2009 New Year, new dreams and new hope
I have been asked by many for a new update and I admit it has been hard to focus on brightness and light of late in Zimbabwe. I waited until the start of a new year with all the excitement it brings and the feeling one holds onto with the beginning of anything new, to start this newsletter.
Some people may read it and be horrified by its contents about hippos, other animals and a very special bird. They may say, how can the author write about animals when people are dying in the Country she lives in. How can she care about a bunch of hippos and all the other animals around her home, when cholera runs amok and many hundreds die, when poverty knocks on people’s doors, enters their homes and won’t leave.
When anthrax raises its ugly head once more in various parts of the Country and kills more people as well as many animals, including hippos in Kariba lake. How can she write positively at all? How dare she?Well I live here. I am a foreigner to the land, being born in the UK. Yet my soul and my heart were stolen by Africa too many years ago.
Anyone who has visited Africa, or anybody who dreams to come here will know what I am talking about. Africa grabs you in an embrace that is stronger than any lover’s arms, or mother’s hold. It is a magic place filled with many great moments, but obviously much pain as well. When you live in Africa, you live a life which is intense and not by any means ordinary.So my newsletter is about animals and a bird, and of course the Turgwe Hippos. What has happened since my last newsletter “Zen” written back in July.
Well, the river as always lost most of the pools during the dry season but we managed to keep the one pool going, right near the house. For most of the months I had up to 19 of the Turgwe Hippos using that pool as their main living area. Tembia, the young bull upstream, lost his females once more when they returned to Hippo Haven. They moved into the pool we kept open by constantly putting more sand bags on the weir wall and digging the channel upstream to divert water to the pool. Abe, Tembia’s main female who has spent the last few years living with him, would visit Hippo Haven and Bob’s old weir pool, then go back to Tembia. She gave birth to her new calf in November of 2008, I believe another daughter for Tembia.
Tembia is a very special hippo bull because his mother conceived in the 1992 drought when I was personally feeding the last Turgwe Hippos during that horrendous period. I gave them enough food for two cows to conceive, and Tembia was the first hippo born in June 1993. His mother Lace, and his father Bob as well as others were fed by me for an entire ten month period and the result was Tembia: a healthy and now matured bull, with his own family. He is still living near us and is very much like his father, my special hippo Bob, not only in looks but in character.
Back at Hippo Haven, Robin the older, dominant bull who was also fed by me during the drought looks after the main group of hippos. Robin was a cheeky hippo in the drought and often charged me or any human in his vicinity. Yet now he is such a mellow hippo, never aggressive nor overly assertive towards people, looking after his family and staying with them 99% of the year, unlike Bob and Happy who often wandered away from their females on their own for a while every now and then. Robin stays put.
He fathered two calves this last year. Odile gave birth to Kim, a little male in April and Cheeky had Peaches, a female, in July. Hence three calves were born in 2008. While the hippos were next to Hippo Haven one hippo was obviously trying to remove the young male juveniles from their mother’s side and chase them away from the group. I do not believe it was Robin as at no time has he shown any aggression at all to any hippo. If anything, it has been quite the reverse, accepting unrelated males like Kuchek who I believe is the son of Happy.
It could even be young Kuchek who turns eight this year in March or even his mother Mystery. Mystery could be trying to have other males, which could at a later stage prove competition to her son Kuchek, removed from the group. I never saw one fight or one attack, but often I would find the mother of the males Chubby and Five cut badly from a hippo attack. Nothing life threatening but lots of new scratches, some quite deep, which do heal on their sides and hindquarter, or in Blackface’s case even across her tail.
Chubby’s mother, Surprise, at one stage looked like she had walked through a thick bramble bush, so many were the cuts on her body. Yet both her son Chubby and Blackface’s son Five did not have a mark upon them. Obviously their mothers kept whoever wanted to attack them, away from their respective sons.Surprise is still with the main group but in November Blackface had had enough and she took her son Five, who turned four years of age on December 30th , up to Tembia’s small channels and tiny pool. There she joined Abe and her new calf as well as Tsakus, Abe’s eldest daughter.
Amazingly Tembia has not in any way tried to attack Five who is not his son, nor Blackface. He actually seems very content to have her living with him. She is a mature female and was here in 1990 when we arrived, fully adult, and Bob, my favourite hippo’s closest companion. Blackface is notorious for charging people including myself.
Even after all these years of living with these hippos and having a definite relationship with them, she is remarkably different to most of them.Somewhere in her past a human being has threatened her, as she trusts no one. Even with me she will still charge and still be aggressive if I enter her space and do not respect her, as a very wild and sometimes dangerous hippo.
This I really appreciate as it keeps me from being too blasé. These hippos know me, they react to my voice, they relax when I speak to them, they go about their lives totally naturally with me very much in their face, and yet they are wild, born free and not captive animals. They should never be treated as pets, or as “tame” animals but we have an understanding and a bond that is hard to explain. Blackface reminds me they are wild and teaches me every single day many things about hippos that the calmer and more relaxed members of her family do no longer do with me, as they tend to see me as part of the family.
So she is now in an area that gives me some worry, as the man that killed Zen hunts up there. That area is a sport hunting area. Tembia is one of only two hippo bulls in the entire area, neither of them related to each other, so if he was shot for sport hunting trophy it would be against all conservation principles that this Conservancy adheres to. Yet Blackface does not like people. A hunter with a gun who faces an animal aggressive towards him, will hopefully walk away rather than confront it. That is, if he is an ethical “sport” hunter. The man who killed Zen is a man who moves into the animals’ comfort zone. He is known as an aggressive hunter, who provokes the animal so that it will charge. This will give that extra adrenalin fix to the client, the man about to pull the trigger. I hope that Blackface, who knows this man, will remain unusually calm if she decided to stay in that area when the hunting season recommences in April. Or better still that she will return close to Hippo Haven, where this man cannot kill.
Wherever you are, when you live with animals as a vet, veterinary nurse or in a shelter, sanctuary or even with your own pets, in whatever situation you are in, feeding wild birds in your garden, etc. and if you care, if you have a heart that hurts when an animal disappears or dies, then you will know what it is like to worry about an animal or bird if it goes missing, how it feels when he or she dies.
Here in Africa, in the bush death is very much part of practically every day you live. Be it natural predator to prey, be it man-made from hunting illegally for the pot or for profit, be it hunting for sport, which is done so much in southern Africa. It surrounds one and it is hard at times for me to live with it.
I am not a person that likes having hand-reared wild animals as part of my family, as it normally ends up in heartbreak as the animal in question is too human imprinted to go back to its wild life. Yet, heroes of mine like George Adamson, of Born Free fame, proved that one can take a lion bred in civilization, in a zoo, a circus or somebody’s flat in London, and return it after much hard work to the life it should have led back in Africa. Give it back its heritage, allow it to be once more a lion. I knew George, and George cared for an animal to have its own life and be free and wild. Many people do this with so many different animals and do it remarkably well, and it is no easy achievement. I personally try not to have such an animal and especially not here, now in Zimbabwe with poachers on our doorstep and all the dangers that man can bring to an animal who is no longer afraid of man.
Yet at Christmas, on Christmas Eve to be precise, a bird came into our lives. There, in the outside rubbish pit, sat a juvenile Brown hooded Kingfisher. He could not fly and perhaps had just taken his first flight of his life and something had grabbed him, possibly even one of my 12 cats. He had survived and just lost important wing feathers but they could re-grow. So Christmas came into our lives.
Christmas initially had to be force-fed to make him open his bill, but not for long. He soon had mastered taking grasshoppers from my hand and catching them on the ground. Over the next 12 days Christmas taught me so much.
I have only with Jean-Roger, ever raised two Weaver birds years ago, from tiny fledglings and both had survived and flown away. Now I had a juvenile kingfisher who had the intelligence, ability to understand and relate to noise like the door opening and chirp when he heard my voice. His way of turning his head on the side and doing a sideways walk up my arm like a parrot. His total stillness when one of my cats would stalk by the outer fenced area of the cottage where we had him living in a cats’ traveling cage, his head bobbing as he listened to other birds and his impatient Brown hooded Kingfisher call for food when I was five minutes late in his feeding schedule. His alert expression and inquisitive eyes when I walked him around the bush every day to aclimatise him to the sun, the rain, the sky, the trees, to let him know he was a bird. Christmas showed me that a bird has intelligence and abilities that I thought only belonged to hippos and elephants, baboons and monkeys. This bird was outstanding in so many ways.
Two days ago I said to Jean-Roger “Christmas is unreal: at the moment he talks so much when I walk in to feed him and it’s as if he has suddenly come alive in many ways and he is so keen to get out there and fly and I am sure that soon we can let him have his wish”. Well, Christmas just died.
We never have hardly a visitor to our home these days. I used to get each year between 700 and 1000 people visit Hippo Haven to meet the Turgwe Hippos. If we were lucky they made a donation, bought a t-shirt or fostered a hippo. If we were lucky they left some financial contribution and the best thing was that every single one of them loved coming here. They all shared the experience of these amazing animals and they left with smiles on their faces and a camera full of pictures of the Turgwe Hippos, and often of the monkeys and baboons that share our life here. This stopped in 2000 when Zimbabwe went mad.
So we don’t see many people now. Between the odd visit from our neighbours or their families and the occasional visitor, we are lucky if this past year 25 people entered our home. Today, 4th January, old friends with their family came around for the day. They now live only 135 km from us, having moved back to this area. With no fuel in Zim, all the problems we all face and the pressures of just life in Zimbabwe, one does not visit people too much these days, but today they did. Later two daughters of Roger, our neighbour, popped around. So in between talking and being social, Christmas still got his food but not his walk in the sun as I was saving that until they had all gone. At 4pm I fed him. Earlier we had all watched a spitting cobra pass by the doorstep, foraging for food.
As all left I rushed off to get Christmas, give him his last feed before dusk and his walk in the bush on my arm. He was not on his perch, a stick I had put in the cage. I panicked, lifting the newspaper that was made into a kind of burrow for him each night to sleep in, and I saw the tail of the cobra. This three foot snake had managed to squeeze into the traveling cage through the mesh, had killed Christmas and was in the process of eating him.
Jean came at my scream. We did not kill the snake, as I do not believe in killing snakes or killing a predator because it kills an animal you love, in this case a bird. I hurt at this very moment. You punish yourself and you blame yourself. Why did you not think about snakes? Why did you not snake-proof the cage? Why did you not hang the cage from the rafters in the cottage he was in? But you cannot, with your anger at yourself, bring Christmas back. You can only learn. I learnt a valuable lesson: birds are as intelligent as a mammal, if not more so in some ways. Birds can also love you as much as a cat, a dog or any known domestic companion.
So pain is once more around me and it is New Year: new life, new hope. My God at times it is hard to believe in going forward, but that is why we are given the gift of thought and emotion. To learn, and to keep chasing our dreams.
For those of us still in Zimbabwe from choice (there are many people who cannot leave, even if they would like to), for us that choose to live here, we must follow our desires and dreams. My dream is to see Hippo Haven back to having tourists that like or love animals, that like or love to see nature and photograph nature, be it a hippo, a bird or a mouse, but like to enjoy the beauty of this land, its people and animals. Or just look at it and appreciate the whole creation of life.
This is my dream. To stop seeing snares all around the bush, to stop hearing of dead rhinos killed for their horn. This epidemic of renewed assault upon the rhinos is now in southern Africa literally wiping them out as I type.
This Conservancy has to my knowledge, lost to poachers over 25 of their rhino this last year. All killed for their horn. Not for meat, not by accident. It’s a systematic slaughter of this ancient beast. The perpetrators are known, often caught and then released. These poachers should not be allowed to walk free. The middle man should be caught and then he should be squeezed until he tells who the ultimate buyer of the horn is. This can be done, but it is not done, so the rhino die. There will be no rhinos left in Southern Africa in a very short period of time if something is not done now to stop this systematic and organized murder.My dream is also to see this Conservancy return to what I was told it would be about. Areas without any sport hunting, areas of eco and photographic safaris, horse safaris, where nothing is killed. It is a huge area: it can have places where the killers can kill, but it was supposed to also have no kill areas, like so many other places in Africa.
Now the only money that the owners make is from sport hunting. The tourists no longer come to Zimbabwe. The funds from big donors dry up when a land is under pressure in a war zone. Yet that is actually the time when the people on the ground need more support and more help than in normal, healthy times. Yet, most big donors want to know that they can advertise their generosity, and what if their boards say to them “hey that is a war zone, how can we promote our company in such a place”. And so, they go somewhere else where it is easier to look good!Yet Hippo Haven has no big donors now. We have just you, the ordinary individual who is out there writing to me or fostering a hippo, or donating every now and then, and my God do I appreciate you all more than you will ever, ever realize.
So back to optimism! Here we are in a Country falling apart at the seams, but the people out there want Zimbabwe to succeed and once more be strong and productive, so let us see what 2009 will bring.
2008 was a bad year for me, deaths all around, both human and animal. My darling Sid, a huge Chacma baboon with hardly any teeth left from fights with poachers’ dogs and wars that he had survived, finally lost his fight against man. He was killed by two poachers and their dogs while trying to protect the troop he belonged to. Jean-Roger recovered his body before they could take it away. Sid had had some of his body cut up for smoking and selling his meat.
Silas, who works with us, told me that most people do not eat baboon meat, but the poachers smoke the meat and lie, selling it as something else. It is only once they have paid for the meat and attempted to eat it that they find out they have been tricked. At least Sid came home and we gave his remains to the crocodiles as they are one of nature’s predators.
In 2008 we removed a few hundred snares and destroyed every single one; those snares will never kill again. In 2008 we actually caught several poachers as well, with the games scouts arresting them often helped by National Parks personnel. In 2008 animals died that should never have died but new animals were born. So it was not all bad.
We still have the herd of elephants that have moved into our area and taken up residence around us. I pray with every ounce of my body and soul that the elephant cull this Conservancy wishes to start next year, never occurs. That National Parks and the laws to be stop it and that the elephants, when their numbers need to be curtailed, get sent alive to new areas in Mozambique or elsewhere where they need to restock their elephant population.
So many elephants have been shot over the last 8 years because so much of the Conservancy’s boundary fence no longer exists, thanks to poachers stealing the wire. So many elephants have died that the whole argument of them being “too many for the environment’s bio-diversity” is to me null and void. Yes, one may have to supply meat to the people surrounding the Conservancy to be allowed to function in Africa, but it does not have to be elephant meat or for that matter any large mammal’s meat. There are thousands of impala and I have been told repeatedly by hunters that there is not much meat on an elephant considering its size!
I pray for positive, good things for Zimbabwe and for Africa. Don’t get tired of all the bad tales and do not wash your hands and walk away. Life is harsh at times wherever you live and yes here it is at this moment a total extreme, but the potential is there still for this Country to once more be a jewel in Africa, for dreams can come true. Thanks one and all for being there for the Turgwe Hippos.
Karen Paolillo.
Founder Turgwe Hippo Trust, Hippo Haven, Save Valley Conservancy, Zimbabwe, January 2009
Mystery Kuchek Dizzy and Robin.jpg)
