Visitors

We still don’t have completely reliable internet access. According to our service provider…. “The satellite has a major power problem, which needs a service visit in orbit – and that mission is not planned till end of year” It must be an interesting job being a satellite technician! For now we are able to do more or less everything we need with the connection as it is and we will apparently be moved to a new satellite in the near future.

   Back at ground level, recent weeks have seen a few visitors reaching us here at Sinamatella. First were Nicholas Duncan and Nia Carras of the SAVE African Rhino Foundation. It would be no exaggeration to say that without SAVE we wouldn’t be here and Sinamatella would be a very different place. Amongst other things, two of the station’s vehicles were donated by SAVE who also pay the driver of one of them and when rangers go out on patrol many of the packs, GPS, radios and even clothes they use were donated by SAVE. We are very grateful for their support.

Nicholas Duncan

     As you might expect, not all of our visitors are human. A pair of squirrels has taken to coming into the house to search for food. After losing oranges, bread, breakfast cereal and jam to them we have quickly become used to not leaving anything edible lying around. Squirrels are very cute and, at first when they started coming in and just exploring we had equally cute names for them. Not so any longer I’m afraid.

 

Cyril the squirrel, a.k.a. @!!*?>*@!

   We don’t often get animals (apart from insects) coming into the house by night. In the past we’ve been visited occasionally by snakes, regularly by frogs and sometimes by bats, one of which came in last week. Having come in through the open door to the verandah it couldn’t find a way back out and spent a long time hanging in the corner of the room until Sue eventually chased it away. I am very far from being a bat expert but I think this is an Egyptian Slit-faced Bat (Nycteris thebaica)

  

     Many of the houses at Sinamatella, ours included, have bats living in the roof and at dusk streams of them fly out and head off across the edge of the hill to feed. We have only once seen a bat hawk here taking advantage of this food source. Presumably the few houses in the camp don’t support enough bats to keep a pair of bat hawks in food throughout the year and the ones we saw were just passing through

    There are very few tourists at this time of year so the hyenas and honey badgers that regularly wake us as they tip over the dustbin in the tourist season have got out of that habit. They haven’t gone completely though and Sue photographed this neat hyena footprint near the house last week………

    Returning to human visitors for a moment, Thor Thorsson, an experienced traveller and conservationist recently spent a week with us. He was also here two years ago and it was nice to see him back again.

    It seems there are not many parts of Africa, and indeed of the World, that Thor hasn’t visited at one time or another so he has a wealth of experience to pass on.  From here he travels to Zambia for a while then he will return to Sweden for the summer. We wish him a pleasant journey.

   

Some January images

   I used to be a safari guide. It was a great job but, like any other, it had its difficulties – one of which was that all the visitors have seen television wildlife documentaries and many expect real life to be the same as the documentaries. No matter how many wonderful things you see, they are not satisfied unless they see lions, preferably lions making a kill – and even better, lions making a kill then having to chase away hyenas while the sun sets in the background, silhouetting a flat-topped acacia and perhaps a passing giraffe, against the red sky.

    Similarly, sitting around the camp fire, guests expect to hear tales of dangerous encounters with hungry leopards, charging elephants or giant snakes. Unfortunately I don’t have many such tales to tell – I’ve hardly ever been charged by anything, menaced by snakes or lined up as a cat’s dinner.

    If you read on then, you won’t find red jawed lions and open-mouthed mambas but you will see some of the sights that have caught our eye in the past couple of weeks and I hope you’ll find them as beautiful as we have.

   After the harsh dry season we had last year we are still thrilled with the rain and everything that goes with it. After the heavy rain that caused the Sinamatella River to flood in early January, the weather has become more normal with scattered rainfall and days of sunshine in between. This magnificent storm passed to the south of Sinamatella last week but missed us……..

We don’t need the rain really, the land is still saturated and rivers are still running. This is the upper Lukosi which is completely dry ninety percent of the time – but not at the moment……

And this is a little river at the foot of the Smith’s Mine Hills that didn’t flow even once last year…….

 

And the last of the river photos, near Kashawe View we found that the force of all that water has cut a completely new channel (centre of picture), leaving an island where none existed before.

The animals have started to grow fat on the good grazing. This male Impala we met  close to the camp, is in fine condition….

But as usual at this time of year, animals are scarce and hard to see. A few elephants have returned and we hear lions most nights so there must be something around for them to eat but we certainly don’t see very much. The young kudu in this next picture illustrates the problem – he was close to the road but still almost invisible until he moved…

So instead of animals, we get to appreciate the little things for a change. Sue liked, and photographed, the gloss on these new leaves….

Crocodile Bark Diospyros (Diospyros Quiloensis)

Mopane (Colophospermum mopane)

The stump of a Baobab killed by elephants at the end of October with new grass and herbs now sprouting in the crevices of its bark

White-faced Whistling Ducks in a pool filled with water lilies..

A little blue Commelina flower

And a beautifully marked but well camouflaged pair of Doublebanded Sandgrouse

My only photographic contribution is not up to Sue’s standard (my excuse is that the subject was too far away) but worth putting in anyway. At Masuma Dam recently, I saw a tiny hippo, so small it was trying to sit on its mother’s nose. She made no effort to help or hinder it, just lay there sleeping in typical hippo fashion….

But in spite of its mother’s indifference, the baby eventually managed to clamber up onto her nose and balance there for a few seconds before toppling off sideways. As far as I could see the mother still didn’t wake – a pretty determined bit of sleeping, even for a hippo…..

Off line

   It’s a while since I posted anything to this blog.

   We have been unable to access any popular websites for some time due to a problem with the satellite through which we are connected to the outside world. Google, Yahoo and Facebook have been inaccessible but little-used sites have still opened, though rather slowly. I don’t use Facebook myself so I haven’t missed that and I’ve still been able to keep up with the news and other essentials (cricket and football) - but without Google I’ve been unable to post to the blog.

   Our internet provider has told us that someone is “trying to resolve the issue” whatever that might mean. How do you repair a satellite? It conjures up visions of an astronaut with a toolbox flying up and tinkering around with a screwdriver to fix the offending part but I suppose it is not quite like that!

   Anyway, we’ve found that we can access Google this afternoon (Sunday afternoon), presumably because there are not many other users right now, so I’ll try to download a blog entry I wrote a while back but couldn’t post. If it works, I’ll try again next weekend – or whenever that man in the overalls and the space helmet finishes work on the satellite.

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.