While I head up the project, I have invaluable assistance from my fieldwork team and could not do without them. Azwifarwi is a student working with the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Conservation Leadership Group. He originally came on a six month internship but we are very happy to announce that he is going to extend his stay with us for another six months. As in my previous post, he is going to be doing his Diploma research project on the Wild Dogs, while he continues with me. Much of our work at the moment involves spoor counts, which have to be conducted in the early morning to allow for the low angle of the sun to make the tracks in the sand more visible. By late morning when the sun is getting high, the tracks just seem to disappear. This means that Azwifarwi has free time in the afternoons when he can go out and study the Wild Dogs.  

Wendy originally worked on the Wild Dog project during the last research project which was focussing on the provisioning of puppies by adults. The data was hard to collect for just one person and so Wendy came on board to help with that. The data collection for that project has now finished and is being written up, so Wendy was able to come across to the Carnivore Census Project and share her excellent knowledge of the reserve and the wildlife with us.  

As Snoopy was my dog before the project began and lived alone with me, he is very much a one person dog and is reluctant to work for anyone else. I want to avoid this pitfall with Barclay due to it being more useful to have a dog that can be worked by one of a number of handlers, and so Wendy is going to be working with Barclay as well. We hope to be able to use the dogs on projects elsewhere and it will be ideal if at least one of them is not dependent on my presence to perform. As long as we are consistent in our commands and praise, I think Barclay will have no problem in working for different handlers.

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Poor Barclay had a hard lesson on life in the bush this week. I am encouraging him to get out into the bush and to search around in the long grass, as he will need to do, and while he was out playing in the long grass in our yard, he had a run-in with a Mozambique Spitting Cobra. We found him with swollen eyes oozing thick yellow pus, as is typical of cobra venom in the eyes. It is a cytotoxic or cell destroying venom, which the snake uses to temporarily blind its attackers to allow it to escape. This snake is one of the most common here and Snoopy has also been on the receiving end of venom in his eyes, but made a full recovery on all occasions. We wash out their eyes thoroughly and apply an antibiotic and anti-inflammatory ointment into the affected eyes, and they soon get better. We can only hope that Barclay will have learned his lesson, and will know to stay away from snakes in future.

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I took Snoopy out and we searched the road where the cheetah footprints were but sadly did not turn up anything. Snoopy and I are both learning as we go so I wondered if perhaps he was not searching properly, or was getting distracted so I decided to test if this was the case. I took him home, and went back out with a sample and threw it out of the vehicles window just off the road. I did not place the sample on foot as he may have picked up on my smell, and homed in on that. When we went back, Snoopy found the sample, suggesting he is searching correctly. This leaves me with two possibilities. Either, there really were no fresh scats there, which is a possibility because the cheetahs were looking very thin. With carnivores, they gorge themselves so at meals that you can gauge how full they are on a rating of 1-5. 5 is a very full, pendulous stomach on cheetahs, and 1 is an empty stomach that is sucked up towards the spine. I would have placed these cheetahs at about a 2, so they would have spent the past couple of days without a large meal. With this in mind, it is possible that there were no scats. The other possibility is that Snoopy is looking too specifically for the particular animals scats. My samples come from another project and are from only 3 individuals. Work in the US has shown that dogs can identify to individual level from scats. I do not think this second scenario is likely as we are both still learning and I do not think we are at that stage yet, but it is possible. To address this I will now introduce scats of different species and teach him to ignore them, and will try to source more cheetah scats from different cats.

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The Cheetah family that had become split up by one of the cubs finding its way through the reserve boundary fence has been reunited.

On our way to the area where they were last seen calling to each other through the fence, we picked up the tracks of the whole family walking along a road. They are all now on our farm, and outside the boundaries of the formally protected areas. We carried on to see where they had crossed onto our farm, and found holes pushed through the fence very close to where the first cub came through. The tracks on the Venetia side of the fence has been largely obliterated by guinea fowl, which come out to forage in the early morning, so we think they probably crossed over yesterday evening.

The family of cheetahs are safe here, but they are unlikely to stay for long. The fence surrounding the De Beers Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve is an electrified predator fence that is designed to keep predators from crossing it, but often these animals have different ideas. Where the cheetahs crossed, they had simply forced their way through the strands of wire, rather than the more usual method of using holes dug under fences by warthogs. Our fence is not electrified on the three sides that do not form a boundary with Venetia, and so the family will have no trouble in moving on.

My main concern is actually not for their safety with other farmers, but rather their safety on the road. Two boundaries of the farm are with tar roads, and while there is thankfully very little traffic, the traffic that is here tends to be going very fast.
Last year there was a tragic case just south of here where a mother cheetah was killed on the road, and her well-grown cubs, a few months older than these, all stayed around and waited by her body. In a short space of time all three of the cubs were also killed in the same way as their mother. It was tragic. By the time I got a call about it and set off, it was too late. The carcasses were picked up and I tracked two down to a local taxidermy, and the others remained a mystery. Cheetah parts are important for local traditional medicine, and I think they were most likely taken for this.
Cheetahs are very difficult to trap or catch and I do not think hunting for this purpose poses a threat to cheetahs, at least not in this area. Roadkill is, however, a major threat, with our neighbour directly to the north having picked up a dead cheetah outside his gate three months ago.

We need to know what is happening with these cats. As I have mentioned in previous postings, our habitat here is much thicker than typical cheetah habitat, with the bush being too thick in many places to hunt in the normal way of chasing down quarry with a burst of high speed. We need to know how this affects this size of the areas they cheetahs use, what they are eating, and what their survival rates are. GPS collars allow us to plot their movements accurately without habituating them, and we can even use them to collect data on what they are eating. In my experience on a previous project I worked on with cheetahs, they keep moving in the morning and evening unless they have just eaten and want to sleep off their heavy meal. By closely monitoring their movements, it should be possible to see where we think they may have eaten and respond by taking Snoopy to the site and sending him to look for the carcass. He started his career on finding the carcasses left by cheetahs in thick bush, and can be a great deal of use with this as well as looking for scats. I am going to take him out now to walk the road where the cheetahs walked this morning to see if we can find any scats. I will let you know what he turns up.

The GPS collars we need are so essential to this work. Wherever possible we make our equipment ourselves and manage with the cheapest workable options we can find, but in this case we simply do not have the knowledge and technology required and will have to buy in these collars. Any help will be very much appreciated and will have a very positive impact on the work we are doing in this area.

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One of the pitfalls to avoid with training sniffer dogs is that the dog mustn’t be following the handlers scent to the hidden scent article. We may not like the idea of it, but to our canine friends, we smell very strong and it is very easy for them to follow where we have been. I first held Snoopy in the palm of my hand when he was about 24 hours old, and he is very much my dog. For the first year of his life, it was just the two of us, and we formed a very strong bond. We now live in a far more social setting, with my husband, daughter and four other dogs, but our bond remains. He could find my scent anywhere. He has been doing very well with finding the scat samples, and in his first open field trial, he found all the samples as well as the containers that I had brought them in. In order to test that he is looking for the cheetah scats, and not looking for something with my scent on, I set him up with a trial where I placed two identical pots out, one containing a scat sample and one without. I then sent him into the area to search for the scent. In 11 out of 12 replications, he went straight to the pot containing the sample, and with the remaining one, he quickly ignored the empty pot and continued on to find the real sample without any further prompting from me. This is all the confirmation I need to show that he is indeed looking for the right scent.

As our bush is very thick, I wanted Snoopy to work with a bell on his collar to help me keep tabs on him, but for some reason he absolutely hates it, and so as a compromise, he wears an alarmingly red collar which shows up well in the field.

Barclay is a little slower off the marks, due almost in entirety to his age. At about 7 months old, he is still very much a puppy and has a very limited attention span at the moment. I am giving him space to grow up, learn about the bush, and learn some basic obedience. He is passionate about tortoises and finds them often on our walks, so I have no doubt that his nose works. His other big passion is Nightjars, a small nocturnal bird, that has a dog-enticing habit of flying off only a short distance when startled before resettling on the ground. His nose works, and his will to search is there, so I don’t doubt that he will grow up to be a great dog. For the next month or so though, he will be busy just being a puppy.

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