Masuma Dam

    Masuma Dam, about 25km south of Sinamatella must be one of the best dry season game-viewing sites in Zimbabwe. By the time the hot weather arrives in September, anything up to one thousand elephants drink at the dam in just twenty-four hours and many other species including buffalo, impala, kudu, waterbuck, zebra and warthogs are regular visitors.

    We visited the dam recently. The surrounding area is already very dry and in a few hours we saw nine large mammal species, a lot more than we had expected for this time of year and for the time of day. When we arrived the resident hippo were out of the water sunbathing on the far side of the dam. They stayed out for a few hours but then one by one they woke up and moved back into the water.

 

    While the hippo were lying out there had been many oxpeckers searching their skin for the ectoparasites and loose pieces of tissue (especially around wounds) that are their diet. As each hippo went into the water the oxpeckers flew back to those that remained ashore until the last hippo had at least thirty birds on its back or on the ground around it.

Eventually the oxpeckers were forced to look for new animals to sit on and most of them flew off to join a herd of impala that were on their way to drink.

    At this time of year the impala are very skittish and the slightest disturbance sends them running. Near the water this usually disturbs everything else as well.

    An interesting sighting was the large number of wathogs. Game counts have been carried out at Masuma on a regular basis since at least 1987. In fourteen counts between 1987 and 1992, the average number of warthogs sighted was 15 in twenty four hours. The average for seven counts in 2009 was just 0.3. In 2010 it was 1.6 and by 2011 it had risen to 5,5. In the three hours that we were at Masuma on the 3^rd June this year we saw 16 warthogs, including this one……

  No research has been done into this large fluctuation in numbers but it has been suggested that it is mainly due to lions. A single warthog is not a big enough meal for a group of lions but it is possible that when warthog numbers are high, lions learn that they are relatively easy to catch and they kill enough of them for the population to crash. They then lose interest in catching what is, for them, just a rare snack and the warthog population recovers until they are common enough to come to the attention of the lions again and so the cycle continues.

    The star attraction at Masuma is the elephants. They prefer to drink the clean water that is pumped into the trough in front of the viewing platform so some close encounters are common.

   

   Family groups of elephants can not all get to the trough together so they usually drink from the dam itself. The water is far from clean but it is obviously better than nothing.

   Perhaps the best moment of a great afternoon was the arrival of an old male buffalo when two elephants were drinking at the top end of the dam. He plodded in, looking, as most buffalo do, utterly exhausted and at first the elephants seemed to want to dispute his right to the water and turned threateningly in his direction. The buffalo ignored them and plodded on……

   He got closer and closer and it was the elephants whose nerve cracked first. Squealing in annoyance, the nearest of them turned aside and to our surprise, the buffalo, rather than simply swaggering down to the water, actually charged him and chased him away.

   With aggression like that it’s no wonder buffalo are often regarded as one of the most dangerous animals in the bush.

First camera trap results

    We have recently been in Bulawayo to collect our 1PZ Land Cruiser and to shop, and organise materials and equipment for National Parks. The Land Cruiser has had a complete engine overhaul thanks to very generous funding from Patrick Jacquemin, a former Planete Urgence volunteer. Patrick supported us in 2010 and 2011 and actually bought the vehicle for us in the first place last year. We are very grateful for his support.

 

The 1PZ Land Cruiser

Patrick Jacquemin talking to Sinamatella Area Manager Moses Gomwe

    While we were in Bulawayo we spent nearly three days finding supplies we need and getting quotes for all sorts of equipment ranging from cutting blades for a grader to solar pumps to tents. We returned with the car loaded with tyres for the Parks vehicle at Sinamatella (bought by the African Wildlife Foundation), a solar pump donated by John Brebner from Wildlife and Environment Zimbabwe and water containers, paint, plumbing materials etc donated by ourselves.

    The solar pump was left at Main Camp with Gary Cantle, pending a decision on where to install it. I am hoping it can be used at Baobab Pan in Sinamatella sector. At Main Camp we received two pieces of bad news. A few days previously poachers had killed white rhino number 29 and her three month old calf, outside the Park on one of the Gwayi farms. As a result the SAVE Foundation has decided to stop funding its rhino monitoring programme at Main Camp so our son Nicholas, who has worked there for nearly two years, suddenly finds himself out of work for a while. SAVE are hoping to arrange a transfer for Nick to Matobo where there are more rhino. The loss of number 29 has upset everyone in the Park. The poachers even shot her tiny calf and removed his little horn stubs. What a terrible waste.

    Back here at Sinamatella we have collected the memory card for one of our camera traps. This is the camera set at a small spring which I mentioned in my last posting. We got no rhino (so far) but there were some nice photos.

    By day the commonest visitors were Impala….

Male Impala. Aepyceros melampus

Warthogs……

Warthogs. Phacochoerus aethiopicus

Elephants........

 

Some of which came very close to the camera……

And of course, Guinea Fowls…..

Helmeted Guinea Fowl. Numida meleagris

On one morning some Zebra accompanied the Impala……

And once an unusually smart-looking Spotted Hyena came for a drink…..

Spotted Hyena. Crocuta crocuta

By night, when we hope a rhino might come, there were very few animals using the pan. Most nights there were no photos, occasionally there were elephants and twice a leopard visited.

   The camera is still in place and may get a rhino eventually. The other cameras that are in action are more difficult to get to. I went out to check on them last week but ended up helping rangers look for one of the implanted rhino that had not been detected for three days. She sometimes wanders far from her core territory into an area that is difficult to search as there is not much high ground for finding the radio signal. We drove many kilometres but were not successful. At one point two rangers in the back of the car stopped us because they had smelled the tell-tale scent of a dead animal. We all got out of the car and spread out into a line, walking up-wind to find the source of the smell. With the killing of number 29 in mind I was afraid we were going to find a dead rhino and I’m sure the rangers all had the same thing in mind. On the first sweep we found nothing but then someone found a lot of hyena tracks and we followed them until, with some relief, we found the cause of the trouble – the very, very smelly remains of a warthog.

 Skull and upper tusks of a warthog.

   Good news for us – but less so for the warthog of course.

Camera traps

During the dry season we use camera traps to try to locate and identify some of our rhino. When we first got the cameras we set them at water points, hoping to get pictures of rhino drinking but we soon learnt that all we got was literally hundreds of photos of elephants at night and guinea fowl, baboons and impala by day. After a couple of days the batteries were flat, the camera memories were full and we had learnt nothing. Now we set the cameras at the rhinos’ territorial marking spots, on game trails and at small pans that don’t attract too many elephants. There are still many more pictures of other species than of rhino but the results are often interesting.

  This week we have been setting some camera traps out in the field but first we tested them after the wet season lay-off by setting them at the bird bath outside our house.   The first night brought a real surprise with an elephant getting his trunk and tusks into the picture.  No more than fifteen metres from the house and we didn’t even hear him

   Three days later there was a particularly busy night. The first visitor was a side-striped jackal. We hear them from time to time but have never seen them in camp before though on the three or four nights we have set out the cameras so far this one has turned up every time.

Side-striped Jackal.    Canis adustus

Three hours after the jackal, a grysbok came to drink.

  Sharpes grysbok.  Raphicerus sharpie

   This is another animal we have never seen in the camp before but, like the jackal, she has turned up every night we have put out a camera.

   Next arrival, not long after the grysbok was a young leopard.

Leopard. Panthera pardus

   Sinamatella is good leopard habitat. We have occasionally seen them in daylight and often hear them calling at night. Last year National Parks had to trap one and release it elsewhere because it was becoming a nuisance in the staff village but normally they are very wary of humans and they keep out of our way.

   One of the animals we see frequently at night is spotted hyena and just fifteen minutes after the leopard one came for a drink.

Spotted hyena  Crocuta crocuta

  Hyenas look rather alarming but, like the leopard, they keep away from humans as much as possible. At Sinamatella we are occasionally woken at night by hyenas raiding the dustbin outside the kitchen. We usually try to ignore the noise but sooner or later one of us reluctantly gets up, opens the kitchen door and chases the guilty hyena away. At close range by moonlight they look particularly fierce but they never stop to argue!

    After that particularly successful night with the camera traps, nothing much new has been ‘captured’ apart from our resident large-spotted genet. This is a beautiful little animal that is often around the house at night. When there is food available it can be quite bold but otherwise it keeps to the bush and rocks at the side of the hill.

Large-spotted genet  Genetta tigrina

   Once the cameras had been tested we were able to set a few to try to ‘capture’ a rhino. One animal in particular is of interest. The spoor is too small to be an adult bull and it doesn’t scatter its dung as a territory marker so it is probably a female or a young male. We have tried tracking it but were not successful so we’ve set cameras in some of the places it frequents. We’ve also put a camera at this small spring.

  We know from previous attempts that very few elephant use this water but that a rhino sometimes does. His mother was killed by poachers two years ago when he was quite small but he survived and stayed within her territory. He should be getting big enough to start wandering further afield now but we hope to get pictures of him if he is still using this spring from time to time – even if it is only once or twice a month.

  While the camera is set and waiting for all that time, it is vulnerable to hyenas and elephants. The cameras are difficult to see but we have lost several to animals in the past. Hyenas chew them to pieces and elephants rip them down and throw them around so presumably they detect them by scent. We have reduced the amount of damage by smearing the cameras with mud or dung.

  The first camera trap results should be seen in a week or two. Probably they will be nothing but pictures of impala and elephants – it’s a technique that requires a lot of patience. If there are any good results I’ll publish them here as they come.

First 2012 volunteer group

We have had a number of visitors over the past two weeks. First there were six volunteers from the Dete Animal Rescue Trust (DART) who stayed with us for a week.  Amel, Didier, Gwen, Jean Pierre, Matthieu and Sebastien linked up DART through the French organisation Planete Urgence and after their week with us they travelled to the Main Camp sector of the Park to spend a week with Paul de Montille of DART.

Jean-Pierre, Sebastien, Mattieu, Didier, Amel, Sue, Stephen, Gwen

    Just before the volunteers arrived we received a report that the pump at Bumboosie South had gone wrong again. Sinamatella had no manpower available to pull up the pump so I suggested that we should go there with the volunteers. When we got to the pump we were surprised to find that it was working perfectly and the pan was holding more water than it had on our last visit. Rather than waste the journey out there we spent a couple of hot hours helping to shore up the trough, which is slowly being undermined by elephants.

Amel and Sebastien working hard.

The result of all that effort.

Elephants can be incredibly destructive without really intending any harm. They undermine water troughs as they scoop up mud to throw on themselves then the troughs collapse under their own weight. Unfortunately they also do a lot of damage on purpose. The pump at Baobab Pan is currently in need of repair after elephants pulled up the outlet pipe for the second time this year.

    After our day of hard work at Bumboosie South we spent three excellent days tracking rhino with Sinamatella Rangers Prosper and Stewart. Their tracking skills and their company were greatly appreciated by us all. Using the telemetry equipment to track rhino leads to hard work climbing hills to get the strongest signal but there’s usually the reward of some great views from the highest spots.

Looking east across part of the Deka safari Area

Stewart checking for signal

There’s a rhino out there somewhere.

  Over the three days,  we monitored rhino number 186 on two occasions, staying with her until early evening on the first day but leaving her on the second day when we found her sleeping amongst rocks where she had left no spoor and poachers would not find her. On our third day we helped locate number 299 whose transmitter isn’t working properly. We found her by old fashioned tracking of spoor until we got close enough to receive the radio signal then called in two other rangers who were based in the area to stay with her for the day. Although we saw rhino on three occasions, none of us got decent photos due to the thick cover they were resting in.

   From Rhino tracking we moved to a twenty-four hour animal count at Shumba. On a previous occasion when we counted at Shumba in May we saw nothing at all apart from a distant Jackal so I wasn’t too confident of a big count. The moon was superb and bright so conditions were good.

Full moon rising

  Lions called from all around us throughout the night and in the course of the twenty four hours we eventually counted four warthogs, thirty eight elephants and either two or four lions. In the early hours of the morning Sebastien briefly saw two large predators on the edge of the trees but wasn’t able to identify them. They were almost certainly the two lionesses that came past the pan and back into the trees just as the sun rose but of course we can’t be sure.

    When the count at Shumba was over we drove straight to Shapi where the volunteers joined Paul and a former volunteer, Aurelie, and her mother Collette joined us to stay at Sinamatella for a few days. Having behaved well throughout the volunteer week, our old vehicle “The Mighty Hilux” let us down at Shapi, refusing to start without a push. That meant we were unable to stop until we reached Sinamatella but even so Sue managed to photograph this late-afternoon Zebra as we passed him.

  

The Hilux has since given me several hours of unpleasant greasy work but it’s moving again – temporarily at least. It’s really too old to be completely reliable but has been a great workhorse for many years. The Land Cruiser that we took to Bulawayo for repair back in March is rumoured to be ready this week. We’ll see!

Winter is coming

Suddenly, it seems, winter is coming. This morning it was almost too cold to sit outside on the veranda for breakfast but, in typical winter fashion, a few hours later it was hot and sunny. The first trees to lose their leaves are the Commiphoras and Kirkias. They grow best on the steep hillsides around here so we have a beautiful yellow-leaved Kirkia outside the house for a few days…..

And hillsides seen from a distance stand out yellow from the still-green Mopane around them.

 

On the main road from Hwange to Sinamatella

As the pans dry up, some of them get a covering of aquatic plants. This one, near Mbala, is unusual, covered in water lilies and very attractive to various water birds.

This is the time of the year when a lot of birds are flying north to spend a few months in the northern summer so we no longer hear the cuckoos and bee-eaters whose calls are such a feature of our rainy season. Some species of Kingfishers are well known for accidentally flying into buildings while they are on migration (I have no idea why!). A few weeks ago a Pygmy Kingfisher flew into one of the windows of our house and yesterday this Grey-hooded Kingfisher flew into the very same window, temporarily stunning itself.

Grey-hooded Kingfisher

   When it had recovered sufficiently I put it on a tree and it eventually flew away, no doubt with quite a headache.

   This is also the time of year when the Parks staff start preparing for game water pumping. The engine for the pump at Masuma was recently given a new concrete slab to replace the one that fell apart with the vibration last year. Gary Cantle has been working on the wind pumps at Shumba and Tshompani and has got both of them working.  Our solar pump at Bumboosie South has been running nicely for some weeks since we re-started it for the dry season but last week the outlet pipe developed a leak directly above a join in the electric cable, causing a short circuit. Masterly inaction solved the problem – we were unable to get to the pump for over a week and in that time the join dried out and the pump re-started!

   Yesterday I went to Inyantue to collect Rangers from patrol. It was a beautiful morning with a clear blue sky and a cool breeze. I was enjoying the drive too much to be in a hurry so I stopped to look at birds at both Mandavu and Masuma Dams. The dams have plenty of water but not as much grass as you might expect for the time of year.

   Mandavu Dam

Masuma Dam

Close to the turn off for Robins Camp, I met a pack of twelve Wild Dogs sleeping under a large Mopane tree. They had obviously been feeding as many of them were heavily blood-stained. Although they were close to the road they were not easy to photograph but eventually these two moved out into the open.

 The rest of the trip to Inyantue was less exciting. We were held up six time by fallen trees and once by a very stubborn elephant who had found a patch of green grass by the side of the road. He simply would not move away. We shouted, clapped our hands, whistled, revved the car engine and banged on the car door but he wasn’t concerned. In the end one of the Rangers threw a small stone at him and he ran as if we had shot him. Elephants are strange animals sometimes.

Meanwhile, better news on our finances. Trevor has saved the day by organising a grant that will top up the support we still get from SAVE and keep us in the field for the next twelve months. He has also been working on the Victoria Falls end of the Rhino Sanctuary proposal.

This is the beautiful spot next to the Zambezi where we are considering building the Sanctuary.

 If I was a rhino I’d want to live somewhere with a view like that!

More on plans for a rhino sanctuary

      The proposal for a fenced rhino conservation area is taking shape fast. We have agreement in principal from National Parks although final approval will only come after the plans have been thoroughly investigated. To get that started we have spent a few days doing some vegetation analysis for the proposed area. Sinamatella is very lucky to have Ranger Richard Ndlovu available to help with this sort of work.

    Richard has a wide knowledge of trees and shrubs and can name most of the trees around Sinamatella in Latin, Ndebele and English. Sometimes in Tonga as well! At the end of 2011 Richard was hospitalised for nearly a month after being bitten by a spitting cobra. We’re glad to have him back in the field.

    Another expert for this sort of work is Wildlife Officer Mercy Maganga who carried out a survey of the plant species eaten by Black Rhino back in 2009. Mercy accompanied us on our first day of analysis and found, as well as lots of rhino browse, an unusually large Leopard Tortoise.

   We already knew the area we were investigating quite well but approached the job as scientifically as we could, collecting data from random quadrats chosen by computer on a map. We then walked in by GPS to each point in turn. The data collection was quite easy and quick but there was a lot of walking involved so it took three days in all.

     As expected, we found the ground varies from very open Mopane scrub…..

       To quite dense Diospyros and Combretum bush…….

    The rhino don’t like Mopane but our results so far show that most of the area is covered with good browse and we are confident we could keep up to five rhino within the fence without having to feed them.

      After finishing our vegetation data collection, Sue and I went to Victoria Falls to do some desperately needed work with Trevor on our financial situation. Sadly, after three years of fantastic support, the SAVE Foundation has decided to consolidate its rhino funding in the areas that still have reasonable numbers of rhino and will reduce its support to us significantly for the next three months - then decide whether or not to continue at all. At the same time as we got that bad news, we heard that the company that has been sponsoring our fuel supplies has been forced to close, so suddenly we find ourselves without the money or fuel we need to carry on. It seems odd to continue working on our hugely expensive fenced sanctuary scheme at a time when we are not sure that we can stay in the field even to the end of the month but we honestly believe it is a worthwhile plan and we hope to find a way out of our current difficulty. Perhaps we’ve seen too many reality TV shows. They always seem to have a moment where someone has just one last chance to do something or other and it invariably works out OK in the end. Here’s hoping real life can imitate “reality”. Just in case, I’ll be searching the area at the end of this rainbow I photographed last week. A crock of gold would be very useful right now!

Bulawayo

     OK, I know this is called the Hwange blog but we were in Bulawayo last week so I thought some scenes from the big city would make a change.

     Bulawayo is Zimbabwe’s second city and the main city in Matabeleland.  Sue and I are never quite sure where we would call ‘home’ – Sinamatella where we spend most of our time, Mlibizi on lake Kariba which is a sort of spiritual home, Hwange, Victoria Falls or Bulawayo where our family house is? I suppose Bulawayo has the best claim to being home and, much as I enjoy the bush, it’s always a pleasure to be there.

     Our house is in a small-scale farming area right on the edge of Bulawayo. We approach the city from the north and our first view of it is………

 

   As you can see, there is not much modern architecture in Bulawayo. In many ways it is a city where time seems to have stood still. The cars for sale are not exactly up to date……

 

    A lot of the other transport is pretty old-fashioned……

   And the “Luna Park” travelling funfair which is just setting up on the edge of town has a distinctly 1960s look.

  Bulawayo’s streets are famously very wide. This is Main Street, looking towards the city centre

    Not much traffic in that picture and the same applies even in the central business district where there is still room for hand-carts (known throughout Zimbabwe as ‘Scanias’) amongst the cars.

 

   There is a clothes market near the City Hall every Saturday. The clothes range from heaps of second-hand to smart new and Sue and our daughter Alison seem to enjoy searching for bargains….

    I spent two hours sitting in the car waiting for them. Close to where I was waiting is this statue. That's exactly how I felt as well........

   Bulawayo has an Art Gallery in a beautifully restored old building. Some years ago an exhibition was mounted in which paintings representing the “Gukurahundi” killings of Ndebele people back in the early days of independence were put directly onto the walls. The killings are a sensitive subject and the Gallery was quickly forced to cover its windows with newspaper so that the exhibition was not visible. They remain covered to this day.

   Back at Sinamatella after three relaxing days at home I found a big anti-poaching operation about to get under way. A large number of police support unit, rangers from Main Camp and Umtshibi and rangers from Sinamatella are being deployed for a while to do an anti-poaching sweep and it is intended that the operation will be repeated as often as possible. Recently the poachers have been targeting elephants as well as rhino. Hwange has plenty of elephants but that’s no reason to let them be killed of course so anti-poaching operations will continue as long as there are people elsewhere in the world who put a high value on tusks, bones and horns.