Wonderful Hippo supporters
As the title suggests, I would like to say a huge thank you to all the hippo supporters (of which over fifty people responded to my appeal) who kindly have sent donations towards purchasing a second hand four by four vehicle and paying our annual broadband subscription fees. Without the satellite link setup we would not be able to run the Turgwe Hippo Trust from the bush or have communications with the outside world.
Thanks to you all, now for the first time in my life in Africa I actually can travel comfortably in the bush, without having every part of my body bashed about due to the corrugated roads that exist within the Conservancy. In the past our vehicles have made us feel every single rut and bump.
The Trust found a very reasonably priced and in excellent condition, Japanese import, Toyota Hilux Surf, manufactured in 1992. She may be 18 years old but she has been well looked after and is really in tip top condition. A couple of small repairs are needed, but nothing too serious.
The broadband set-up has also been covered for another year, allowing us to continue all correspondence for the Trust. We live here in the bush without electricity but with a generator that runs all of the necessary equipment, enabling us to keep in touch with the first world, and our hippo supporters.
We now intend to sell the old Mazda pickup and keep the very old Land Rover for bush travel on the really bad roads within this Conservancy. This will allow for the Toyota to be well looked after and not get too bashed up on terrible bush roads.
She will be the vehicle for picking up people who visit the hippos or volunteers who come out to help us here.We will also use her when buying food or Trust goods in either South Africa or Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. We shop now every two to three months, no longer every month like in the old days when the shopping was done in Chiredzi, our nearest village some two hours drive away. Nowadays in Chiredzi one cannot find most of the things one needs to survive on. Although there is a bit more now in the couple of supermarkets than could be found a few years ago, there is still no animal food, dairy or vegetables, etc. Therefore in order to buy those items we have a six hour drive either way and obviously the Trust always needs things. So now we can travel in style, comfort and safety thanks to you all. Our old pickup is liable to break down at any time now and being only a two by four drive vehicle, she certainly is not comfortable!
So the year has started well on that front and this would not have been possible without your help, so I thank you with all my heart for your kindness.
We have been very worried about the rains, as until mid-February they had not been good at all. I was so worried that I put out an appeal to see if I could find transport to bring food once more to the hippos, and another appeal to find the actual food, which is normally Soya bean hay or some form of high quality hay as well as game pellets or horse cubes.
An amazingly generous 30 ton truck owner, Charley King Williams from Harare, kindly offered to allow the Trust to have his truck once a month to bring food from Harare down to the Lowveld and to pay only the fuel cost with no hireage charge at all.
The big problem though is that I have not found anybody with hay! As most of the farmers that existed in 1992 have been removed from their properties during the past and present land invasions, the few that are left do not grow hay, so this is a major problem.
I am still trying to source somebody who grows hay but I believe now that we may just be able to go through the entire dry season without feeding the hippos and other animals in our area once more. We had some late rain in late February, March and April. It will depend on whether the illegal settlers burn us out again this year, or not.
In the past several years they have had the bad habit of setting fire to the bush in the lands that they have taken over. This is done either through tree burning in order to clear land, or by burning the trees to keep the elephants away from their tiny patches of water melons or millet, which they grow for their own consumption.
As well, poachers from those areas set fire to the bush when they are trying to smoke out warthogs from their holes in the ground in order to kill them and sell their meat to anybody interested in purchasing it. So we will have to see. I am stocking up whenever I can afford it, by buying Horse cubes or Game pellets as the monkeys and baboons get tit bits of these anyway. This type of feed will provide as well the necessary protein for the hippos, if we do have to supplement their diet.
This is the first year since the awful drought of 1992 that the Turgwe River has not had its seasonal floods. So the river is another problem. There is water in the Seha dam, some 80 kilometers upstream from here, so water is let down into the Turgwe River from time to time. We have not had good enough rains to flush the sand out of the river, so it is extremely shallow along most of the 35kilometer stretch within the Conservancy.
The only pools of decent depth are the two we maintain and the one weir pool up at Majekwe, where the bull hippo Tembia and his family reside. We will have to hire the front-end-loader perhaps two or three times later in the year, as working on the river channels by hand lasts, if we are lucky, for a few days only, depending on elephants and/or poachers’ movements.
We have had poachers knock down the sand dams that Jean-Roger, the scouts and I build up, and this is obviously done in spite. The elephants naturally like moving through the river when feeding and a meter or so high sand wall is fun to walk through and I am sure that some of the youngsters have great games knocking it down, as elephants so love to play.
We cannot hire the front-end-loader yet as the river still has too much water in it, although it is shallow, and the machine would possibly get stuck, so we have to wait probably until about July. We manage though, to keep the water flowing by using shovels and buckets at the moment. In Africa one always has to, as it is called here, “make a plan”; and we do.
I would like to share with you an amazing experience I had just a little while ago in the bush. Here, as you know if you have followed my updates, we were illegally invaded back in 2000 and since then have had constant poaching problems in our area and within the Conservancy as a whole. So obviously, any wildlife within areas where the poachers are operating is far more afraid of man than in areas where there are hardly any poachers or human presence.
Our area here used to host purely photographic safaris. No sport hunting ever took place anywhere around the hippos habitats and there was nobody living in the area, except for ourselves.
When the people invaded this Conservancy they moved into the center of this 840,000 acre wildlife land, and sadly we live in the center. Well, over the years of problems we have managed to keep many of the animals in our area alive by diligently, every single day, removing snares and being out there in the bush protecting the animals to the best of our abilities. Of course many have died. In our area, because of the kopjes (rocky hills) and the otherwise rocky terrain, there were never that many animals compared to other areas in the center of this Conservancy. There, the poachers have literally killed since 2000 at least 15,000 animals that the Conservancy knows about.
So you can drive for about twenty minutes until you leave the invaded areas, and move onto land where one still sees hundreds of animals, as there there are no illegal settlers. Yet the poachers are now moving into those areas to poach the animals. They have not invaded those areas but they just walk across the river and poach.
So animals are nervous and with sport hunting in other areas of the Conservancy a lot of wildlife is very shy of humans, unlike in areas where no hunting of any kind exists. You can drive to a place where people do not physically hunt animals and get extremely close to the nervous wildlife like zebra, impala, waterbuck, bushbuck and such like. Here that is not the case.
So the experience I had a short while ago, was truly for me something to write down in my diary as so very special, and it gave me so much of a lift.
As most of you know, the baboons and vervet monkeys share our home and our life here. They come and go, while the baboons actually roost at night in the trees surrounding Hippo Haven. In return I do give them all tit bits during lean times and it is just wonderful to have these animals totally accepting us. As a result, the baboons see me as part of their family and they go about their own lives totally naturally in my presence.
So the other day I was walking in the bush on my own about forty minutes before last light at around 5:30 pm. I came across our baboon troop about one kilometer away from Hippo Haven. They were all eating some flowers on the trees and were totally, as always accepting of my presence. Some of the youngsters were walking through the bush and passing me within a meter or so as they have absolutely no fear of me and accept me in their company. I sat down to watch them and then to my joy along came a male bushbuck.
He was full of beans and started literally rushing around like a maniac from one clump of bushes to another, passing by me without noticing me. As far as he was concerned, I was just another baboon. Then along came five kudu females with two youngsters; they too passed me within meters. I kept very still and just breathed in their scent and sight as Kudu are my favourite antelope; the bull to me is one of the most magnificent antelopes in Africa.
The Kudus were followed almost immediately by over twelve waterbucks, all females and youngsters, without a bull. I was thinking to myself that it was like a Disney parade of animals as they passed me by within meters of where I sat and surely it could not get any better.
As I thought this a large group of over thirty impala and young came along; some of the youngsters were pronking. This is when they run in the bush and act a bit like a rocking horse, which you may have seen on television. It can only be described as a kind of bouncing/rocking gait where they bound through the bush chasing each other. I see this often but never from a few feet away. I could hear their vocalization of bleats as they played, and again as far as all these animals were concerned, I was no threat as the baboons had not given any alarm call and so I must be ok. They had not scented a human being as I was downwind, but they certainly knew I was there.
I was just thinking once more that all we need now is an elephant when out of the corner of my eye, there it was; in fact not one elephant, but two. Two huge elephant bulls were approaching my patch of bush and were no more than ten meters from where I sat, heading along the path, following all the other animals.
Now my heart wanted to remain where I was, and just have these two gentle giants pass me by, but my brain would not let me. Here these elephants, that were translocated into the Conservancy back in 1992 and have increased in numbers from 450 to supposedly around 1200, are now being treated in the worst possible way.
Not only are the bulls now on the trophy hunting list, with five usually being killed every year, but the people who run the Conservancy properties are now culling elephants every year too.
A total of 60 elephants per year are supposed to die. In addition, many elephants are now killed by National Parks as alleged “problem animals” when they move out of the Conservancy into the adjacent Communal Lands, or go onto the lands that the illegal settlers have invaded. In theory the actual culling numbers are supposed to be decreased by taking into consideration the PAC animals (Problem Animal Control) that have been killed. The elephants only move out because the illegal settlers cut the perimeter fence in those areas and removed it to poach with!Yet, just the other day a family of 8 elephants were culled. The area they were in had just seen, a few days previously, one of the illegal settlers killed by an elephant. These people have put tiny patches of crops and watermelons onto the huge areas of lands that they have cleared. They clear huge areas of natural forests and plant very little; then they are surprised when the wildlife that lives in this Conservancy goes along and eats their crops and water melons.
This is a Wildlife area and if you put a cream chocolate cake in front of a hungry man, woman or child, what are they going to do? So if you grow crops or fruit that are easy picking, then an animal is going to eat them.
These people moved onto this land illegally and so they should be prepared to pay the price for sharing their lives with wildlife. Yet when one gets killed for doing something totally foolish, the animal always pays the ultimate price.
In this instance the elephants had approached one of these illegal lands and so people there had screamed and shouted and run at the elephants, banging pots to chase them away. The elephants got a fright and ran away, but their escape route took them where another man was actually coming to assist the others from his own patch of illegal land. He ran straight into the stampeding animals.
One bull took umbrage, tusked him and killed him. So the Conservancy members decided that it would be better to kill a small elephant herd in that area as part of the annual cull and preempt any chance of the illegal settlers retaliating in their own way. The latter was likely to end up with a greater number of elephants killed, as well as many animals injured too.
The thing is the land is supposed to be for wildlife, like a National Park. Initially it was for eco-tourism, photographic safaris and a tiny bit of sport hunting in various areas. Now due to the lack of tourists within Zimbabwe, the people who run the Conservancy use sport hunting as the main income on all of the properties, in order to keep the land going, pay their staff and generally run their wildlife management business.
Culling of elephants is something that both Jean-Roger and I believe is akin to murder. There has been enough research on elephants to prove their intelligence, their emotional capabilities, etc. Man has no right to take it into his head that he can play God and destroy families in such a manner. There are alternatives and they can be looked into.
They are just far more difficult to implement, cost more money and involve a lot more effort and planning. Here it is so easy to get a team of professional hunters together for a cull, as most of them really want to take part in it! In fact some queue up to be in the cull and they call it “smoking elephants”!I am not allowed to interfere with the management within this Conservancy and as my own late mother said, when it comes down to it, all we can do is look after our own garden.
So our garden is actually rather large, as it encompasses all the areas that the hippos utilize for grazing and for their well-being. Therefore we have to concentrate on this and try not to let the disgusting attitude of some of the people involved in killing elephants, grind us down.
Just the other day, one young Zimbabwe professional hunter was discussing how “the rats and mice” must be got rid off as PAC animals, in order to save the bigger tuskers for later sport hunting.
This man was referring to elephants and to killing preferentially young, small tusked elephants or tuskless cows as Problem Animal Control as opposed to the bigger males with larger ivory, which he could then shoot later for big money with one of his clients from the USA or Europe.When I hear this, my stomach turns over and I imagine that it is how it felt for Jews in the Second World War or for Native Americans or for any person who has been persecuted in our world. That is how it feels for me when I think of elephant culling and about families being shot down in minutes by a group of six men.
So, as the two elephant bulls approached me I lost my nerve and slowly, quietly, I got up from my seated position and calmly left them and the other animals, and returned home.
That event though, will go down in my memory as a very special time. When you can actually be amongst wild animals and they have no fear, it is as far as I am concerned the greatest honour that they can bestow upon me, a mere human being. I have that relationship of course with the hippos, but just for an hour I also felt it with other animal species and it was truly wonderful.
Another great experience was finding two lionesses at the hippos’ pool in March. It was just before dusk one evening and as the pool is right next to the house I went along to see if the hippos were getting ready to leave the water to go off grazing. I suddenly heard a noise in the bushes opposite the pool and to my astonishment saw a lioness dash by and head into the thick Lanctana bush, which has invaded that part of the riverine.
As I stood there, mouth agape, another female walked slowly from one bush to another where she promptly sat down and stared at me. We had only the water between us, a distance of about 25meters. For about five minutes we watched each other. Sadly it was too dark for me to capture a photo of her, but she seemed as curious of me as I was of her. It was by then getting a bit too dark and I was aware that the rest of her pride must be close by, so sensibly I left her about her business and came home.
The following day Jean-Roger went out with the two game scouts for an anti-poaching patrol and I mentioned to him to be cautious, as the pride could still be close by. Three kilometers up the river he came across a freshly killed Waterbuck bull that had been nearly completely eaten.
As he saw it, his attention was attracted to the movement of reeds about fifteen meters away and a lioness moved off into the thicker reeds nearer the water.Jean-Roger decided it was best to move on, when another lioness walked out of the reeds even closer, perhaps ten meters from him, and then she slowly ambled away. Luckily they were full, having been eating the Waterbuck for quite a while.
On his return from the patrol he took the scouts inland, away from the river so as not to disturb the lions and what should happen? Have you guessed?
Yep, Jean and the two scouts were about to enter one very thickly wooded mopane tree forest when an enormous roar from a very large lion stopped them literally in their tracks! The male must have been lying up inside there. Well at least he had the decency to warn Jean-Roger and so no harm was done, for they quietly moved away from that area and returned through a different route to Hippo Haven.These kinds of encounters really make your day when living in the bush.
I thank all of you reading this, for caring about the hippos and for many of you taking the time to write to me and tell me how our lives either inspire you, or give you something special. I promise you it is your words (and not just your hippos’ sponsoring) that keep me going, as without you all it would be far more difficult to survive here.
The photos I have taken of the animals walking by me are not the greatest as it was so late but just wanted to show you all what it was like, though they do not sadly capture the way it felt.
Karen Paolillo, Turgwe Hippo Trust, Hippo Haven, Save Valley Conservancy, Zimbabwe, May 2010.
