard sheep and goats from wolves and bears, and is being successfully used in Southern Africa to guard against predators. Pego’s job is not to attack predators, but rather to scare them off and send them in search of unprotected natural prey species. Since Pego came to live with us, we have not lost a single goat to predation. Pego does not live with Snoopy and Barclay at our house, but lives his entire life with the goats. He was put with them as a young puppy, and so associates himself with goats more than dogs, which makes him good at his job. Pego’s skills may be put to good use in the next few weeks, as a female cheetah with cubs (as yet unidentified) on Venetia has been pacing our mutual fence line with two of her cubs. We watched them in the dwindling light this evening as she called onto our farm continually. Looking in the sand, we saw a clear set of small cheetah prints on our side of the fence, so one of them has come through. Further searching turned up the spot in the fence where the animal breached the boundary. A hole in the fence showed the pawprints on both sides, and the tuft of hair snagged in the barbed wire of the fence showed that the animal had come from Venetia onto our farm, but the high grass following this years good rain means that we could not follow his or her track for far. We agreed with reserve management to leave the hole in the fence for now, to allow the cheetah family to try to reunite. I estimate the cubs to be no more than nine months old, if that, and as such to be fully dependent on the mother for food. We have never lost a domestic animal to cheetahs, and we do not mind our predators eating the wild animals as it is what they are here to do, so if the whole family moves onto our farm, they will be welcome. A significant part of our work here is to look at the difference in the success and survival of our subject species on protected land and on farmland, and to this end we plan to fit radio and GPS collars to a number of cheetahs to gain a better understanding of their movements across different land uses. Radio-collars are by far the cheapest option, but regular tracking quickly habituates cheetahs to vehicles, which is wonderful on protected land, but may well sign the animals death warrant on private farmland where some farmers do not tolerate the presence of cheetahs. A cheetah that has become relaxed enough around vehicles not to run off at the sound of an approaching motor vehicle, may well give a less tolerant land owner time to load and fire a gun, that he would not have if the cheetahs remained more shy. The small farm size in the area of an average of approximately 2000 hectares means that the cheetahs will cross many peoples’ land in the course of their lives, and tracking them becomes very difficult when you have to get each landowners permission. This work with the cheetahs in South Africa is extremely important as it is thought that more of them live on private farmland than on protected areas, and so a full understanding of how they operate here is essential to devising long term conservation strategies for cheetahs in this country. We desperately need GPS collars. We have a permit to fit collars to five cheetahs, but only have funding for two GPS collars. We will be putting all donations, unless otherwise specified, towards these collars which are so essential to this work which I believe is it at the heart of cheetah conservation in the world in which we live today. I would like to sincerely thank Andrew F for his generous donation, which we will be putting into our fund for GPS collars.
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Rox Brummer of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, and her dogs Snoopy and Barclay report on carnivore research that is helping to conserve one of Africa's greatest cross border protected areas the great Limpopo-Shase Transfrontier conservation area, a peace park linking South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe
