Wild Dogs

    In recent months we have had a number of encounters with Wild Dogs. I should explain first that these are not domestic dogs run wild. They belong to the same family, the Canidae but are not part of the genus Canis and are sometimes called Painted Dogs from their Latin name Lycaon pictus. I prefer the simple name – Wild Dog.

    Hwange is home to the very successful Painted Dog Conservation project which has a base near Main Camp. They monitor the Dogs in Hwange and elsewhere and try to raise awareness of these beautiful and endangered animals. In many parts of the Park the Dogs are struggling to survive because they often travel out of the Park and run the risk of being killed in road accidents, in snares or by diseases of domestic dogs. Here at Sinamatella we are very lucky to be in the middle of a huge area of protected land and the resident pack of Dogs rarely, if ever, runs these risks so, for the moment at least, they are doing well.

    Back in November we met up with the largest group of Dogs we’ve ever seen. There were eighteen pups and seventeen adults……

Part of the pack on the road near Gurangwenya.

The adults were not bothered by the car and simply bypassed us but the pups stayed on the road in front, watching us carefully…..

We watched them for a long time but eventually had to go and Sue got some nice close-ups as we drove slowly past….

Since that day in November we have seen the Dogs quite often. They range in colour from very light…..

 

To mostly dark……

They rarely take much notice of us and spend a lot of time relaxing……

But occasionally they are playful……

And they are surprisingly keen on bathing……

They are normally very successful hunters but on the two occasions we have seen them hunt they have failed both times when their intended prey risked being taken by crocodiles and took refuge in fairly deep water.  Although we haven’t seen them actually catch anything we have several times seen them feeding on Impala or Kudu and they can become quite gruesomely stained with blood, losing a lot of their “cute” looks …..

Currently, the Sinamatella pack seems to have split and we have a group of eleven Dogs regularly in the area. They are no doubt taking a heavy toll of the newly born Impala but of course Impala are nowhere near as endangered as the Wild Dogs and we’re pleased to see the Dogs so often so we hope they will stay in the area.

 

January floods

   Since I last posted to this blog over a month ago the Park has changed dramatically. The good rain that fell at the end of November was followed by a long dry spell. We went home to Bulawayo for Christmas and it was even worse there, with the grass hardly changed from its winter brown, and when we returned to Sinamatella, it was to the depressing sight of wilting bush and drying grass. However, all that changed a few days into the new year.

     The first sign that we were in for some heavy rain came while we were in Victoria Falls, returning a Land Cruiser axle we had borrowed (our own had a bearing and half-shaft problem). The clouds built up during the morning and a lot of rain fell on us while we were shopping (and Sue’s new Chinese-made umbrella broke on just its second outing - why do they bother to make such rubbish?!)

     Back at Sinamatella the roads were wet and we were told there had been a good, heavy shower there too. When the view from Sinamatella hill is so often like this………

Sinamatella floodplain, September 2012

  It’s great to see it, for a few months, like this…….

January 2013

And even more amazing, after it had rained all the next night,  is to see it like this……..

Overnight the Sinamatella river had burst its banks and filled most of the flood plain for the first time in the almost four years we have lived here. It slowly receded during the course of the day and this morning it is not far from normal so, over the last three days, we have watched the water levels rise, rise again and then fall - to reveal quite a lot less damage than we had expected.

At Kashawe View the high water of the first day …….

 Became something altogether more serious on the second day…….

At the bridge near the start of Sinamatella River Drive, the first day the water was high……

But the second day we couldn’t get even within sight of the bridge because the approach was flooded  ………

The road is somewhere under all that water – or at least it was, because when the water receded, the road was gone……

Luckily, that was the worst of the damage we found.  On the Sinamatella River Drive we had to clear a fallen tree off the exit from the bridge …..

I let Sue go ahead and probe with a stick to make sure there was concrete under the water before I crossed with the car. ….

  I’m not sure if that makes me a) lazy, b) sensible, c) a pig or d) all of the above. Choose for yourself!

  On the road to Mandavu Dam the vlei which was as flooded as this yesterday……

  Was back to normal today…….

   A pair of Saddlebill Storks was hunting bullfrogs in the still wet grass and this one got lucky….

   It took a long time to swallow!

   There were other beneficiaries such as this terrapin that found itself a quiet pool next to the road…

 And fungi are springing up everywhere…..

Of course the vegetation is loving it.

And amidst all that water there were some surprising survivors. Ants and termites were back at work in grassland that had been under at least a meter of water for most of yesterday….

Up in the Smith’s Mine Hills we even have some pretty little waterfalls…..

So, in spite of some minor annoyances……

We are hoping for more rain to come. After all, the washing may not dry but it is well rinsed.

Google

Too many elephants?

Now that the dry season and its associated problems are over (well we hope they are over) it’s time to take stock. A lot has been said and written about the animal’s water supply, overpopulation of elephants in the Park and so on, mostly triggered by sights such as this…

 

  It looks awful but was it really so bad or are we just over-reacting to seeing dead elephants at almost every water hole? A number of questions need to be answered. How bad were the losses? Did we do enough to prevent them? What can we do in future? And since the key factor in all this is the number of elephants we must also ask are there too many elephants? Are they really destroying the Park? What can we do?

    Let’s take the questions in order. First, how bad were the losses? The main visible losses were elephants. In the Sinamatella area almost every major water source had one or several deaths but there were surprisingly few carcasses away from the water – certainly fewer than last year when it seemed at times that the smell of dead elephant was the dominant feature of the Park. Known losses are under one hundred but no doubt there were some unrecorded. We visit many places off the tourist routes and away from the main water points and have seen very few carcasses there so perhaps a reasonable guess would put elephant losses in the low hundreds. The recent WEZ game census recorded 2382 elephants in Sinamatella so (say) 200 deaths is 8.4% of the population. Yes, of course there are many factors to be considered, for example the age and sex of the animals dying (obviously the loss of breeding females has more effect on population growth than the loss of old males) but however you look at it, the death of 8.4% of  Sinamatella’s elephants would be bad but certainly nothing to panic about. In fact I think the actual number of elephants in the area is greater than 2382 (WEZ didn’t count in the Safari Areas) and the number of deaths was probably much less than 200 so the over-all loss would be well below 8.4%. My guess would be that it was closer to 4%.         

      As for other losses, the death of a small animal is hard to detect as scavengers quickly remove small carcasses. However, the WEZ census shows increased or steady populations for most species. Giraffe numbers have been in steady decline for some years but others such as Impala and Kudu are steadily rising. The value of 24-hour waterhole counts is often questioned but it is unlikely that these results could be obtained in the face of actual major losses so it seems that the mortality was distressing to look at but unlikely to have had much impact on animal numbers in the Park.

     So, did we do enough to prevent the mortality? Many observers have written about animals dying of thirst. In Sinamatella that wasn’t the case. Water supplies were (and are) adequate and the deaths were more due to poor diet and perhaps heat stress. These are factors though, which are clearly connected with water supplies. When animals are forced to stay fairly close to just a few water sources the food in that area is consumed and they lose condition so, did we provide enough water?

     There were numerous breakdowns of the ageing water pumping equipment but thanks to Mr Mafa and his hard-working team, no pump was out of action for very long.

Installing a new engine at Inyantue

    In September the Park authorities, recognizing that a problem was looming, called a meeting of interested parties to ask for help. Through the season many people and organisations donated money, equipment, fuel and expertise and without their help the situation would have been much worse. It would be fair to say that as much was done as possible, given financial and other constraints but of course more could have been done in an ideal world. There were boreholes that were unused or underused which could certainly have provided more water. So that leads to the next question, can we do better in future? For now though I want to leave that question and come back to it after we have looked at the ‘elephant problem’ as any future plans on water supplies must be made with reference to the growing elephant population.

   Are there too many elephants?

   The Hwange elephant population seems to be very mobile. The 2011 game census recorded 23,569 but in 2012 there were just 14,428. The missing 9,141 are not dead, they presumably left Hwange at some time and spent at least part of the dry season elsewhere – Botswana, Namibia, parts of Zambia, even South East Angola are all within easy reach of Hwange for an elephant. Our various animal counts show very large numbers of elephants in June/July and a steady decrease from then. Perhaps the elephant herds were as appalled as we were at the huge numbers early in the dry season and they reacted by migrating elsewhere. We could therefore say that the elephants are regulating their own population according to conditions and the question of “too many” doesn’t arise but I think that would be short sighted. Even if Hwange wasn’t over-populated this year, it just means that our elephants had become somebody else’s problem and sooner or later there must be too many because there is a limit to the areas they can inhabit without coming into conflict with humans – a conflict they are bound to lose.  So my answer to ‘are there too many elephants?’ is This year? No, I don’t think so, Eventually? Yes, certainly.

   Are the elephants damaging the Park?

   Just as one dead elephant has a visual (and olfactory) impact far greater than its real impact on the environment, a hectare of smashed bush or even a single felled Baobab looks awful and is far more memorable than a ‘normal’ landscape.

Baobab and Combretum bush destroyed by elephants

Hwange’s tourist roads were designed to pass through the areas of greatest animal concentration so anyone using those roads is likely to get an impression of widespread destruction. In terms of the Park as a whole, I believe the environmental destruction by elephants has been relatively small. Close to Sinamatella there are patches of Combretum bush that have been flattened almost to the ground. It is worse close to Masuma and Mandavu dams. Move away from these places however, only a few kilometres sometimes, and there are large areas of similar vegetation that are almost untouched. That’s a pattern that is repeated almost everywhere I go, a mosaic of  patches of clear and often severe damage and places that are apparently normal so, yes the elephants are destroying parts of their environment but in most places the damage is not anywhere near as severe as it is around the most popular water sources.

    And now we come to the really difficult question. What’s to be done about the elephant population? There are three broad answers. First, do nothing; let the population regulate itself, even if that leads to large scale mortality and environment change. Second, shoot enough elephants to bring the population to an acceptable level and then keep shooting them in subsequent years to stop it rising out of control. Third, try some technological fix such as reducing the elephants’ fertility through chemical means.

    Each of these answers has its backers and each has its pros and cons. I don’t believe there is a ‘right’ answer but arguably, allowing matters to take their own course is the ‘morally correct’ way. However, if the elephant population reaches a point where there is massive conflict between elephants and humans as hungry animals flood out of the Park into the surrounding farms and villages, the impact of that on the whole National Park/wildlife conservation concept could be huge. We might end up losing everything in such a situation so ‘morally correct’ would have to give way to action of some kind and I would have to say I think culling is inevitable in the end – unless a cheap and practical technological fix emerges of course.

      So finally, that brings us back to what can we do about water and food supplies in the future. If we want to precipitate a ‘natural’ decline in animal numbers perhaps we should stop or at least reduce the pumping of water. On the other hand, if we believe that there are not yet too many elephants then we must try to provide water points in as many places as possible so that all the Park’s food resources are used. These are huge decisions that will continue to provoke great debate and they are decisions that possibly no-one is ready to make. Here on the ground then, the only thing we can do is make sure that next year the water pumping effort is at least as good as this year and that, if possible, more of the under-utilised infrastructure is brought back into action. That will at least ensure that we don’t decide the future of the Park by default – by simply failing to do anything – and it will give time for the tough decisions to be considered. Whatever else we do, one important thing is not to panic or over-dramatise. Some time in the future the situation may become desperate but we haven’t reached that point yet and the Park will be as wonderful next year as it has been this.

A storm at Mandavu

On Saturday as we were approaching Mandavu Dam from Masuma even the most inept weather prophet could see that rain was inevitable…

    By the time we reached Mandavu, rain was visible in the distance and the wind was starting to blow strongly……

Within minutes the rain started……

And our view was quickly obscured……

But within half an hour the rain had stopped and we drove to the top end of the dam to see if the Mandavu River was flowing. The dry dam-bed had changed from desert to swamp in a matter of minutes…..

  And the rivers were bringing new water into the dam….

    We had a similar experience the following day when rainfall upstream brought the Sinamatella River down in flood.

    Suddenly water and green leaves are everywhere and the harsh sights of the dry season are replaced by the soft colours of the wet….

The road towards our house at Sinamatella

And of course, with clouds in the sky there is more scope for Sue to add to our huge collection of sunrise and sunset photos!

Sunrise at Sinamatella.

Some recent trips

Our trips away from Sinamatella in recent weeks have spanned (we hope) the start of the rainy season. Just before the rain we took some of the children from Sinamatella School into the Park to see the animals close up. Living at Sinamatella they are surrounded by animals but rarely get to see them except from the top of the hill where the camp is situated. They were a bit shy at first – no big smiles for the camera!

Grade 7 2012, Sinamatella School.

We headed out to Masuma and were lucky to see lions just after we left the camp, then later a big herd of buffalo. At Masuma we found a scene of devastation. The ‘scooping’ of the dam had come to a temporary halt with heaps of drying mud still piled up around the edges. In the dam, just in front of the viewing point, an elephant lay dying in the shallows, large numbers of thirsty elephants were jostling noisily for water at the trough. A dead buffalo lay behind them, swelling horribly in the sun and at the back of the dam another elephant had collapsed and was barely alive.

An elephant dies in the water at Masuma

At the trough.

    The smallest elephant in the second photo above had a large wound on the side of its trunk through which water leaked whenever it tried to drink. It was forced to take many small sips but the bigger elephants allowed it to stay at the trough for a long time without bullying it. The wound was pink and clean and will probably heal.

    With two dying elephants and a dead buffalo close to the viewing point we arranged to return the next day to “clear up”. The buffalo was easy and we soon towed him away to what is becoming a large graveyard well beyond the dam.

    One of the elephants was dead and also soon towed away but the other was still just alive and had to be finished off first – not at all a pleasant way to spend the morning.

    Much better was a trip out to Inyantue from which we have just returned. The Inyantue area has had at least two quite good rain showers so far and is, to our eyes anyway, luxuriantly green. The river hasn’t flowed yet…….

Inyantue River

   In the Mopane woodlands we found the flowers of the ‘fire lily’ Scadoxus multiflorus……

    And grass seeds sprouting between the dead Mopane leaves…..

  Unfortunately we didn’t find what we were looking for – rhino. None has been seen in this area for several years but we had hoped that maybe one or two were there, unknown. It seems not.

    The main Bulawayo to Victoria Falls railway runs close to where we camped. Long ago the lines took a different route and Sue was struck by the contrast in the monumental style of a bridge for the old line…..

Remains of the old bridge at the Makwara River

And the functional crossing of the new line a few hundred meters down stream.

  In the past the Inyantue area has been the scene of a great deal of activity both for the railway and for mining. Out in the hills while we were walking, we found numerous prospecting trenches and a few old claim markers, the oldest still legible dating back to 1966. Presumably whatever the miners were looking for wasn’t there in sufficient quantities as there are no active mines and everything is back to being wild, overgrown and used only by the animals …..

    If only the rhino population could bounce back as easily as the bush does.

First rain, first power failure

     For most parts of Zimbabwe, especially urban areas, power cuts are a daily occurrence. Here at Sinamatella we are lucky that our electricity is connected via the town of Hwange which supplies a great deal of Zimbabwe’s home-produced power so we don’t often get cut off. In the rainy season however, things change. The power lines out to Sinamatella run on an old-fashioned series of wooden poles, often located on high ground and very vulnerable to lightning strike. When that happens we can be without electricity for several days while we wait for the fault to be located along the approximately 40km of cables. We had our first big thunder storm of the season on Saturday morning and, within minutes of the first clap of thunder waking us just before dawn, the electricity went down and stayed that way until now, three and a half days later.

     We saw the first distant lightning way out past Shumba towards the South on Friday night and Sue’s reflexes proved to be up to the task of pressing the camera shutter quick enough to get a photo.

    All ‘our’ elephants had left us to feed wherever it was that some rain fell a few weeks ago but had returned, presumably when the pools of water they were relying on there dried up. By Friday evening there were around fifty elephants at the Sinamatella River but they must have seen the distant lighning as well as we had, and were gone again by the morning. We haven’t seen a single one since.

    The storm took the whole night to reach us and wasn’t especially violent when it arrived. There were a few minutes of heavy rain followed by a couple of hours of steadier fall. Unfortunately the rain coincided with changeover day for anti-poaching patrols and the outgoing patrols had to set off from Sinamatella in dismal weather. My first drop-off points were in the northern sector as usual. Sue stayed at home to avoid taking up space inside the car where one of  the Rangers could otherwise keep dry so the “official photographer’ wasn’t there to record our mud-splattered journey or the slightly unnerving (but very slow) ninety degree skid that left us up to the axles in mud and temporarily broadside across the road near Chawato.

    Back from the northern sector in late afternoon I set off for distant Gubombiri, away to the South-west. I remembered to take the camera but not far from Sinamatella in that direction we found there had been no rain and there were no dramatic “stuck in the mud” photos to be taken. We met a small group of lions that had killed a buffalo close to the road so I did make some use of the camera.

 

   These are part of the pride whose dominant males are known as Jose, Patron and (to us at least) The Third Man. The young male in the photo will presumably soon be chased away by the ruling coalition to live a nomadic life until he can get a territory of his own.

    Returning from Gubombiri I heard a radio call from the driver of the Parks Land Cruiser that he was stuck in mud on the road to Bumboosie South so next I headed out that way. It is a bad road just after rain and I made it worse by missing a ‘detour’ in the dark and heading up a deep, muddy gully that had once been part of the road. We got through, as much by luck as skill, towed the Parks Cruiser to safety, delivered the rangers for their patrol at Bumboosie South and finally reached home close to midnight. With no electricity we sat on the veranda to eat a belated dinner by the light of our old-fashioned but bright paraffin lamp. The light attracted a mass of beetles and newly hatched ‘flying ants’ and Sue made good use of the camera again with these fascinating photos of them….

 

Sharing the veranda with all these insects is interesting for a while but eventually we get fed up with beetles down our necks, moths between the pages of whatever we try to read and seemingly every winged insect in Sinamatella trying to get into our food so we have to reluctantly turn out the light and go in the house.