News

     We have some good rhino news to report for once. Last month Nick and his colleagues at Main Camp found their White Rhino number 27, hiding in thick cover with a tiny new baby. Unfortunately they were not able to get close enough to see the sex of the calf and they didn’t get good photos but it’s great to hear about an increase in numbers rather than a loss for once.

   The supposedly pregnant female at Sinamatella hasn’t produced a baby yet. I was with rangers monitoring her for a day last week. We didn’t see her clearly for more than a few seconds at a time but she certainly looked big. Whether or not she is pregnant, only time will tell.

    It has been clear for a while now that we are not winning the battle against the poachers and there is no sign that the demand for horn will reduce in the near future. It seems impossible to keep a large wild population ranging at Sinamatella so we have been looking at alternative strategies. Trevor and I have been working for some time on a proposal to put up a fence around about ten square kilometres of good rhino territory at Sinamatella and protect at least a breeding nucleus of rhino within that. It is a strategy that has worked well elsewhere and we are confident it can be successful here.

    Trevor has also looked at the idea of a much smaller ‘rhino centre’ at Victoria Falls that can support one or two rhino for education and tourism purposes and raise money for the bigger Rhino Conservation Area (RCA) at Sinamatella. He has identified suitable land and approached the town council about using it and has received a lot of backing for the idea, including from the National Parks hierarchy. We have now started working on getting proper approval for the project from National Parks at Sinamatella and then up through the chain of command to Head Office in Harare before the really difficult bit – raising the money.  I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

     Meanwhile, this post started on the subject of rare babies, let’s finish with something about much more common ones. We have in Zimbabwe (and elsewhere in Africa) a bird sometimes known as the ‘feathered locust’. It is the Red billed Quelea which feeds on small seeds and can be a tremendous pest in small-grain crops like wheat and sorghum.

 

Male Quelea in breeding plumage.

   At this time of year when their food exists in super-abundance, the Quelea breed in colonies of up to millions of birds. We currently have a colony forming below Sinamatella Camp where there are probably tens of thousands of birds building their nests in a patch of thick bush near the old rhino bomas.

 

Nest building.

   Each bush can hold many nests close together and the noise of the birds is clearly audible at least a kilometre away. When the eggs are laid and start to hatch predators, from snakes to eagles to Jackals and Mongoose will gather to rob nests or feed on babies that fall out but thousands will survive. A Quelea colony is a noisy and rather smelly but fascinating place. We’ll try to follow this one as it develops.

 

Nests are close together