December 6, 2011 AD
Hello friends,
What a three weeks it hath been. I was fairly uncertain about the
whole situation until about a week ago. The first two weeks were a
bit slow in terms of actual wildlife work, but I did learn more about
vehicles in those two weeks than I had learned in the 28 years leading
up to them. Along with our two Honda motorbikes, we have a‘91 Land
Rover with no roof and no doors that rattles and squeaks and bumbles
along, and breaks down almost daily for varying lengths of time. A 2
hour breakdown seems pretty standard. I was broken down two days in a
row for two hours in the blazing sun with no one around who knew
anything more about cars than I did. But after much screwing and
unscrewing, tapping and tinkering, twiddling and twisting, I
miraculously got the Rover roving. The problems have mostly had to do
with the fuel tanks, fuel pump, fuel lines, and fuel filters… exciting
stuff. Everyone who has worked in the African bush has become a
mechanic out of necessity. I have decided that the Zambian Carnivore
Programme should become known as the Zambian Wildlife Mechanics
Programme. I am now a Level 2 wildlife mechanic.
I now know how to drive a motorbike and an automatic transmission (it
only took me 12 years of driving to figure it out). Riding a
motorbike across the plains is liberating, especially when you are not
wrecking your spinal cord running over termite hills and hidden
potholes.
On the second of the two days that I broke down, we were very near a
small village and some locals were trying to help us. I was stuck in
shin-deep muddy water on an incline, and the car wouldn’t start. Two
guys came by with four oxen pulling a cart. We asked them to help,
maybe the oxen could at least pull the vehicle out of the mud onto
dry, flat ground. The guys were very kind to us and took time to
help, but I soon wished they hadn’t. I realized that slavery is still
real and present in how some humans treat animals. These guys,
despite being quite friendly with humans, were brutal and cruel
towards the oxen, and every time they beat the animals over the knees
or the head, the children around would laugh and mimic them. There
was absolutely no compassion, or even respect, for these animals. It
was the most difficult thing I have had to watch in a long time, and I
felt even worse because I did absolutely nothing about it. I should
have stepped in and told them to stop, but I didn’t, and it killed me
not to do so. Later that day, I told my friend Herbert (who is
filming his third film based in Liuwa) about the situation. He told
me that what I had in that situation was an opportunity. It was an
opportunity to stand up for something, and to act for something I
believed in and cared about. Next time, I will not sit silently.
The film that Herbert is shooting concerns with the most exciting
thing currently happening in Liuwa, which is the release of two young
lionesses into the ecosystem. Other than the two new lionesses (ages
15-18 months), there are only 3 other known lions in the entire
ecosystem. Two magnificent male lions (age 4-5) and the beautiful and
famous Lady Liuwa, the last lioness of Liuwa (0ne of Herbert’s other
films is about here, its called “Last Lioness” I believe, look it up.
His other film is called Bonecrusher Queen, about the hyenas). The
young lionesses were captured and transported about a month ago from
Kafue National Park to Liuwa, and they had been in a Boma (aka
enclosure) since then. We released them about 5 days ago, which was a
pretty wild experience. It has required several people to work 20-30
hour days in order to keep an eye on all the lions and make sure the
three resident lions don’t kill the two new lions. People are still
watching them day and night, and yesterday the young lions got their
first meal on their own in Liuwa--they stole a wildabeest carcass that
15 hyenas had killed. The young ones and the other three haven’t
really integrated with each other yet, and they may never. Lady has
been soft-calling (a series of low roars) for the youngsters, trying
to find them, but they do not call back and don’t seem interested yet
in integrating with her. It may be that the young ones never
integrate with Lady and just form their own 2-lion pride instead.
Lady Liuwa (age ~12, a relatively old lion but still a healthy,
expert hunter), and the two males had been regularly hanging around
the lion boma, keeping an eye on the new females. The ideal scenario
for the day of the release was to have Lady close to the boma and the
males off somewhere else. We wanted the three gals to meet each other
and hang out for a while before the little ones had to encounter the
males. The worry was that the males would kill the new lions, and the
hope was that Lady would take them under her wing and start a pride
with them, and protect them from the males, whom she pretty much
dominates. So, on the day of the release, Matt (my boss) and I woke
up at 4am and went to check on the location of the males and Lady.
Lady was sitting perfectly right outside the gate of the boma. The
males were also ideally situated about 500 meters away in some tall
grass. At sunrise, some African Parks folks shot two wildabeests.
The first wildabeest was drug behind a truck past the males, a
slightly morbid sight. The males followed the truck across a flood
plain to a small woodland several hundred meters away. Perfect. Then
we had to drop the other wildabeest carcass at the entrance of the
boma and hope Lady and the young lions would meet around the carcass.
They did, and when they did, I thought they were going to kill each
other. There was a fury of claws and teeth and roaring, but it was
only regular lion behavior at a carcass. The little ones were
surprisingly scrappy. They did not back down from Lady, and the
littler one even shared a piece of meat with Lady. When they were
done eating, the three of them sat about 60 meters apart in a
woodland, resting and watching each other.
That night, the youngsters separated from Lady and slept alone. Matt,
Jassiel, and I parked the Rover near them all night. I stayed up most
of the night listening to the telemetry signal of the vhf collar on
one of the youngsters, making sure they didn’t move. I sat under the
stars, watching multi-colored lightning on the horizon and
contemplating Orion above me, occasionally drifting to sleep to the
white noise static of the telemetry receiver. It was uneventful for
the most part. The exciting stuff didn’t happen until the following
night when the youngsters finally encountered the males. It happened
around 10pm after an intense evening storm. There was a series of
chase scenes and small fights involving different combinations of the
five lions. We spotted one of the young lions lying around with the
two males. They had attacked her, and at first she submitted, but
when they attacked again, she stood up to them and swatted them. They
sat together for a while not doing much and I closed my eyes out of
complete exhaustion. I was jolted awake by the most powerful of
sounds, the thunder of two lion’s roaring. We turned on the spotlight
to see the two males standing over the young female, roaring in her
face. surreal. When they were done roaring, the males butted heads
and rubbed necks, as if they were high-fiving.
The next morning, the younger of the two young lions decided to take a
hike. My boss and others were worried that she would not survive
without her sister (I still wonder how much and for how long we can
baby-sit these wild animals), so we tracked her down and darted her so
that we could put a collar on her and return her to her sister. It
was my first experience handling an animal, and I probably wouldn’t
have been involved except that the lion’s body temperature got
dangerously high while she was drugged and we needed all the help and
hands we could get to continuously pour water from the nearby pond
onto her. I reckon we probably poured 600 liters on her. Her temp
was at 41.7 celcius, and she would have died if she reached 43. It
was hectic. At first, I was just running back and forth to the pond
and refilling water jugs--luckily we were near water and luckily we
had two 30 L jugs and luckily there were about 10 people there to make
sure she was shaded by a tarp and cooled by water. Eventually I
somehow ended up becoming the guy who was pouring the water on her and
checking her temperature every few minutes. She is a fairly young,
small lion, but her paws are huge. She is a beautiful creature, and I
felt bad for her. She’s been drugged twice in the last month,
transported a couple hundred miles, kept inside a fence for 4 weeks,
attacked by Lady Liuwa, attacked by the big males, and inserted into a
foreign landscape. But it was also amazing to be kneeling next to
her, taking care of her, doing what I could to keep her alive. It is
a powerful feeling to be able to place your hands upon a lion. She
and her sister are doing alright now, and hopefully will continue to
be fine.
This is an exciting time to be in Liuwa, probably the most exciting
time. November, December, January are great every year because the
rains come and the landscape changes from sandy soil and brown tall
grass to flooded plains full of new green grass and colorful flowers.
In the dry season (May-October), there are not nearly as many animals
on the landscape in the southern part of the park where we work. But
the rains bring a migration of 40,000 wildabeest and large herds of
zebra, lechwe and other antelope species to the southern part of the
park. The birdlife, which is always spectacular, becomes even more
abundant as well. The birds in Liuwa are many in diversity and
numbers. There are cranes, storks, pelicans, geese, hawks, eagles,
falcons, owls, kingfishers, and endless others.
This is an exciting time to be in Liuwa for other reasons too. The
landscape is not only changing seasonally, but on a larger time-scale
as well. Assuming the new lions survive and eventually breed, the
lion population will grow in the next decade and onward, and this will
greatly change the dynamics between the carnivores in Liuwa. The four
large carnivore species present are Lion, Cheetah, Wild Dog, and
Hyena. The dynamic between predator and prey will also change. The
wildabeest population may continue to grow, and Zambian Carnivore
Programme (whom I work for) just received a large grant that will
allow them to carry out the first 3 years of what will hopefully be a
long-term wildabeest study. This study will inherently involve
further studies of the carnivores, and Herbert the filmmaker will
shoot another film about wildabeest and the study. I think ZCP has a
bright future.
On the day when we found out that the donors were going to provide us
with the money for future research, I had spent 13 hours monitoring 5
cheetahs. It was a female with 4 cubs. They had been spotted for the
first time the day before and I stayed with them for 6 hours, until
sundown. The next morning, I woke up before dawn and found them close
to where I had left them the night before. I then stayed with them
from 6am until 7pm. My bosses, some African Parks people (who manage
the park), and the donors showed up in the evening after I gave them
the coordinates of my location over the radio. The donors were
thrilled. They were calling me the hero of the day (which is better
than being called Chuck Norris, which has been a common occurrence for
me everywhere I travel…including Liuwa). After following the cheetahs
across the plains all day the day before, I spent most of the second
day sitting under the shade of a small tree with my motorbike while
the cheetahs rested under a tree about 50-60 meters away. They grew
more and more comfortable with me, so that when the donors and others
arrived, the cheetah pups emerged from under the tree and posed in the
evening sunlight for photos.
These cheetahs are not collared, so the purpose of staying with them
as much as possible is to get them used to us so that we can
comfortably get within 20 meters of them, dart the female, and put a
collar on her. We are trying to collar several wild dogs and cheetahs
so that we can follow them on hunts and learn what they are hunting
and killing and noting any interactions they have with other predators
at the kill site. We have only a couple wild dogs and cheetahs
collared so far, but if we can get a few more, most of the work in the
next few months will involve following dogs and cheetahs (and
sometimes lions and hyenas) on their hunts. Apparently, that is
pretty thrilling work.
The animals in Liuwa, and in other national parks in Africa, are
relatively tolerant of vehicles. They get a bit spooked if they see
you on two feet, but as long as you are in or near your truck or
motorbike, they don’t mind you. Liuwa is unique in the number of
hyenas present and how easy they are to see. We know the locations of
the dens of 4 clans, and we visit them regularly. The cub hyenas are
ridiculously cute, and when you approach the den, they will sometimes
walk right up to you. Even the adults hyenas that have seen us a lot
will come up to us, sniff the tires of the vehicle and give you a
funny look (not funny as in “uh oh, that hyena is giving me a funny
look, maybe I should be worried,” but funny as in “hey, you’re pretty
funny”). I’m told that there may not be any other park in Africa
where you can so readily see and get close to so many hyenas. And I
never thought I’d be that interested in them, but they are adorable
and great to observe. Usually when we see them, they are just laying
around in the tall grass or in muddy seasonal ponds, and often they
don’t even stand up when you approach them. I have not seen them hunt
yet, but I think that will give me an entirely new perspective on
them.
I have only seen the Wild Dogs once, and I immediately fell in love.
They reminded me of domestic dogs in their playfulness and
socializing, except they are capable of taking down a wildabeest. On
the night I saw them, they were initially gathering and fighting with
each other over a piece of blue cloth they had found somewhere. They
were a pack of 10. After getting all excited, they decided to hunt as
an amazing sunset was occurring. By the way, the sunrises and sunsets
in Liuwa are incredible every day…so much sky. The dogs tried to hunt
a wildabeest herd about 300, but the wildabeests formed an iron
curtain around their young, whom the dogs target. The large bull
wildabeest even charged the dogs. When the dogs would chase the herd,
huge clouds of dust and sand would raise from the ground. The dogs
were unsuccessful in that hunt, but about 30 minutes later, I watched
them chase down a rabbit for several minutes over several hundred
meters. They are fast! They killed the rabbit, ate it, and settled
down as the sun set, and we rode back to camp with lightning all
around. I had also seen my first three cheetahs earlier that day.
The Liuwa sky is incredible. The landscape is almost completely flat,
so flat that a 6 foot pile of dirt is called a hill. This makes for
the most vast sky I have ever seen. It is like standing in the middle
of a dry, grassy ocean. You can see the curvature of the earth on the
horizon. And with this being the rainy season, there is always
something of great beauty and importance happening in the clouds.
Storms can be seen from miles and kilometers away. Its great to sleep
in the tent when the rain is hammering. Its not so comforting to be
out on the plains in a vehicle when the storms hit, but it is
certainly wild and adventurous.
We have vervet monkeys that like to hang around camp. We have to keep
our foodstuffs secured so they don’t come in when we are away and rob
us.
Other animals in Liuwa: two species of mongoose, aardvarks, huge
porcupines (medium dog-sized) whose quills can be up to 18-20 inches
long, eland (enormous antelope that can jump 10 feet vertically), red
ants (who raid your camp and bite you, especially in places where you
least want to be bitten…), oribi (small antelope that is lightning
fast and is the main prey for cheetah), and others.
Many other happenings have happened, but I think this letter has gone
on long enough. Things are good, life is great. I’ve been eating
well and getting pretty much no exercise. I spend a lot of time
sitting in or on some sort of vehicle and it is not wise to go running
around due to the carnivores. On the rare occasions when it is not
scorching hot or dumping rain and we are not chasing animals around, I
sometimes go for a jog on the enclosed, electrified grassy airstrip
near camp. So, despite much speculation prior to my departure, I will
probably come back looking more like Buddha than Ghandi.
I will probably not be able to send another email until late December.
So, until then, enjoy life and go well on your journey.
I love you all.
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