by Clay Wilson
I was looking forward to seeing this striking raptor. The bateleur is not Africa’s biggest eagle, but it is still mightily impressive when seen up close. It’s a striking-looking bird, squat and muscular, with a black back and a bright red face and legs. When it flies, it spends most of its time gliding with its wingtips turned up and its stubby tail tucked in so that it looks like a flying black cigar rocking from side to side in search of snakes and other reptiles, and carrion.
But this old flyboy was grounded. The local rangers had found him on the ground, on the main road near the park entrance, unable to fly, and they guessed he had been hit by a speeding car, possibly while feeding on some road kill – yet another animal finished off by a thoughtless motorist. It’s a common problem for birds of prey in Africa and elsewhere. Alternatively, it could have flown into some power lines.
We found a blanket and I was able to get close enough to the hopping, half-flapping bird to toss it over him and wrestle him into a cage. Although he couldn’t fly, he still had some fight left in him and, with his wide, hooked, red beak and sharp talons, he could have shredded me easily.
Back at the surgery I set up an iv to get some fluids into him, anaesthetised him with gas and took a good look at his injuries. He had broken one of his legs and his left wing was badly lacerated. As well as breaking the bone in his leg, he had also severed a tendon, so I set to work suturing the tendon back together again. When that was done, I set the broken leg with a lightweight splint made of aluminium and specially designed for birds. Luckily I’d brought some of these over with me from the States. Next I set to work on his wing, stitching it and then strapping it to his body with a bandage to stop him from ripping the stitches out when he came to. After four hours of surgery, all we could do now was wait.
Within a couple of days this wild bird, who when I’d first fetched him had put up quite a fight, even in his weakened state, was like a semi-tame member of the family. I fed him minced beef by hand and he seemed to warm to me. As with other birds I’ve treated, I found this one liked sugared water, and I knew it would help build up his strength.
After about eight weeks of convalescence I decided to x-ray the eagle to see if his injuries had healed. The x-ray looked good so I removed his bandages and took him out into the back yard and opened the door of his cage. He hopped out and immediately tried to take off. Unfortunately, though, he only managed to get a few feet off the ground before he came crashing back to earth. I was standing by with a net for just such an eventuality, and was able to quickly secure him again. It was back to the enclosure I’d built for him for some more rest. Even though his injuries had healed well, I thought he was perhaps still a little weak and out of shape.
About a week later I tried again. To my great relief he was able to take off, and disappeared up into the clear, blue sky. My heart soared with this majestic bird; it was a wonderful moment. Time after time my work would end in the death of an animal, and while this was often the kindest option it could be terribly demoralising. As much as I tried to compartmentalise the sadness and the cruelty and the frustrations of my life, sometimes it did get to me.
It was moments like this, when I saw an injured bird fly again or a resilient warthog waddle away after I’d removed a snare, that gave me heart and reminded me I had made the right choice. I just wished there were more such moments.
Chapter 8
Honorary game warden
Even though so many of the cases I was called out to were distressing and all too often ended in me having to euthanise a stricken animal, I must have been doing something right, because on 20 April 2009, almost a year and a half since I’d started volunteering for Parks, I was appointed as an honorary game warden.
That day, Thuto Seema gave me an enthusiastic handshake and a hug. He would later confide in me that I was his most active warden, and this made my heart soar.
I didn’t care about the title, but the fact that I, a white South African-born American, could be appointed as an honorary warden here in Botswana was incredibly significant to me. Firstly, my new accreditation gave me some official standing in the park and greater flexibility to make the calls that I needed to in relation to treating wildlife; secondly, it made me feel more like what I believed I always was, truly African; and thirdly, it gave me hope for the future.
While I was over the moon just to be operating as a bush vet, and with some legitimacy following my appointment as a warden, I wanted more for Chobe National Park. I could see so much that needed to be done and now that I had a foot in the door I was champing at the bit to get started.
I envisaged setting up a wildlife rehabilitation centre on the border of the park, and I already had the ideal site picked out – it was the old entry gate complex near the Chobe Safari Lodge that had been decommissioned when the new Sedudu Gate had been built. Its rundown buildings were the site of the BDF camp, but it could be made into a top-class facility with the help of some funding, which I was determined to raise. I pictured a facility where injured animals could be nursed back to good health in proper enclosures, rather than the cage I had at my clinic. We could have enclosures strong enough to contain orphaned baby elephants so that I could raise them to an age where they could be released into the wild. Ideally, there would be volunteers and researchers from around the world, learning from each other and sharing their knowledge while we worked to conserve Chobe’s wildlife.
On the research front I was particularly interested in initiating a study into the papilloma virus that was infecting giraffes in Chobe. This sometimes debilitating and unsightly illness resulted in giraffes being covered with warts, and I wanted to find out what caused it and how it could be cured. The park was home to the rare sable and roan antelopes and I also had dreams of setting up an IVF-type breeding programme for these magnificent animals and releasing more into the reserve. Rhinos had been wiped out of Chobe in the poaching epidemic of the seventies and eighties and I wanted to see them reintroduced.
More could be done to combat poaching in the park if we had the right resources and I was determined to use my new position to push for these. I put my mind to proposing an enhanced anti-poaching programme using new technology and boots on the ground to win this war we were fighting.
For some time I had been interested in the concept of using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to conduct surveillance over Chobe National Park. These remotely piloted drones, similar to those used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, can linger over an area for hours, transmitting video day and night to a base station. Fitted with an infrared camera, they can detect heat sources as they fly in the darkness of the night, and they can easily pick up a human. Once we found poachers operating in the park, I saw them being intercepted by a quick reaction patrol, dropped by a helicopter. I considered it essential that a National Parks or BDF helicopter be based in Kasane.
I started researching commercially available UAVs and putting out feelers to companies that manufactured them, to see if they might be interested in taking part in a trial over the park. My initial correspondence to the new president of Botswana, Ian Khama, started in September of 2009, and I subsequently sent about 15 letters and emails, seeking an appointment to discuss this new technology and how it could be used to stop the poachers who were infiltrating at night and on weekends with no apparent interference at all. I never once received a reply, even though I copied my correspondence to his other relevant ministers and departmental secretaries.
All of these grand plans of mine would need approval from the National Parks department, but I was not confident that the government of Botswana would come up with the money to fund everything I wanted. I would have to start fund-raising abroad if I was to see my dreams come to reality.
As well as wanting to conduct research to educate myself and others involved in education, I was fast coming to the conclusion that the problem with human–animal conflict in Kasane was all about education, or a lack thereof, of the value of wildlife not only to the ecosystem but
also to the community.
I figured that one of the things I could do with my new game warden status was to help spread the word about the financial and other benefits of wildlife to local farmers, business people and, importantly, kids.
Kasane had traditionally been a tourist town, making its living from the presence of the national park next door, but government programmes to encourage commercial farming along the river, and further inland had changed the balance.
Farmers felt justified in taking the law into their own hands and killing lions and elephants and baboons and monkeys and other animals that fed on their crops. Instead of checking or changing their fencing, they would rather shoot first. Town planners and developers, too, were at fault. Every new waterfront property, whether sold for housing or a farm, represented the loss of many more metres of access to the river for elephants and other game that migrated through the area. If they couldn’t follow their traditional routes to food and water then they would have to find new ones, and this would put them into conflict with more and more humans. It was a vicious cycle.
This cavalier attitude to wildlife also spoke of a lack of understanding and empathy for wild animals, and it was something Laura and I set out to do something about. We wanted to show the people of Kasane and neighbouring areas, starting with their children, that wildlife had a very real value to the community and, as such, was worthy of their protection and their care and concern for its future.
Sometimes that lack of understanding and empathy manifested itself in downright cruelty.
I received a call that a waterbuck had been injured and entangled in a fence and that some local kids were tormenting it. The waterbuck is an impressive-looking antelope with a shaggy grey coat and distinctive mark on its rump that looks like it has sat down on a toilet seat coated in wet white paint. The males, like the one I found in severe distress, have large, curved and ringed horns.
Part of the problem with this animal, I realised, was where it had been at the time. It was near a ritzy tourist lodge and a golf course. With its manicured lawns and lush surrounds, the golf course was, of course, like a magnet to animals, especially in the dry season when their grazing and browsing material started to dry out. The lodge and golf course were surrounded by an electric fence.
On one hand, I was in favour of electric fences, such as the one that had been erected around the rubbish dump. On the other hand, this incident showed that while acting as a deterrent to elephant and buffalo they could cause serious damage to smaller animals.
The waterbuck had apparently touched the fence and had received such a shock that it had collapsed and had probably very nearly been electrocuted. It was immobile, but still breathing. As bad as that was, what was worse was the spectacle we were treated to from the sidelines. About a hundred people, mostly kids but also some adults, were laughing and screaming with joy at the animal’s plight.
“Let’s eat it!” cried one.
“Plenty of food for us,” agreed another.
The kids were throwing stones at the shocked animal and generally tormenting it. This senseless cruelty enraged me, and when I talked about it with Laura we decided we would have to do something about educating the kids of Kasane about the value of wild animals and how they should be treated. But for now I had an animal in a state of partial shock that I had to deal with.
I mixed up a dart of half a cc of M99 and 1.5 cc of xylazine, a sedative used mainly in antelope and recommended in the dosage book I used. I loaded the dart gun and shot the waterbuck. To my surprise, the impact of the dart seemed to raise it from its stupor and it got up and started to run along the fence line.
My heart was in my mouth because the fence had been the source of its distress and if it ran into it again in its groggy state it might make matters worse. The waterbuck veered crazily away from the fence, perhaps remembering its lesson from the last contact with it, but that gave me a new worry – that it might run on to the road and be hit by a passing car or truck.
A guy who was helping me ran ahead of the waterbuck and tried to cut it off before it ran into town, but his yelling and waving only seemed to panic the startled beast even more.
Finally, the poor distressed animal succumbed to the tranquilliser dart. Laura covered its eyes with a towel while I made a quick inspection. Its lip and muzzle were bleeding where it had apparently touched the electric fence and then, in its fear and panic, it looked like it had slashed itself on the sharp coils of razor wire that also made up part of the fearsome barrier.
I injected the waterbuck with 20 cc of penicillin and 20 cc of dexamethasone, an anti-inflammatory and shock drug, and 5 cc of finadyne, a kick-ass painkiller. Next I cleaned the lacerations on its lip and sprayed it with the purple gentian violet antibiotic spray.
With a lot of grunting and heaving and help from about 10 of the bystanders – this was a seriously big antelope we had here – we were able to load the drugged male on to the back of my truck.
Travelling with Laura and me was a journalist from Air Botswana’s in-flight magazine, Peolwane. My bid to raise awareness of what I was doing was not just aimed at potential overseas donors via the Internet, but also at local people and, in particular, local decision-makers. I had thought that getting the magazine interested was a good move, as the country’s elite would all be flying on the national airline at some time or other and I hoped that maybe even the president might pick up a copy and read about what was going on. He was still ignoring my letters, but I was hoping that like all politicians around the world he might be reachable via the media.
In hindsight, it was quite fortuitous that the journalist, who was accompanied by her 15-year-old daughter, was there on the day of the waterbuck rescue. It provided some great pictures for her story and some real-life drama. It also encapsulated the disregard many people had for the nation’s wildlife and, on the flipside, the work that was being done by other people in the community to conserve and rescue animals in distress. That, as I say, was all good in hindsight, but during the actual rescue the woman was freaking out.
I had never darted a waterbuck before and, as I’d learnt the hard way, different animals reacted differently and needed different doses to make sure they stayed under. After its initial, frantic run down the street the waterbuck seemed fine, but if it woke up before we could get it to the bush and a suitable release spot, then the six volunteers I had riding in the back of my bakkie with it could be in serious trouble. The male waterbuck’s first line of defence is his massive curved horns with their deadly sharp tips. If he came to and started panicking, he would start swinging that big old head of his around and lashing out at anything that moved.
Laura took the Land Cruiser with the journalist and the woman’s daughter. They had been quite startled by the waterbuck’s charge and our attempts to catch it, and now Laura was doing her best to keep up with me as I flew along the back road to the national park. I was going as fast as I dared because I wanted to make the gate before it woke up.
“She was seriously worried,” Laura told me later. “I’m still trying to get used to driving on the other side of the road and all the controls in the Land Cruiser are on the wrong side, so I was telling her everything was going to be fine and that it was all under control while I was flipping the windscreen wiper switch instead of the indicator and weaving all over the place!”
We had a good laugh about it later, but at the time it was a matter of life and death – for the waterbuck and the guys in the back of my bakkie. We raced through the gate and Laura was hard on my heels as I drove into Chobe National Park and stopped at the first water hole we came to. As their name suggests, waterbuck like to hang out around permanent sources of water. As well as using their horns, one of the waterbuck’s means of defence is to run into the water, where predators such as lions are unlikely to follow. Another asset nature has given the waterbuck is the fact that its flesh is not very nice to eat. Lions know this and the waterbuck is therefore a long way down the feline menu.
Once we had the animal off the truck, I administered the antidote and it came around straight away, got up and trotted off, no worse the wear for its terrible day. It had recovered from the shock and its injuries would still heal. This time the victim of humankind’s desire to shape the landscape and the local children’s lack of concern had survived and would hopefully stay inside the national park, but the problems that had caused its trauma showed no sign of dissipating. Indeed, they seemed to get worse by the day.
Following this incident, Laura and I became involved in several wildlife conservation programmes. Laura organised for me to give talks at local schools and we also started work on a plan to take schoolchildren into the national park as a reward for excelling at their studies. Even though they lived on the edge of one of Africa’s great game reserves, the fact was that most local children from Kasane had never been inside the famous Chobe National Park.
The day after the waterbuck incident, the journalist from the Air Botswana magazine and her daughter went into the park and reported back to us that they had seen the waterbuck, with its nose still painted purple, and that the animal was trotting about and seemed to be fine. It was a great result. As well as mentioning my work and the problem of human–animal conflict, the article highlighted some of the problems with poaching in Chobe.
The problems mentioned in the story piqued HE’s interest (most locals refer to their president by the abbreviation of “His Excellency”), because he ordered a delegation to be sent to Kasane to investigate the issues raised in the article.
