by Clay Wilson
Fencing the garbage dump had reduced the number of elephant fatalities caused by eating plastic bags, so it was not as though progress were impossible. The problem of humans running into conflict with elephants and buffalos might never be completely solvable, but it could be mitigated.
Chapter 10
Cats
The days and seasons rolled into each other with the lazy, inescapable beauty of Africa. Each day began, if I was up early enough to see it (I’m more of a nocturnal creature), with a breathtaking sunrise and would end in a similarly heart-stopping sunset. Laura tended her organic vegetables, waging an escalating war of one-upmanship with the local baboons, and I would eke out a few pula treating pets in between waiting for the calls I lived for, to tend to injured or imperilled wildlife.
I wonder sometimes if it is the lurking presence of danger that holds some of the attraction to Africa for outsiders who have grown up in safer, more predictable continents. No one consciously wants to be charged by a buffalo or find him- or herself on the wrong end of an altercation with an elephant, but the inherent risk of just living in a town on the edge of an unfenced national park, while really quite minimal, does add a certain spice to life.
But it wasn’t just humankind and wildlife that came into conflict; something had begun killing the domestic animals of Kasane, in the dead of night.
In August 2010 one of my pets, Minnie, an Africanis dog so named because she was a skinny minnie when I first got her, was attacked by the killer. I heard Minnie barking and squealing, and when I ran outside into the night I caught a glimpse of a young leopard bounding away.
I followed a blood trail to the end of the garden, where I found Minnie, and noticed a large wound in her neck. Laura and I put a pressure bandage on and I rushed her into the clinic where I put her on an iv drip and gave her shock treatment. After she stabilised, I operated on her to suture a large laceration in her neck that had almost severed her jugular vein. Various deep scratch wounds were visible and I stapled these together after cleansing and disinfecting them. Though she felt very sorry for herself for a while, Minnie recuperated fully and always greeted us with a sweet smile by curling up her lips.
Other pets in Kasane, however, were not so fortunate. Over the next four nights, three dogs were killed by the leopard. I had bought a trail camera or camera trap, which was activated by motion and infrared sensors, to take pictures of wildlife day and night. I set it up in my back yard to try to get a picture of the leopard if it returned. I suggested to Parks that we set bait in a cage, and the trap was set at the home of the commander of the Kasane Airport police station. One of his dogs had been killed and it was thought that the sneaky cat might come back for seconds.
Leopards are exceptionally cautious and cunning animals, and not easily caught. So it was with some surprise that I received the news the very next day that the leopard had been trapped. According to the rangers who set the trap and found it, the leopard was making a hell of a racket in the cage, and I was asked to come around and dart it as the rangers were too scared to get close to it.
At the policeman’s house I saw the rangers hovering at the edge of some bushes. There was, indeed, something growling in the cage, and when I moved closer, dart gun loaded and at the ready, I saw that it was a carnivore and spotted. It turned out to be a spotted hyena. It had probably been raiding dustbins in the neighbourhood and caught the scent of the freshly killed impala the Parks guys had used as bait. I could hardly believe that they had mistaken a hyena for a leopard.
The trap was re-set and when the rangers went to check it the following morning they found the bait had been taken from the cage, but not by a leopard or a hyena. A person had crawled into the cage and cut the wire holding the haunch of impala for his evening meal!
Despite the follies, the night stalker continued his work. A woman who lived about three blocks from me on the plateau called in a panic to say her dog had been attacked. She rushed it around to my place and I tried to save its life, but it had been too badly mauled and died on the operating table. It was time to get serious about this cat that had turned the tables on Kasane’s dogs.
The woman who had lost her dog was serious about stopping the killer, so she allowed us to set a trap in her back yard. It didn’t catch the leopard, but it did raise the ire of her neighbours, who were concerned about us trying to entice the leopard to return. Mindful of a possible community backlash, I decided to set the trap in my own back yard this time. I knew the leopard was possibly wise to us, so the next impala we shot for bait was hung in a tree in my yard, with no trap in sight.
I set up my trail camera to cover the bait and the next morning I could see that some of the impala had been eaten. It was encouraging that the leopard had come to the bait so easily. I took down the IR camera from the nearby tree I had strapped it to, facing the bait and trap, and reviewed the pictures from the night before. On the camera’s tiny screen I could see the leopard on its haunches reaching up from the ground and eating the bait, but when I tried to download the pictures to my computer they wouldn’t transfer, so I couldn’t see the cat in detail.
In any case, the leopard had been enticed into my yard. The park rangers and I transferred the nibbled-on carcass into the cage trap and disguised our scent by scattering offal from the carcass all around. Incredibly, the next morning we found we had caught the cat. Its curiosity over the freshly killed antelope had got the better of it. I darted it with 1.5 cc of Zoletil and, when the drug had taken effect, I was able to inspect it. We had caught a young male, about a year and a half old, and by the size of its mouth and bite radius I reckoned it was the one that had attacked Minnie and the other dogs. Because it was a male, and old enough to feed itself, we decided to take the leopard deep into Chobe National Park and set it free there; if it had been a lactating female, feeding on easy meals of domesticated dogs to produce milk for cubs, then we would have released it on the spot so it could go back to caring for its offspring.
While it was still sedated we loaded the cat back into its cage and put it on my truck. I drove about 80 kilometres into the park, to a spot about 10 kilometres west of the Ihaha campsite on the Chobe riverfront. It was a good spot, with plenty of game in the area for it to hunt, abundant water, and nice, thick riverside bush in which to hide.
When I got home I called the company that made the trail camera and they were able to help me download my pictures from the camera on to my computer. Now that I could view the images in a larger format and more clearly, I wanted to have another look at the leopard we had captured.
“For crying in a bucket!” I couldn’t believe it. “Laura, honey, come see this, you won’t believe it.” When I viewed the images again I pointed out to Laura that there were not one but two leopards in our yard! I had been unable to see the second one on the camera’s small screen when I first reviewed the pictures, but there was no doubt that there was another one. It had been perched up in the tree, above the bait, and so camouflaged that I had missed it when reviewing the pictures on the small screen. More importantly, though, it was still out there.
I called Mogau and gave him the news. We got together and discussed the options, agreeing to just wait and see if there were any more incidents of dogs going missing before we tried trapping the second one. From a closer review of the pictures, it looked as though the second leopard, the one that was still presumably around town, was much larger than the one we had released. We theorised that this was the male’s mother and that she had perhaps been teaching him to hunt, starting with easy prey such as domestic dogs.
Sure enough, 10 days later another dog was attacked. The pet was severely mauled, and by the time it got to me its liver and lungs were protruding from his wound. However, it was still alive and it was a fighter. I operated on it immediately and this time I was able to save its life.
I knew we would have to start the whole process again of hanging bait and preparing a trap. I’m a night owl and I was having a bath late that night when I
heard a gunshot. I hastily dressed and rushed outside – the shot had been close. In the street I came across one of my neighbours, sitting in his car with the engine running, and with a rifle in his hand.
The man told me the leopard had attacked his dog, and that he had shot the cat and killed it. I went to his house and found that the dog had sustained fairly minor injuries. The dead leopard was on a sand mound, outside the man’s property.
I operated on his dog and it made a full recovery, but I was pissed off with the owner. He could have fired a warning shot to scare off the leopard, and his yard had not been fenced (not that it would have been much of a deterrent to a determined leopard). The man had killed a wild animal in a public area, which was not allowed. I was sure I could have trapped the second cat.
When I inspected the dead leopard I found that it was not, in fact, the other’s mother, but most likely its brother. While it was bigger than the first, the size difference wasn’t as great as it had appeared on the infrared camera picture. I estimated it was probably the same age, and therefore most likely the other’s sibling.
I have a wonderful picture of the pair of them on the impala bait in the tree in my back yard, with my boat trailer beside them. One is in the tree and the other is reaching up, standing on its hind legs, as if trying to wrestle the prize from its sibling in a tug-of-war. I’m pleased I was able to return one of them to the wild, but still sad about the fate of the other.
Working as a wildlife vet I was fast learning that you win some and you lose some.
Laura and I were getting ready to go back to the us for a working holiday. As well as taking a break from my unpaid work in the bush, we wanted to try to drum up some support for what we were doing in Botswana, and hopefully raise some much-needed funds.
I had set up a charity called Chobe Wildlife Rescue, and I needed to apply for not-for-profit status for the organisation with the us internal revenue service, so that people could make tax-free donations. I would not be seeking money for my living expenses, or Laura’s, but rather some funds to cover my outgoings – sedatives, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, syringes, darts and all the other tools of my trade which cost money.
It was October, and the days were getting hotter and heavier with the promise of the summer rains. The humidity was almost unbearable. Both Laura and I were looking forward to getting back to Florida’s milder winter for a few weeks. As much as I loved living in Botswana, I counted myself lucky that we could still afford the odd trip to the us. But for how much longer, I wondered.
A few days before we were due to leave I was contacted by Doctor Mike Biggs, another vet doing research on large predators in the Kwando game reserve in north-western Botswana. Mike said he needed some assistance in collaring predators so that their movements could be monitored by GPS tracking devices.
Technology has come a long way, and it, too, costs money, but the pay-offs can be big. Using traditional radio tracking collars was also expensive, and time consuming. To follow an animal’s movements with a radio collar a researcher had to go out regularly, sometimes daily, and sit on top of a vehicle scanning the airwaves with a receiver that looked like an old-fashioned television aerial. When a signal was picked up you then had to bash through the bush, causing damage to the environment along the way, to search for the animal while listening to “beeps” through a set of headphones.
By contrast, a GPS collar constantly relayed the animal’s location by satellite, and the signal and the movement could be viewed on a laptop computer from the comparative luxury of the researcher’s camp. It was worthwhile work and I would have loved to have seen more of this kind of thing going on in Chobe National Park. We desperately needed a lion research project in Chobe to collar and track our predators.
A trip to Kwando would be as good as a holiday, I thought. While I was making headway in treating wildlife in Chobe and its surrounds, it was a daily grind just trying to deal with the bureaucracy.
To get to Kwando in time – Mike had said he needed help with his project urgently – I had to charter a light aircraft, which at P4 500 was pretty expensive. It was worth it, though, to be out in the field doing the sort of work I hoped one day to replicate in Chobe. We went out with Mike on a moonless night into the bush in search of lions. I needed no excuse to be out doing this important work in such a fantastic area. The Kwando River flows down from Angola in the north, across Namibia’s Caprivi Strip and then into Botswana. The countryside there is similar to that of the Okavango Delta: clear-water swamps studded with islands and open grasslands.
To attract the area’s resident lions, Mike put on a tape recording of a wounded and dying buffalo bellowing. It was an eerie sound that rolled across the swamps and chilled us as we waited for the lions to respond to a noise that to them was extremely enticing.
We didn’t have too long to wait for the desired response.
“Look,” said Mike, pointing. His night vision was almost as good as that of the cats he followed. Two lionesses emerged from the darkness like silent ghosts. We had the dart guns loaded and ready and Mike and I fired simultaneously. Because it was night, they were close before we saw them, and at this range we couldn’t miss.
Mike was a true professional and within 10 minutes he and I and a team of volunteers had fitted new GPS collars to each of the lions. At the same time, a team of volunteers had thoroughly examined and measured the animals. The final task was to load each lioness into a canvas sling so that it could be hoisted on a scale and weighed. As Mike and I hefted one of the big cats, she started to wake up, with a cacophony of growls and grunts.
I was holding the animal’s head at the time and she twisted and turned in my arms, trying to get her fangs around me. All I could do was hold on to her scruff as tight as I could. I felt her rippling muscles straining against my grip. Unlike the 55-kilogram injured lioness that had jumped on me after I darted it on the road to Ngoma, this one was closer to 120 kilograms, and she was not a happy kitty.
I nearly wet my pants. Fortunately the weighing had been successful, so we quickly lowered her to the ground where I could release my grip and jump out of the way. The cats woke up and silently slid into the dark night.
The “fun” at Kwando didn’t end there. After we got back to Mike’s camp from my near-death experience, I said goodnight to him and started walking back to my tent. On the way the batteries in my torch died and I got lost in the bush. After much stumbling about I finally found my way home.
The next night I decided to take two torches with me, just in case. However, once more I became geographically confused and lost my bearings in the pitch dark.
“There’s a couple of lights over there,” I said to myself.
I headed towards them, but as I got closer to the twin pricks of light they started to move. This was not good. There was a snuffle and grunt in the dark.
“It’s a hippo!” At first I’d discounted the idea that the glowing lights I could see were an animal’s eyes, because they looked too far apart; I hadn’t thought that I’d encounter a hippo, though! It’s claimed that the hippopotamus kills more humans in Africa than any other mammal. While they might look fat and ponderous, in a cute kind of way, I knew that they could be terrifyingly fast on land. Fiercely territorial, their immediate response on encountering a threat on land is to head for the water, and they will trample and bite and kill anything in their path without a moment’s hesitation.
I backed up slowly. I was unarmed, and, for the second time on this trip, terrified. As I swung the beam of my torch around, I realised that there were not one but two of the massive creatures now staring me down. Slowly and carefully I backed away from the hippos and, spurred on by my close call, found my way back to our tent. Getting away from Kasane to have a bit of fun playing around with some big cats had turned out to be more dangerous than my day job.
Helping Mike with his research had got me wondering if the local predator population in Chobe would ever fully recover from the effects of the dist
emper outbreak. It had been nine months since I had seen a pride of lions in the area, but I didn’t have permission or the resources to mount a research programme of my own.
During the long dry winter, when the water holes in the park dry up and the Chobe River becomes the only source of water, lions establish their territories near the river and waited for their prey to come and drink. By the end of the dry season, however, I had identified only two lionesses on the riverfront.
Park officials and guides had been complaining that the one animal most tourists wanted to see on their safari, the lion, was all but absent. Some people refused to put two and two together and accept that the distemper outbreak had depleted our predator populations. I still hadn’t seen the big pack of wild dogs that used to live by the water tower, and I had given them up for dead.
Laura and I came back from our six-week break and immediately went on patrol, making one of our regular sweeps through the park. To my great delight we came upon a pride of 10 lions. One of the lionesses in the group was my old friend One-Eye, a muscled mature female who had lost half her vision in a fight, or perhaps from a hunting injury. I’d been seeing her on and off for three years, so it was great to realise that at least she had survived the outbreak.
I didn’t recognise the other lionesses in the pride, and I guessed they had moved into the riverfront area from a more remote part of the park, where distemper had not reached them. Even better news, as I closed on the group, was that One-Eye was nursing three tiny cubs. Her young were sporting the spots that immature lions have until they reach maturity, and they squeaked and meowed as they climbed all over their mother, using her flanks as a slippery slide and her flicking tail, with its tuft of hair on the end, as a plaything.