HAPPENINGS AT HIPPO HAVEN
Quite a few months have passed since I last wrote to you about the hippos and life at Hippo Haven. One of the hippos’ supporters, Cary Martin, wrote about his stay here in October of last year. He came out from England to meet Kuchek, the hippo he supports. Cary is not the first hippo supporter to visit, but it is always so wonderful to have a supporter come out to Africa and see his or her hippo in the flesh.
Cary was fortunate as he came here at the height of the dry season when the pools are very small. At times he was sitting as close as twenty feet from Kuchek and the family of hippos, at the Mokore River pool. We also had the elephant herd and of course our resident troops of vervet monkeys and chacma baboons, who all enjoyed having a new person to investigate, in the case of some of the monkeys literally climbing upon his lap.
After Cary left us the rains commenced, and by November the river was in flood and all hippos had left their normal pools, moving to smaller tributaries of the Turgwe River. Since then we have had terrific rains and the Turgwe has remained in flood.
The noise below our house has to be heard to be believed. With so many rocks within the riverbed, rapids form, and the roar of the waters crashing over the bedrock turns our quiet little haven into a place where one has to shout to be heard, even when standing at the front entrance of our house.
With the abundant rain, the surrounding environment returned to a luscious oasis of grass with new leaves on all the trees. In fact the grass is so long at present that in many places it is higher than the top of my head. On my daily patrol of the hippos’ grazing areas, the walk within the bush at this time of the year is actually not so pleasant.
It is hard to walk quietly as the seeds under one’s feet snap, pop and crackle so it sounds as if you are wading through a bowl of rice krispies. Many of the grass seeds or flower buds stick to your clothing. A creeper similar to the British stinging nettle really has an incredibly sharp sting, leaving you with an itch that burns and is so sore that you want to rip your leg off where it brushed the skin. Yet there is no English dock leaf to ease the pain, and only saliva seems to lessen the itch.
Golden and Garden Orb spiders spread their exquisite webs over everything, so you spend a lot of time trying to avoid breaking their webs, that seem to crisscross every single route you take. These spiders are totally harmless but even so, when you cannot help but get the odd one or it’s web stuck in your hair or attached to some part of your anatomy, it’s a bit off putting!
On a bright and funny note, one of the wild baboons that daily visit our home, spending several hours with us, has commenced a new amazing ritual with Jean-Roger and myself. She grooms us!
‘Vixen’ actually goes through practically every reachable hair on our bodies, from head to toe searching for tasty morsels! The worrying thing is when she seems to actually find something and you hear her lips smack, and watch her pick off the offending thing from your hair! I mean we might live in the bush but that does not mean we have to be bushed, as the saying goes!
I just tell myself that she has a vivid imagination and likes to look as if her relentless search has achieved something.
It is though absolutely incredible to have this wild creature, who has her own mother Foxy, as well as sister Renarde, and yet she will sit on my legs, lie by my side when I am sitting on the stoop, and treat me as one of her own kind.Of late she even allows me to touch her and hold her hand, something that has taken many months to achieve. She started grooming me nearly a year ago and then approached Jean-Roger a few months later. Allowing me to now touch her has only occurred recently and Jean is still not allowed to do this. If he attempts to stroke her hair she pushes his hand aside and then moves away from him.
I believe that every wild animal, whatever species it is, can reach this kind of relationship with a human being, if only it has not in any way been hurt by people.
Bob the hippo had a unique relationship with me, in that he would always come when I called his name and stop but ten feet from where I stood by the river’s edge. He also on many occasions alerted me to the too close approach of a Nile crocodile. All of the Turgwe Hippos relate to my voice and know their own names and me but because of the present situation in this Wildlife Conservancy, with people just a couple of kilometers away killing animals, the animals rightly fear man.
I can have the hippos calm with me, but you never know if the night before they did not bump into a poacher, or a group of poachers and had to run to avoid being hunted by them or just harassed. I have these days to always judge the hippos’ attitude as soon as I see them in the early morning, as you never know what may have happened the night before.
As well, these people who invaded the Conservancy, constantly harass the elephants. So the family herds are afraid of people and although the herd around us began to realize that Jean-Roger and I would never harm them, they naturally feared man. If they smelt us, they would immediately take their calves into the thickly wooded hippo island to get away from the scent of a human being.
Sadly, the legitimate people that have businesses within the Conservancy now all do hunting safaris, as the photographic tourists no longer visit Zimbabwe in the numbers that they used to. Whenever any country in Africa has internal strife and the media relates these problems, the first thing that happens is that the tourist market slows down, and in some cases stops.
This always has a detrimental effect upon the wildlife of Africa. In a place like Kenya, which is in my eyes the very best African country for wildlife protection, the people appreciate the benefits wildlife brings to their life. Well, without tourism the animals suffer terribly. So many of Kenya’s people are involved with tourism that when holiday makers stop going there, the people often lose their jobs, and the animals have no financial support from Parks’ entrance fees and such like. It is a terrible situation for the future of Africa and its inhabitants.
Zimbabwe and Southern Africa have always had two ways of dealing with wildlife, one being from tourism and the other unfortunately from sustainable use like hunting and culling. Here in the Save Valley Conservancy before the land invasions began, back in 2000, many of the landowners either worked purely on a photographic safari basis on their properties or combined it with hunting, if their lands were large enough to support both.
Nowadays the majority of people coming here are hunters and so animals that were only seen by people with cameras are now aware of the gun! Hence also fearing man.
Vixen and her troop, the vervet monkeys, and Bob my wonderful bull hippo are and were all examples of a wild animal trusting a human being. Without fear, and allowing me to be part of their life.
Back in Kenya many years ago Ian Douglas Hamilton and his wife Oria, not only lived for a few years with a few hundred elephants, while as a scientist he carried out a study of them. His wife brought her new babies and introduced those children to the elephants.
They had reached such a relationship with some of their elephants that members of that wild herd would actually approach them and touch their hands or heads in greetings. In his one book there is a photo of one of these elephants walking right up to his wife who holds her baby and the elephant touches the human child. Proof that an animal can learn to trust man and can be non aggressive, even when it has the capability to kill with one swing of its trunk.
Young Vixen’s father, Spazzy, could do me considerable damage. Bob could have killed me with just a single bite, but with respect from my side and knowledge of their needs, they have learnt to trust me. It is a trust that I never take lightly.
A lady in South Africa called Louise Joubert, who owns and runs the San Wildlife Sanctuary took on recently an elephant herd that had been constantly harassed by man. Initially these elephants were orphans from the worst of all man’s sins: an elephant cull. Those elephants have now settled well at Louise’s sanctuary. To quote her: “There are no problem animals, there are only problem people”. I could not agree with her more.
So when I sit with the Turgwe Hippos watching them go about their lives, and they ignore me by sleeping, mating or playing, I thank God that I can experience such an honour.
Of late here in Zimbabwe it has become harder and harder to remain optimistic. The lack of goods, food, and daily things that we used to take for granted, wears one down. Thanks to some of the hippos’ supporters, an appeal that I urgently sent out for financial help, for the Trust to have a reliable communication system has been fulfilled.
We have enough funds to order a satellite broadband setup and hopefully in the not too distant future it will be operative I hopefully will have once more daily email communication with the outside world. Of late we can go for up to three weeks with no email whatsoever. The network system is either totally oversubscribed, or it is impossible to get a connection, or the network is just not working at all.
With satellite this should not be the case. It will also mean that for the first time I will have the Internet and be able to see our own web site regularly instead of using an Internet café!We though, have had to arrange for a cage to be put around the dish as otherwise the monkeys and the baboons will think that we have bought them a very expensive toy! It is too fragile for them to use as a climbing frame!
With all the food in the bush and so much grass, a lot of the animals have moved away. The elephant herd have moved but as there are supposedly 1200 elephants within this wildlife area, I am sure they have just gone off to meet others of their own kind, and hopefully they will rejoin us later in the year.
Just the other day at dusk, I bumped into five African wild dogs hunting but a stones throw from our home. The Conservancy has a large population of this endangered animal. Yet even the dogs have problems from the snares put to kill the animals, and several have died caught in these vicious wire nooses.
Last week the baboons were sitting by a huge baobab just adjacent to our house, in an open grassland. I was leaving the house for my dusk walk when I see running straight at me a huge male cheetah. He veered to the right when he saw me and continued his mad dash, and then I realized why.
Spazzy and Joe, the troop’s two dominant baboon males, were pursuing him. The rest of the family were all calling while the two big baboons chased the cheetah a good five hundred meters before returning to the family. Whether the cheetah had been trying to sneak up on one of the young family member, or had just been minding his own business walking through the long grass, I am not sure, but either way the two baboons were not allowing him to stay around just in case he was hunting.
Poaching by man, at this moment, has slackened off slightly due to the vegetation. With so much grass and food the animals can disperse. To snare them is not as easy as they are not using the regular paths that they utilize during the dry. Also it is harder for the dogs that some poachers use to chase wildlife, to actually get close up to the game, as the grass is so long and thick. The poachers do tend to hunt more at this time of the year with bows and arrows and dogs, than with wire snares, and they persecute the young of animals such as warthog and impala. It is easier to catch up with dogs a baby impala than an adult, and a lot of young animals are born with the first rains.
Poachers kill warthogs after seeing which ones of their burrows are regularly used. The poachers then block all the entrances but one, and light a fire in order to smoke the piggy out. Their dogs, waiting by their owner’s side, then pursue the warthog, turning it back towards the man who kills it with an arrow or an axe, depending on the size of the animal.
So, even though snaring is slower through the rains, we cannot afford not to continue our anti-poaching patrols, and we keep the two game scouts regularly walking further afield in search of poachers, their dogs or their snares.
Of late there has been a high turnover of old scouts from the safari camp who employs the two scouts who work with. Most of the experienced scouts were in cahoots with the people living in this area and poaching. They were making money from killing the animals. Now new game scouts have been employed and in just a few months we have had many poachers caught in our area.
The one old man we caught has apparently been a notorious poacher for over forty years, but now he is much more of a commercial poacher. Over the years he has killed hundreds of animals. He is involved with businessmen from neighbouring areas. We get information from people living in the traditional lands adjacent to this Conservancy. Apparently most poachers now do not get paid in Zimbabwe dollars but are paid by these businessmen in South African rand. They earn this money and then jump the border by illegally crossing the Limpopo River into South Africa. In many cases they know which people to bribe at customs! Many of these poachers either then work temporarily in South Africa, or just buy goods there to bring back to Zimbabwe to sell for more rand.
Due to our inflation of now over 27,000% per year and increasing (!!!), many people work by doing illegal things and in every way of life there are entrepreneurs making money illegally. The money they need in our area is not the Zimbabwe dollar but the rand. Poaching is now even more lucrative financially, as with no food in the shops there is always a market for meat.
To remain optimistic in the present climate is very very hard. I am most fortunate in having my love of nature and its inhabitants, which sustains me most of the time, and also the correspondence I receive from some of the hippo supporters boosting our sagging morale.
Due to the rains I have not seen all of the Turgwe Hippos in the last few months but that is quite normal. Of the 22 in my study groups I still have not seen Hope, Chubby, Odile, Tacha and Tandee since November, but in the last week Abe, Tsakus, and Cheeky have all come back next to Hippo Haven, so I am sure the others are quite fine. If no more rains fall, then they all will eventually return to their normal pools.
I thank everybody reading this, for taking the time to learn a little bit about our lives here and I thank once again everyone who has donated towards the new broadband setup and care enough to financially support us in our time of need.
Karen Paolillo, Hippo Haven, Save Valley Conservancy, Zimbabwe February 2008
Postscript:
After writing this newsletter I received an email to tell me that my mother has just passed on at her home in Kariba, in the north of Zimbabwe, leaving us on the 22nd February in the early morning hours.My mother’s life has always held adventure and many experiences. Her love of animals wild and domestic is part of my genes. I was born into a family of cats and a dog and throughout my youth animals were the most important thing in our lives. The happiest time for my mother and I as a child, was when she worked at a small Pets Corner at Woburn Abbey, in Bedfordshire, UK. She cared for the animals that lived there. Her two favourite animals were a Wooly monkey called Wooly, and a Gibbon called Wimpy.
If any animal was sick or in need of special loving care, she was always there for them. I was put on my first ponies back at six months of age. This gave me my lifelong passion for horses and ponies, and perhaps even the hippos in a way, which are after all river horses.
I thank my Mum with all of my heart for allowing me to grow up with animals, to learn about their care, on how to respect them, and to treat them as part of the family. A child’s life is, I would believe quite barren if they are not allowed contact with a pet, or with animals on a regular basis. They need those growing years with a pet or pets to teach them about love and trust and many other important things.
I salute my mother for her courage when often under fire! Her glamour and beauty, her social skills, and most important of all her love of animals. Rest at peace now Mum, now that you have crossed the rainbow bridge and met up with and are with your loved ones, humans and animals. God bless you.
With my love Karen
