A tail of survival

At a time when wildlife habitat is shrinking, wildlife populations are collapsing and what remains is increasingly confined to fenced and fragmented reserves, African Wild Dogs are fighting-back; reclaiming territory long ago lost in the conflict with humans. These free-ranging painted wolves live in defiance of a hostile world, a world that denies their kind a place, and their fight for survival is more desperate, more tragic and more inspiring than that of their brethren living ‘safely’ inside large protected areas. The Herd Reserve, with the support of the Endangered Wild Trust and its Carnivore Conservation Programme, has the good fortune to play a small part in their epic struggle.

Their story begins with the rebound in African Wild Dog numbers thanks to the heroic efforts of conservation organisations like the Endangered Wildlife Trust to save the species. As a consequence of the rally in numbers though, South Africa’s national parks have simply run out of habitat, pushing dogs out beyond their boundaries and into areas where the species went locally extinct many years ago. Our pack is the ironic victim of a rare conservation success; they are the Kruger National Park’s refugees, up against brutal odds in trying to recover some of their former range – still being relentlessly persecuted; hunted down and shot or poisoned, or killed on our roads, sometimes deliberately, which they resort to using as corridors between safer refuges. And yet, they are surviving. In fact, the Herd Reserve pack is thriving.

What has changed since this apex predator species died out in places like the Limpopo Valley – and what is a source of hope, for us all – is that wildlife refuges do now exist outside the reserves. Even as ever more land has fallen to the plough, even with the remorseless creep of human settlements, mining and industrial development, land has yet been saved for wildlife, even for the carnivores. Small and fragmented though they remain, the patchwork of nature reserves and predator-tolerant wildlife ranches that has gradually emerged across the Vhembe Biosphere Reserve in the Vhembe District of Limpopo Province between the transfrontier peace parks of Mapungubwe in the west and the Greater Kruger National Park in the east, is what has allowed for the return of these long-vanished creatures.