Warthog post may 2017

From the editors desk Last Month’s Top Shot Winner Facebook Cover Shot Winner Volunteer Encounters Ranger’s Report

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Community Focus

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Photography Reflections Photography Focus

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Research Update Research Focus

We strive day in and day out, staff, volunteers and partners alike, to make as much of an impact as we possibly can… but there are always those that make an Impact on us.

Sarah McAuley started with African Impact in 2014, working as the Research Manager originally at Thanda and then moving along with the project to Dumela in the Greater Kruger area. She has recently decided to move back to her home country to direct her intense passion, dedication, skills and knowledge into supporting the research efforts of the wildlife and natural environments in Canada.

Of course, it’s always hard to see such a beloved friend and co-worker leave, but we all know she’s going to make such a success and impact in the new direction she’s taking her career into, so we wish nothing but the best of luck to her.

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Cover shot: Trotting Wolf – Samuel Cox, Second Photographer, England

Wolves and bears in -40 degrees, no problem. Lions and leopards in +40, will I be able to handle it?

These were some of the questions that ran through my head as my wife and I finalized our application process for the Big 5 Research & Conservation program. I’m a hiking guide back home in the Canadian Rockies and am lucky enough to be able to live in one of the most beautiful parts of the world. This has never stopped me from dreaming of coming to Africa to experience a totally new culture and be able to spend time with some of the most iconic wildlife out here.

I was also drawn to the idea of helping with the conservation efforts with wildlife in Africa, so volunteering seemed like an obvious choice. Coming from such a far distance away we decided to spend a month volunteering with roughly three months of further African travel on either side of our stay at Dumela lodge with African Impact. We flew into Cape Town and gave ourselves three weeks to get there. The coast of South Africa is very beautiful, and I would recommend spending more than just three weeks there. Now we are ending our month here with the Big 5 Conservation program. Looking back it is hard to believe all of the incredible experiences we have had…

Giraffes are the tallest mammals on Earth. Their legs alone are taller than many humans—about 6 feet. They can run as fast as 35 miles an hour over short distances, or cruise at 10 mph over longer distances.

A giraffe's neck is too short to reach the ground.

There were so many amazing wildlife encounters from start to finish - from tracking and stalking leopards at night, watching one drink water, walking alongside giraffes during a snare sweep and spending my wife’s birthday with a pack of 18 wild dogs to name but a few.

It isn’t just the wildlife that makes Dumela and South Africa so special - it is also the people you meet and all the lessons you learn from them. From the very knowledgeable guides, to the friendly locals and everyone in between, they have made a very lasting impression on me. I have learnt so much from everyone here; it has truly been a special time in my life. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to come here and be able to make a difference, whether it was collecting data on endangered wildlife, or helping the local school kids with their reading skills.

Although our time at Dumela is over, the adventure still continues. Our next stop will be Madagascar and from there who knows. Maybe Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania? So far what I’ve learnt from travelling in Africa is to not make too many plans. Just go where the wind blows you (or maybe where the dung beetle rolls you).

We want to thank African Impact for helping us on this amazing adventure and hope to be back soon.

Ivory is a type of dentin present only in the tusks of the elephant. It historically has been obtained mainly from Africa, where elephant tusks are larger than they are in Asia.

Despite a ban, the ivory trade has continued illegally with strong demand, leading to increasingly devastating effects on elephant populations and contributing to political instability, with rebel groups using it to fund their operations.

Work WITH the light It’s always frustrating; first thing in the morning or towards the end of the day when the light is low you want to keep taking pictures but the results are noisy.

Try working with the light and bringing some creativity to the mix! Lower your shutter speed to 1/15 and pan with moving subjects. This shows the speed they're moving at and can lead to some very abstract imagery. Try to keep focus on the head of the animal and if you’re lucky you’ll get a sharp head whilst still showing the fast speed they were moving at.

My name is Charlotte and I’m volunteering on the Conservation and Big 5 project here in the Greater Kruger area. This means that our weeks are quite busy between the data game drives and inputting, the conservation or ecology work, the project work, etc. But it also includes going in the community at least once a week.

Going into community can be for different activities.

On my project we have three different types; the Eco Children eco villages, the conservation education and the reading clubs. Because I’m here for eight weeks I have the chance to have the experience all three of them.

I’ve been twice to the Ecochildren eco-villages but for different reasons. The first time was for Holiday Workshops with the children. They were on holiday but came to school for activities. We first helped them in the school’s garden and then we played different games; race games, team games, balloon games, etc. It was really nice to spend fun time with them.

The second time we went the Eco Village to help them with painting of the keyholes in the garden. The students were in the classroom but even with the rain we had lots of fun and the teachers were glad of our work.

So, how long have you been interested in animal research?

Since I first volunteered back in 2011, originally for photography, but then I got more interested in the research and conservation side of things.

What do you like about South Africa?

Living in the bush and being constantly surrounded by all the wildlife and animals that I love!

What makes you smile here?

The people. Being able to meet new people all the time with all the interesting volunteers joining and and contributing to our projects ď Š

I love going to conservation education. We do this with two classes of grade 8. The students are around 13 years old. The other volunteers and I teach them about the conservation and different subjects like the difference between habitat, environment and biome or the difference between predator, prey, scavenger, herbivore, carnivore and omnivore. Last time we organised a big scavenger game where they had to find clues and animal facts about the Big 5 all around the school and at the end of the game we let them see and sit on the game drive vehicle and taught them what the volunteers do with African Impact. They really loved it and we could see big smiles on all the faces!

One of my favourites is the reading club. The students who attend reading club are around 11 years old and they read to us. We help them with the pronunciation and English comprehension. I really like to share this with them; they enjoy reading to us and I enjoy being with small groups of them and sharing a nice moment. I am used to taking care of kids in Belgium and organising activities and games for them. I love being with children so it is always a pleasure to go in community and spend time with them. What I love the most is teaching them what I know and them teaching me what they know. I like being with them and sharing an agreeable moment with them. Seeing them smile, seeing them playing, laughing and learning always makes my day. I think it’s a really good and important thing that African Impact does it in different schools.

To finish with something nice, last time I was really surprised that after few times of being at conservation education, some of the students remembered my name! It just made me happy for the rest of the day!

Buffalo are reported to kill more hunters in Africa than any other animal. They are known to ambush hunters that have wounded or injured them.

The hide on a bull buffalo's neck is as thick as 2 inches in places, which protects it during battles with other bulls for dominance.

Cape buffalo are known to kill lions, and can seek out and kill lion cubs — preventative punishment!

I’ve always maintained that photography speaks just as much about you, the photographer, as it does your subject. From the moment you pick up the camera to the final click to Export, you’re making artistic decisions and changes that make your photograph yours. As such, you can have two photographers in the same position at the same sighting and still get radically different results. Different composition. Stronger contrast.

Black and white or color. Everyone and their accompanying artistic sensibilities are different and as you grow as a person and a photographer, your style changes too. There’s never, nor ever should there be, a locked down artistic sensibility; it forever evolves. A picture you might not like now, might blow your mind in a few years.

Take the images to the right, for example. Both images shot at the same time from roughly the same position; yet entirely different in tone, feeling and sensibility. Neither is better than the other, just different artistic representations of what the photographers were seeing at that point in time.

This is why I always find it such a pleasure and an excitement to see how people treat the same sighting; how they represent their subject. You don’t just get a deeper look at the subject, but the artist behind the camera too.

In the first week of the photography program I learned a lot about the different aspects of photography, the different circumstances to take photos in and the different settings.

One of the first things I learned during these lessons is the importance of light in a picture and the different kind of lights like hard and soft light. To learn about the theory before you start taking photos is important to start with but I’ve found out what it really meant when I practiced taking photos on a gamedrive. The most special moment to practice my photography was during the gamedrives in Klaserie.

When we arrived in the afternoon we always started with a sunset gamedrive. The moment the sun was going down there was a nice orange glow that gives a nostalgic look to the scenery and animals. This moment, known as the Golden Hour, was for me the most exciting time to take photos of the animals and the landscape. The softness of the light and the feeling it gave me was, for me, the ultimate South African feeling.

African Wild Dogs, otherwise known as the Painted Wolf are Africa’s most endangered carnivore, with numbers now less than 6,500 in the wild.

This is due to a multitude of reasons such as human conflict, habitat loss and disease.

Due to them being highly social animals, it only takes one to get rabies for the entire family to get infected and subsequently die.

Hyenas have a bad reputation, mainly due to being vilified in media entertainment as dirty, ferocious and scavenging antagonists but they’re extremely efficient creatures and accomplished hunters.

They hunt in clans and being the second largest carnivore in Africa (after the lion) they can bring down adult Zebras. Of course, their success is also down to the fact that they’re also extremely opportunistic so will take any free meal they can, using their powerful jaws to crush and eat the bones of carcasses.

Due to the amount of bones they eat, their droppings are often chalky white in colour.

Natural light is the best light source to use when taking photos, but having good light is not enough to make a good picture; the position of the light, the subject and the photographer has a big influence on the photo. An important lesson I’ve learned is to position yourself between the light source and the subject. Easier said than done because with wildlife photography there isn’t much to control as animals go wherever they want. So you have to deal with the circumstances as they are.

But taking photos in a way that goes against the photography rules can also give an interesting effect to a photo, for example a nice contour of an animal or mysterious shadows. And it is also fun to work against the rules and capture a creative image.

The gamedrive during sunrise and sunset taught me a lot about using light in a useful way. But my camera is not always included in the good memories I have of the golden hour. On one of our first morning gamedrives in Klaserie we stopped at a dam just before sunrise and had a cup of tea while the sun was rising behing the dam. Here we could experience the sunrise without the camera. This was a lesson I also learned. You don’t need to take a photo of everything to enjoy it. Sometimes you need to enjoy the moment and the memories you have of it.

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What made you want to be a guide?

It’s something I’m passionate about and links into my love for Geology; giving me the bigger picture of Nature.

What do you like most about your job?

Exploring places I’ve never been; driving new roads and seeing new animals and things I’ve never seen before.

And what makes you smile when in South Africa?

Little moments, like waking up and seeing a Trumpeter Hornbill for instance. 

I love different perspectives - that's why i thought Africa would be the perfect destination to experience something completely different compared to my life in Berlin. I wanted to be able to freeze those perspectives and attempt to display them in a simple photograph. What seems more perfect than the photography course of African Impact? However I wasn't a huge fan of animals and didn't know a lot about the nature of Africa other than it’s the continent where lions and elephants live. Well that changed within the first 2 days.

The first game drive was incredible.

We didn't see a lot but watching those animals just being animals was nothing compared how it is in a zoo back home.

It creates a breathtaking peacefulness I am fortunate to experience. With the days accelerating by, suddenly four weeks were gone.

The sophistication of nature which can not be seen on its surface is made easily accessible by the guide’s knowledge. I remember asking a simple question about termites and the answer displayed a whole new world and a society of life underground. And that is not even the only part of volunteering with African Impact.

It is amazing to watch how people are passionate about their subjects. Taking in every second of their time volunteering with a unique satisfaction it started to infect my too. The first question people get asked when they are coming back to the lodge from game drives with a big smile is: what did you see?

Even though answers like ‘we saw lions, leopards and elephants’ started to make one jealous, it made me look even more forward to my next game drive. In addition there are the trips to Klaserie or an optional trip to the Kruger National Park which I highly recommend. All volunteers travel most weeks to the camp in Klaserie; a different experience every time packed with hyena and lions calling at night, delicious burgers grilled on the fire and a night sky like nowhere else that’s remarkable. To top my whole stay with African impact off I decided to go to the Kruger national park - my personal highlight. The sightings were extraordinary! Five minutes into the park we saw a leopard in a tree with its prey hanging from one of the branches. Apart from the driving which can partly be boring it pays off every time an animal appears around the corner; it is stunning to see that a few elephants can vanish completely in the bushes after two minutes.

Overall because everyone shares one passion the atmosphere at the lodge is amazing. Sitting together in the evening talking about what we have seen and dreaming about what we want to see creates a general happiness. African vibrations are underlined by an overall great staff. The stay enabled me to explore not only Africa but my inspirational input. My personal way to appreciate the little things and on top of that hopefully make a little impact on the whole.

Explore, inspire, impact. A grateful thanks to African impact and everything which stands behind these two words.

Impalas are the smallest antelope and animal that will tolerate the Oxpecker bird from landing and riding them.

The keyword for this month will definitely be Leopard. In April we had at least 10 sighting of leopard in Buffaloland and Klaserie. We were even lucky enough to see 3 different leopards on one drive.

Some sightings were for only a couple of seconds, but mostly we had visuals for over an hour. Being able to sit with these leopards for such a long time is one of the coolest experiences you can have in the bush. These many sightings provide the necessary data and photos and are very important for the leopard research and our partners. We use these visual sightings and other data like kill locations, tracks, and scent marking to better understand the movements of individuals within the reserves. As well we can use the photos gathered through the many sightings, like this month, to create and update each individual’s ID kits which we then send to both the reserves and for us to identify the leopards we see in the field. The leopard that was spotted the most in April was Bundu (CLB61). We saw him trying to stalk and hunt a steenbok. Unfortunately the steenbok walked too far away for Bundu to attack. These are the hard lessons a young male leopard has to learn to become a full adult leopard. He was also seen walking across the road and through the bush, scent marking along his new territory and then drinking from one of the waterholes as well.

Wildebeest, or gnus, (pronounced 'news'), are noisy. They constantly emit low moans and if disturbed, snort explosively. They're one of the few African antelopes to have extended its range in the last 50 years. They numbered about 250,000 in 1960 and are thought to number 1.5 million today.

Having no camouflage coloring, they get some protection from gathering in large herds.

Leopards eat small hoofstock such as impala and wildebeest. On occasion, they may hunt monkeys, rodents and birds. They often bring their prey up into trees to protect it from other predators and scavengers.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, Leopards have the broadest diet of any large predator. They've been recorded to have at least 92 different prey sources.

In Klaserie we discovered a new lion pride. This pride includes 3 females and 1 younger male. Maybe this new pride will call Klaserie their new home. With so much open territory for a new pride to take over it is very likely that this pride or another young pride will very soon begin to take over this area. We are excited to see if this new pride of lions will become a staple of the Klaserie area for us. Night drive brought us to a sighting of 7 spotted hyenas who were fighting and chasing each other for a carcass. The sounds that the hyenas made were very eerie since they were running all around the vehicle.

Hyena’s can make up to 14 different calls from laughing, to whooping, to cackling and we got to experience quite a few of their different calls that night.

The new camera traps we have been putting up are doing a great job. Not only is the quality and colour of the pictures much better, we even get photos of some rare species. We have had a few great pictures of the elusive spotted hyena, honey badger, and even the aardvark!

As soon as volunteers arrive here at Dumela Lodge they learn very quickly how leopard-crazy most of us are here. This is with very good reason though! We live in the Limpopo province which contains 63% suitable leopard habitat and 32% of South Africa’s entire suitable habitat (Swanepoel, 2012). With this in mind our leopard project is one of our largest focuses here in Greater Kruger. We are very fortunate with our leopard sightings and have had the privilege to monitor many different leopards across many reserves. By the time most volunteers leave the project they have learned just how magnificent and elusive these beautiful creatures are.

This past month has held many exciting developments regarding some of our almost celebrity status leopards here. First we have a new male leopard that has been identified in our Guernsey Project. This leopard, now coded as MBL5, was originally an unknown male we captured on a camera trap on a different property way back in January 2016. This male was unidentifiable at the time and we thought maybe he was a nomadic male just passing through, but it turns out he’s back again! Just a few weeks ago the volunteers got a great sighting of him crossing right in front of the vehicle as they were on Night drive! Then a week later we had our confirmation that this was the same male when he was captured crossing a drainage line where one of our camera traps was located. As we compared the photos from these 2 sightings the team waited with bated breathe to see which male he would be.

Have Patience.

Patience is the key to any successful photographer or photograph. Regardless of talent, if you can’t sit in a hide for hours on end with nothing in front of you, you’re not going end up being rewarded.

Game drives, similarly, can be frustrating; bumping around in the scorching heat with barely an impala to be spotted. However, it only takes one short sighting to make everything worth it. So, have patience and appreciate the environment you’re in; you’ll be rewarded eventually.

When it turned out this was a new male we were so thrilled to discover more individuals within the area. Our level of excitement turned into pure joy as we compared these recent photos with our unknown individuals and discovered this individual was the same as one seen Jan of last year! With this new male in the area we are excited to see what develops with MBL5 potentially taking over old territories, access to females, and the many corridors in use.

The expression of elephants being pachyderms is correct but only in part.

On vulnerable spots like the trunk embouchure, legs and back, the skin can in fact be 2.5 to 3 cm thick, but behind the ears, by the eye, on the abdomen, chest and shoulders it is as thin as paper.

The other star of the project lately has been a young male named Bundu, or coded CKL61. We have seen him 3 times in the past few weeks and he sure has put on a show. Not only has he quickly captured the hearts of the volunteers here, he has been a leopard that we have monitored since he was born early last year. At approximately a year and a half he is already very large for his age but staking a claim for himself within the region. He is extremely relaxed with the vehicles, which allows us to observe behaviors rarely seen with other leopards.

Getting to witness a sub-adult leopard learning how to hunt a steenbok and practice his stalking skills gives us an insight into the secretive world of these beautiful animals.

The more we observe and monitor these felids, whether it be by camera traps, insane visuals, or through their tracks, the more we grow to understand the behaviors and movements of one of the most enigmatic large megafauna left on the planet.

Swanepoel, L. H., Lindsey, P., Somers, M. J., Hoven, W. V., & Dalerum, F. (2012). Extent and fragmentation of suitable leopard habitat in South Africa. Animal Conservation, 16(1), 41-50. doi:10.1111/j.1469-1795.2012.00566.x

The

“perfect silence”

What is perfect silence? Perfect silence is my description of, well… perfect silence! Not the total absence of sound, but rather the true freedom of thought. Our minds and thoughts become polluted with every day “noise” slowly filling our heads like mass of cloud moving in with a cold front. In regular day to day city life this cloud mass builds and builds to a point where we function like robots, programmed to act and think in a certain way….

Natural areas, especially the African bush provides us with a unique opportunity to clear the “cloud mass” that parasitizes our minds, facilitating deep thought and self exploration, an opportunity to filter through your mind. With perfect silence one can solve what seemed to be major problems with relative ease. You realise the answers you have been searching for have been right in front of your eyes the whole time! On the other side, things that you never considered to be problems, you may realise actually are and need desperate attention.

This can be a scary experiment sometimes, but it’s important and helpful nonetheless. It’s a free service and one of the most valuable resources that nature offers us and it can never be depleted or exploited!

The

I highly recommend that each and every person reading this takes time out of their day, even if it’s only for 15 minutes. Walk out of earshot of people; find a quiet spot with a good view somewhere in nature. It doesn’t matter if it’s a public park or on a private game reserve. Just find that spot and allow your mind to wander…. Leave your cell phone behind and anything else that may distract you. Wander off in to the wild and allow your brain to breathe. If you can find a place where the only sounds are natural sounds, even better…. No cars, no sirens, no ringing phones or music. No people talking, no TV in the back ground, just nature. Just perfect silence.

Give it a try and you will see what I am talking about!

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