Karen's New Year 2010 update
It is quite some time since I wrote last to you about happenings at Hippo Haven. I was looking for a positive start to the New Year and that has now thankfully occurred.
The biggest worries for anybody working with wildlife in drought prone Countries are the rains. We, unlike Europe or the States, do not have regular all the year round rain and are totally dependant on the seasonal rains when they come along. This year they have been sporadic to say the least.
We had a little bit in November and early December and then nothing; by now we should already have had a flood of the Turgwe River. Without these annual floods the sand that is deposited into all the hippos’ permanent, dry season pools does not get washed away. The Turgwe River in the dry has but a couple of places where the hippos can now live, as the rest of the river has silted up over the years. We do have a back-up plan for pools that are too full of sand. We need though the rains to fall in order to have the water to deepen these hippo pools with our sand pump, which is operated by Jean-Roger.
The other real fear is if the rains are too little. Then there will not be enough food for the hippos to eat during the dry season. Although I provided food for them in the 1992 drought, and kept them alive by feeding them for 10 months, I have only supplemented their diet twice since then, and for short periods before the rains.
On both those occasions I did this because man had been responsible for their lack of grazing. The illegal settlers who invaded this area in 2000 had either burnt the grazing while poaching or burnt down trees to supposedly grow crops that would never survive in this area in the first place. Whatever the reason for the fires, they got away and burnt valuable wild animals’ food. This year things have been looking really bad and I have been worried that once more a long term feeding project of the hippos may have to take place.
We are not completely free of that worry but in the last few days we have had nearly 50mm of rain and at last the grass is popping up all over the place again, so the hippos and all the other animals that graze have food once more. We just have to hope that this will continue for the next two months and then it will not be necessary to try and source food. The logistics of feeding double the number of hippos that I fed in 92 are staggering. In addition, we would now have to deal as well with a permanent herd of over 50 and sometime up to 100 elephants in this area, a lot more game around Hippo Haven, and the added threat of the poachers living close by taking advantage of the feeding animals. The whole exercise would be a nightmare. To make matters even worse, with the land invasions and the take-over of the farms there are hardly any farmers left to grow crops, hence sourcing food for the hippos and other animals would also be extremely difficult. Nonetheless, if it has to be done we will do it. So at least now with rain in the air and chances of it still falling, I can write a more upbeat newsletter.
The other thing that has kept me from writing is the disappearance of one of the most important hippos in the two family groups: Blackface, my cantankerous, dangerous and wonderful black female hippo. Like her name suggests, she is blacker in colour than the normal grey. She has been with me here since the day I arrived in October 1990.
Blackface has always been the hippo who kept me from being too blasé with all of the others. She reminded me regularly that hippos can be dangerous if one does not respect them for their abilities. I am often asked if hippos really are the biggest killers of man in Africa, if they really are aggressive, and if they do have the bad reputation that they are made out to have. My answer is always the same: any animal that has the potential to defend itself against man and has a human aggress, harass it or its immediate family, or in anyway in the eyes of the animal gets within its comfort circle, will of course be dangerous.
Yes, Blackface makes hippos’ reputations come alive when she is charging one. Many a time she has put me up a tree or made me beat most Olympic records in a sprint. I have seen her from a distance charge out of water and go on land in a most determined manner when a human’s voice was irritating her, or when people were in her vicinity.
On a couple of occasions she has chased my husband, leaving the water and made him realize that these wonderful animals that come so close to his wife when she calls their names can be faster than any of us if they put their mind to it.Blackface is one lady hippo who has a bountiful character, and now she is missing. She has a five year old male son. He is the first male calf she has had in the nearly twenty years that I have lived with these hippos. His name is Five: he was the fifth born calf in 2004 and he is black, just like his mother. Kuchek, another young male who is much older than Five, had been trying to attack Five in the family group for all of last year. The reason for this is that he knows at a later stage Five could prove to be competition.
Blackface would not allow mistreatment to her son and although he received possibly only two cuts on his hide, she was the one taking the brunt of Kuchek’s pursuit. At one stage she looked a bit like a pin cushion with cuts all over her hind quarters and stomach area but none of them were life threatening. None were too deep for her to bleed profusely; they just didn’t look very good.
I went away in October. During my absence, Jean-Roger was in charge of daily checking the hippos and patrolling alone for snares and accompanying our two game scouts at times in the bush. Jean left here for two days to take me up to Harare and on his return Blackface and Five were not around.
For the next two weeks he searched for her but to no avail.I returned and continued the search. Two weeks later Five reappeared here at Hippo Haven. He joined Surprise, a mother with her own son Chubby, and another male Bobin in the tiny pool adjacent to the weir pool where the main family of hippos lives under the leadership of Robin.
Five looked well, without any new cuts, which to me said a lot. In that if something had happened to his mother he should have shown either new cuts or loss in condition. As although he was well old enough to be on his own, he had spent every day of his five years living with his mother. The next day he was gone again.
Since then, Jean-Roger and I have tried to locate Blackface. The Turgwe River stretches for about fourteen kilometers to the east of us and another 25 kilometers to the west. The river in the dry only has a couple of pools suitable for a family of hippos, but for two hippos to hide there are a million places in the reeds, in channels and such like where they both could live undetected.
I was hoping that she might even have been having a new calf, although I would have been surprised, as I believe she is in her late thirties to early forties, and so is not a young hippo and perhaps Five could be her last calf.
If she had died, then there would have been evidence. A large adult female hippo’s carcass would be found. If she died in the river, as it is so shallow, again even with crocodiles eating her body we would still have known. In the past we have had a few of the Turgwe hippos die, normally killed in fights and we have always found their bodies.
We have lion in the area, which also could eat a hippo but again there would be bones, even after the hyenas had fed and anyway the vultures would tell us if there was a large body in our area. Blackface would never leave this area and roam. I have had that happen with younger females but Blackface has never left these surroundings during the last nearly twenty years.
In December the two game scouts swore they saw a big black hippo with a smaller, not so black hippo in the one pool near to where Tembia, my younger bull, and his family live. We tried to walk up there later that day but the elephant herd had arrived and we could not approach the river. The elephants, numbering then over 80 animals, were all within the river bed and around that pool.
These elephants have been shot at regularly by National Parks when they go near the illegal settlers (many elephants have been killed or wounded that way) and each year some of the bulls are put on the sport hunting trophy quota. In addition the Conservancy, much to my utter horror, culled over 40 elephants last year. Therefore the elephants in this wildlife area are understandably afraid of man.
When elephants are afraid they can be extremely dangerous if cornered or if you get between them and their family members, which is totally understandable. So unlike National Parks where elephants are not supposed to be hunted, here the elephants are much wilder than in places where people do not hurt them.
When we got to that pool the day after, of course there was no black hippo. A few days ago Five reappeared here and stayed once more for a day. Long enough for me to catch him on video for his foster parents and get a couple of photos. Again he looked very well.
I am really concerned, as she has never been gone this long before. Yet, quite a number of years ago another female called Lace, who was the mother of Tembia, also was being attacked by others due to her young son. So Lace left this area. She moved 14 kilometers downstream to a new pool where she lived until she died. Her son Tembia stayed with her until she gave birth to a new male calf and Robin the bull was living with her and Enfin, and only then did Tembia return to this area. Tembia was then a youngster of nine years. He is now nearly 17 years old and has his own pool and family six kilometers upstream from Hippo Haven. As he is the son of my beautiful Bob, I am so pleased that he established himself in this area, as that means Bob’s genes live on.
So hopefully I will find Blackface alive and maybe if the rains are kind to us and the river floods once again, she will return to Hippo Haven. I have to hope with every ounce of my optimism that she will. When one of my hippos goes missing, it is always the fear of man now that is the main reason I worry so much.
In the old days I had the odd professional hunter in the area constantly telling me “he had shot Bob” or one of the hippos, as they love to upset my equilibrium, but these days with poachers on our doorstep, there is always the fear of one of the hippos being killed by them.When an animal is missing, be it a hippo, warthog, any of the animals in our area that we see regularly, one always these days thinks man, and not natural predator like lion, leopard or such like. When an animal that you love disappears, like Blackface, you need closure, especially when she has been gone for so long. I suppose no news is good news but it is hard at times. I also fear the sport hunters as they did shoot Zen without telling me and it was only because I heard the shots and realized what had happened that they eventually had to tell us the truth.
Back to the positive though, as my attitude to life is to look for the bright side and not the negative. In my last newsletter poor Silas, the African guy who has worked for us for years, had all his possessions stolen from the hut he lived in. This included his beloved bicycle.
The good news is that thanks to some of my wonderful hippo supporters this has all now been replaced. I would like to specially thank Audrey and Chico Noriega of Las Vegas, USA who paid for a complete new bicycle for Silas. To Alan Meyers, Kevin Lenahan, Cheryl Hathaway and Rowena Spacey, I thank you all for allowing him to have new clothes and cash to replace some of the other items he had stolen. He now once more can listen to the radio and ride his bicycle back to his family at the end of each month. This on a bike takes two and a half hours, on foot over six hours so you can imagine how badly the theft of his bike affected him. Apart from the fact that he feels safer on a bike than on foot due to the presence of the elephants and lions.
Sadly he had another terrible thing happen to him: Moreblessing, his new daughter of only two months of age, died. We will never know what killed her as she was taken to the clinic by her mother and died half an hour later having a small fit. They gave her malaria pills but as there are no real medical facilities within a hundred and twenty odd kilometer radius, none of us will really know why she died. His wife has lately been sick and we have taken her to the doctor, but both of them are terribly upset by their daughter’s passing. They have two sons of under six years of age but Moreblessing was Silas’s first daughter. In Africa death is something that we all learn to live with, far more frequently than in the first world.
You hopefully have read the two stories on our web site www.savethehippos.com written by the Mitchinson sisters. They came here from the UK last year and stayed with us at Hippo Haven. Hazel was with us for over two months, the longest stay for a volunteer. During that period I had some incredible new experiences thanks to her being around and allowing me to change my busy schedule for a few days.
The highlight for me was when Jean-Roger, Hazel, myself as well as an American wild dog researcher Rafael Crespo and his friend Kate Eckman, a NBC TV reporter from America went for four nights to Hwange National Park and Victoria Falls for a mini break. Jean and I have not been able to get away on a break together since 1999! This is due to the ever present poachers and problems that have surrounded us here since the land invasions of 2000, so one of us at least always has to be here.
We left here in 2007 together for eight nights when I had a Hippo presentation to give at the Royal Geographic Society, Ondaatje theatre in London, but that was not a break as I was full of the usual nervous fears of talking in public, and Jean was actually rather unwell. Our short trip last year was the first real sort of holiday, as we gambled that with the quieter situation in Zimbabwe over the last year it was safe to leave the hippos for four nights altogether.
The highlight for me was a visit to my colleague Sharon Pincot, who works with the President’s herd of elephants in Hwange. She lives at the Hwange Safari Lodge and spends her days with the elephants, learning about their l ives, their families structures and living amongst them as I do with the hippos.I have a passion for any animal, and each animal gives me immense pleasure and joy in my life but I must admit the majesty of elephants has always been a huge draw card, second only to my love of the hippos.
Sharon’s elephants number over 400, all split up into family groups but often joining up into larger family gatherings. That day, Sharon initially allowed me to accompany her, and just the two of us sat within a herd of over fifty elephants as they went about their business. All that separated us from the elephants was her beat up old Range Rover body work, but with its open sun roof and windows I could have reached out and touched any of those elephants as they walked past. I am not ashamed to say that I howled.
The emotions I felt, as that herd of huge gray beasts strolled past us, some even stopping to scratch an irksome itch on a nearby tree or throw dust with their trunks over their dry bodies, the calves happily playing with others only meters away from the vehicle, were overpowering. It was the most enriching and awesome experience I have ever had to date in Africa, apart from my experiences with Bob hippo and the hippos here.
To be literally in the elephants’ eyes and feel no threat from them, no fear, just plain curiosity, to be accepted by them was for me, a person who has very strong emotions, just impossible to contain. My tears were tears of awe and happiness.
I thank Sharon with every ounce of my body for allowing me to share that experience with her. Hazel and the others later joined us as we searched for specific elephants amongst the gatherings. We all met Leroy, mentioned in Hazel’s update, as he approached the vehicle for Acacia pods, thrown to him initially by Sharon and then all of us.
It proved to me what I have always known. If you do not hurt an animal and cause it to fear, the trust that animal can give back to you is for me one hundred percent more special than any other life experience one can get.
I am not an adrenalin junkie. I grew up with my own personal bibles, the Jungle Book, Tarzan stories, the Little Prince and Born Free. I dreamed as a child growing up in England of living and working with wild animals. Well my dream has come true as I do this with my hippos, and later Kate was to tell me that for her the hippos were the highlight of her stay.
Well Sharon’s elephants were mine, and I pray that both she and I can continue until we both die living and sharing our lives with wild animals, daily seeing that a human being can step into the life of a wild animal and be part of its life.In the meantime back here at Hippo Haven we have as usual had problems to test our staying ability and our perseverance.
For years we have kept going with a battered old second hand Land Rover, which one of my wonderful honorary trustees, Michael has kindly donated money to keep it going, but I have been trying to raise sufficient funds for a replacement vehicle and this has not come to be. Now we are aware that our only roadworthy vehicle, which is a second hand small two by two pickup truck, could easily pack up on us this year. She has had to do a lot of mileage in order for the Trust to survive the last few years. When Zimbabwe had nearly two years of no food nor goods readily available in the shops, we have had to do many times the 600 kilometer trek to South Africa.Our roads have pot holes and the wear and tear on this vehicle is showing. All of the talks I gave in the past in the UK where people kindly donated or purchased merchandise, were given to raise funds for a vehicle but it was never quite enough and the money had to be used for other things for the Trust. So I have now put out an appeal for a second hand vehicle and hopefully this time we will be able to purchase one. As I am not a scientist, nor doing this for a qualification in the scientific field, I cannot approach organizations that readily help fellow scientists. So I have to ask you the person reading this, to help if you can.
We would preferably like to get a four by four which is good enough for tarred roads and going down to South Africa for goods for the Trust and food, but which can also be used in the bush. We had the opportunity of a four by two, but have not managed to raise enough yet and it has gone. I have word out now with as many people as we can think of and just hope enough funding comes in for us to firstly get a vehicle and secondly pay the annual fee for the satellite system that operates our emails and web site connections.
Without funding for these two items the Trust will come to a standstill. We need communication with the outside world to run our ‘adopt a hippo’ project and we need it too for obvious security reasons. We no longer have a phone as we removed the land line many years ago as the poachers kept cutting the overhead telephone wire to use as snares. So we removed over ten kilometers of wire so that they could no longer kill animals with it.Our mobile phone that we used to use up on the kopje behind Hippo Haven is worthless, as one might get a signal once a month these days, so we are totally reliant on Skype on the laptop. We must probably be one of the only two people in today’s world who do not use a phone as part of their daily lifestyle. I have actually never sent a text message to anyone in my life; the other day I needed to send one and Jean-Roger did it for me!
So we need some large funding at the moment and I believe that the recession is still out there so big companies are not approachable, hence that leaves it to my hippo supporters. So far we have had enough come in to nearly pay the satellite annual fee but we do not have enough yet for both the broadband system and the vehicle. So if there is any amount that you can help us with, you can find out how to help us by going to our web site http://www.savethehippos.com and clicking on donations; please specify whether it is towards the vehicle or satellite setup.
This year we have a few more hippo parents talking about coming to Zimbabwe to meet their hippo. This is always a joy to see their faces when they come to within thirty of so feet of their hippo. For many it is a first time trip to Africa. If they want to, they can help us with our daily work and join us on snare patrols, but if they prefer to stay at Hippo Haven and just enjoy the other animals that utilise our home and the hippos’ area that is fine with us. We just ask for a donation to the Trust and for contribution towards board and lodging.
Hazel had, I believe, an amazing experience here. Not many 16 year olds have the chance to remove snares off of African wild dogs and minister to them. This was thanks to Dr. Rosemary Groom who works within the Conservancy with the wild dogs and allowed us to join her on a couple of occasions. Again this was a first for me as I am normally so tied up with the hippos. This close proximity to an endangered animal such as these amazing wild dogs was simply great. As well the satisfaction of seeing that life threatening snare removed and the dog Hopalong managing to walk the next day almost without a limp, were the rewards. I thank Rosemary for allowing me to join her and bring Hazel along as well as later Jean-Roger.
On another sad note little Basil, the baboon in June’s newsletter photos, and his mother Foxy have been killed, but we think it was by a natural predator. Vixen, Basil’s older sister, the juvenile baboon who is wild but allows us physical contact, came rushing in the other day with a dying Basil in her arms.
As is the way with baboons, family members often carry the little ones. In Basil’s case it was obvious he had been hurt and was dying. I tried to get him away from Vixen but it was not possible. Even when, two days after he had died she dropped his body on one of the cement slabs in our back yard, I couldn’t grab him. As I approached the body the whole troop of over 40 baboons charged me. Fortunately their leader Spazy realized I had not touched Basil as I immediately opened my hands and held my arms up, showing open palms (this is something that stops him following up an attack). Later that night I did get Basil’s body, as by then he sadly was smelling badly. He had a hole on his tummy near his thigh. It could have been caused by a raptor, or another baboon or a larger predator. His mother has never returned, so we assume she is dead. We found the remains of a baboon about a week or so later and again have to assume it was Foxy. We will never know what killed her and eventually her son but I think it was a natural death, which is for me something I can handle. It is when man kills that I feel rage, but I feel sorrow if the death is natural. Out of all of the Chacma baboons the Foxy family members were named and were special. At least Vixen, her sister and brother are still with the troop and will carry on Foxy’s genes.
People think that because Zimbabwe has had problems it is not safe to visit and that life possibly stops during all the problems that have happened in the past. This is not the case at all. If you are dedicated to something you don’t stop, whatever is thrown at you. Of late the security situation has been thankfully very quiet and we have managed to lose a lot of the fear that we lived with on a daily basis over the last several years. That stress eats into your well being and makes one have mood swings, affecting your health and your relationships. Yet now of late it has been quiet and peaceful and the change is so wonderful; having visitors once more to meet the hippos is just lovely.
This year is going to be a challenge as always. My most fervent hope is that Blackface will return and maybe even come back with a new calf, although I think she is perhaps a little bit too old to have a new baby, but perhaps she will surprise me. In the meantime I thank you all for your support of these hippos and if you can help us towards the vehicle purchase it would be greatly appreciated. If you already have I thank you most sincerely for caring about our lives here and being there for us and the hippos.
Karen Paolillo, Turgwe Hippo Trust, Hippo Haven, Save Valley Conservancy, Zimbabwe, January 31st 2010.
