Wilfried Pabst calls it high art: the formidable logistical process involved in moving 2 600 wild animals, including 400 elephants, from his overpopulated wildlife conservancy in Zimbabwe, by road, to their new home more than 700km away.
In Project Rewild Zambezi, Pabst is donating the animals “as a present” from the Sango Wildlife Conservancy within the remote Savé Valley Conservancy, one of the largest private game reserves in Africa, to the 128 000-hectare Sapi private concession in the Zambezi Valley, east of the Mana Pools National Park.
The mammoth project, which is being billed as one of the largest translocations of wildlife in the continent’s history, will unfold over the next 18 months. Convoys of trucks will kick up clouds of dust as they transport the consignment of elephants, 2 000 impala, 50 eland, 50 zebras, 50 buffalo, about 10 lions (two prides) and one pack of wild dogs, traversing what Pabst describes as “mostly okay” roads.
The aim of Project Rewild Zambezi is to replenish wildlife populations in the Sapi Reserve, decimated by decades of hunting. “We are rewilding and restoring the wild back to what it once was,” said the non-profit Great Plains Foundation, which runs the concession and works to conserve endangered species, empower communities and protect ecosystems.
Earlier this month, in a “test run” for the mass transfer, 91 impala and seven elephants were moved to the Sapi concession. They are adapting well, Pabst said. “We’ll try and do a total of 400 elephants between now and next year. We can’t do it all this season because we started too late.
“You can’t capture animals in the hot season because they are just simply overheating and it is stressful. Imagine somebody chases you by a helicopter through the bush, into a boma and onto a truck and you are then 800km on a truck. All these things are completely strange to you,” Pabst said, of Sango’s fifth wildlife translocation.
Capturing elephants
The art of capturing elephants lies in separating a complete family herd from a larger herd and then driving them to an area where they are immobilised. It’s a very complicated procedure, he explained.
“Each dart that gets fired needs to have just the right amount of drug in it to suit the specific animal. If you load a drug into a dart that’s good enough for a matriarch and you happen to shoot that on a one-year-old, it is going to be dead ….
“It’s a high art of helicopter piloting, of armed people on the ground because we also need to protect ourselves … and veterinarians and all kinds of capture experts. It’s quite an exercise.”
Once the animals are on the road, the journey will take anywhere from 15 to 20 hours. “Animals like these, we believe they can be transported up to two and half, three days — that’s when the stress level gets beyond them. Also, at some stage you want to get them closer to water. Remember, animals can deal a day or two or three without water or food. It’s part of nature.”
The Savé Valley Conservancy is experiencing a “wildlife population explosion” beyond what can reasonably be managed. Relocating the animals into a new area “helps us to reduce the pressure of overpopulation of wildlife on our habitat”, said Pabst.
Harry Idensohn, the chief executive of the Savé Valley Conservancy, said: “We are proud that with the kind permission and great support of the government of Zimbabwe and working in conjunction with our member property, the Sango Wildlife Conservancy, we will be able to relocate our excess animals and restock a previously depleted area.”
Pabst, a German businessman, started Sango in the early 1990s, and describes it as a “philanthropic venture”. His conservancy is a hunting-based property. “Those are the only people that come here,” he said. “Unfortunately, we can’t get a lot of photo tourism here.”
‘Sustainable hunting’
“Sustainable hunting is a methodology of funding the excess animals. Because of the income from hunting (which contributes $600 000 annually to the $1.2-million needed to run Sango) we are able to maintain a crack troop that supports our rhinos. Because of the income from hunting and the protection we give to our animals, we’ve got too many animals of just about every and any species so it’s a big problem for us to be overpopulated.”
In the Savé Valley Conservancy, 90% of the income generated is from hunting and has been that way for the last 30 years, he said. Without it, Savé wouldn’t exist.
The controversies about hunting are not an African controversy, he asserts. “It’s a European and American-made controversy … Even WWF in Southern Africa agrees with us that 75% of all wildlife areas in this part of the world would go belly-up if we stop the income from hunting …. Every dollar that a hunter or a photographic tourist brings in goes straight into conservation. In fact, my pocket covers the losses that are incurred nevertheless.”
If nature gets funded by the income from sustainable hunting, and/or photo tourism and and/or making money from translocations, “which unfortunately we are not, because we all have too many elephants in any part of the Southern African scenario, then I’m quite open to it”.
Free to roam
Wildlife overpopulation and shifting rain patterns because of global climate change has seen Sango lose about 80% of its grazing land. “Eighty percent of a 60 000ha estate is a massive number,” Pabst said. “We’re working on it. We do need to de-stock as we’ve been too successful in our conservation efforts.”
He will try to avoid culling elephants “at all costs”, he said. “I haven’t come here to cull what I love … However, [Savé Valley Conservancy] took a bit over 500 elephants in the mid-1990s. We’ve now got 3 000 elephants. The carrying capacity is probably one third of that, so we’ve got about 2 000 elephants too many. It’s the same number game now [as] for the whole of Zimbabwe.”
Once released in the Sapi Reserve, the wildlife from Sango will be free to roam in the broader 1.6-million acres of the Greater Mana Pools Unesco site. “All we see is a wonderful opportunity to repopulate [wildlife],” Pabst said.
The Great Plains Foundation said there will be consistent assessments on the impact on resident populations, adapting rates of new releases, the impacts on vegetation, migration, and the effects of human interactions. “We aim to develop a blueprint for the best, stress-free mass move of wildlife across multiple species for future relocations across Africa,” it said.
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