Chasing cheetah

A friend in Bulawayo leant me a Partricia Cornwell thriller book and I was lying in bed reading one evening - with the door from the bedroom to the outside wide open, wind blowing through the whole tent, making doors creek and branches hit the canvas - and I hear loud and quick steps urgently getting closer. So I freaked out. Naturally. And it was a massive cow that came and stuck it’s head through the door. Just to say hi.

I have to say that sometimes, living out here, where it can be absolute pitch black, with random noises coming from all over the place, I scare myself a little bit (too much thriller book reading is not helping). But the truth is, there is a reason to be…at least a little bit. And the local villagers know why all too well. Lions, hyenas, elephants…wildlife literally walking into their properties, destroying their crops and livestock. It can be terrifying…and the most recent intruders have been three cheetahs.

Hwange National Park is home to only about 40 cheetahs, so very few considering the park is almost the size of Belgium! Local guides know them well, Queenie and Cindy (mother - and now grandmother - and daughter) are often spotted on the Ngamo plains and have raised many cubs. We had them hunting some impala outside our tent one evening. To look at, they’re incredible - really fast, elegant and, seemingly, quite chilled out. But over the past 3 weeks, three of the now grown cubs have been coming out of the park and into the bordering villages, killing calves, goats and donkeys. Domestic livestock is the livelihoods of these villagers, especially during a year like this, when the drought has meant that planting subsistence food has been basically impossible. So losing an animal is an enormous cost to these communities. The cheetah even killed three goats, without eating a single one. The cheetah seem to be playing a game that is both detrimental to the villagers and dangerous for them. If the rampage continues, it’s likely, and quite understandable, that villagers will want to, and will try to, kill the cheetahs. But this is not an option either - every single cheetah is important to the park, to the tourists, to conservation. So the anti-poaching scouts, or the community wildlife protection scouts as we’re now calling them, have been tasked with tracking the movements of the cheetahs and preventing them from causing any more distress... by basically scaring and chasing them back into the park where they will be safe and can go back to preying on wild animals. For the scouts, it’s been a non stop job for the last 3 odd weeks: early mornings, late nights, warning shots fired, blockades, …anything to make sure that the cheetahs stay in the national park and do not cause any more damage to villagers’ animals.

Human wildlife conflicts have always been a big issue, in so many settings, for so many people and with so many repercussions. Just a few days ago a local worker was killed by a lion a little bit further north, just outside the park, and tonight three elephant were having a maize snack in a villager's field - these animals are powerful and three could sink the entire field a family has been intending on living off of for a year in just one sitting. It’s very difficult to control ‘wild’ situations. You can try very hard to mitigate these but sometimes I guess you have to come face to face and literally chase the conflicts away. Otherwise these serial offenders are likely to get snared, poisoned or shot by villagers.

Scouts tracking and looking for cheetah spore along the national park boundary fence.