Limpopo Valley Carnivores

Category: Cheetah, Snoopy and Barclay | Date: Jul 27 2009 | By: limpopocarnivores

With the arrival of a shipment of much needed camera traps, I am finally able to start using Snoopy in another way to help with the carnivore census. Instead of simply collecting the scats for analysis, I have now set up some cameras at places where Cheetahs have been deposiiting scats and are likely to return. Cheetahs make use of so called play trees to mark their territory, so when we have found these, we can set up remote sensing cameras and wait for them to come back. This method of data collection is very non-invasive and leaves the wild animals to their own devices with no outside interference. We try to limit our impact on our study animals as much as possible, and when collecting scats, we only take a sample and leave the rest of the “signpost” in place.

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Category: Cheetah | Date: Jul 14 2009 | By: limpopocarnivores

Here is a photo of two beautiful male cheetahs. The one on the right is the one we fitted with a radio-collar recently. They are using the whole reserve and I suspect strongly that they are the dominant coalition in the area.

We are hoping to replace the radio-collar soon with a GPS collar, that automatically downloads the locations of the animal, so we can get a much clearer idea of the areas they are using, and how this is affected by cover, prey and other predators.

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Category: Snoopy and Barclay, South Africa, Tracking | Date: Jul 13 2009 | By: limpopocarnivores

While out and about today, Snoopy, our resident cheetah scat sniffing dog, showed us quite how easy it is for dogs to smell differences we cannot see. We are currently working on farmland and were driving transects to pick up footprints of animals that have passed by the night before, and saw a large predator scat in the road. There were no fresh tracks at all to identify it’s creator, so we offloaded Snoopy and asked him. Immediately he indicated strongly on it, staring intently at the scat, then back at me, waiting for his reward. Definitely a cheetah scat! We collected the sample for analysis later on, and continued on our way. Further on, we again slammed on the brakes for another promising looking sample in the road, and again offloaded Snoopy. This one looked pretty much identical to us, but Snoopy barely bothered to sniff it. I had given him his command to search, and left that scat to carry on looking. It was close to a river bed, which is typical leopard territory, so I am quite sure Snoopy was right and this was was not cheetah.

During the training process, he was offered a range of scats from different species, and only rewarded for indicating on the cheetah scat, so he wont waste his time on scats from other species as he knows they hold no reward. They may look the same, but a dog’s incredible sense of smell allows them to distinguish between the species. Dogs elsewhere have been trained far enough to identify individuals within a species. We are not quite there yet, but we are making great progress!

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