The ancestors must be smiling, scientists are befuddled and nature conservationists are elated after a low-key African renaissance event in Limpopo last week immediately bore unexpected fruit.
Sixteen African wild dogs were released in Marakele National Park near Thabazimbi last Friday, an area where the species was extirpated 90 years ago. But the bush telegraph works in mysterious ways and word got out fast that conditions have changed in these parts.
Within two days another group of seven wild dogs was found wandering inside the fence and on Tuesday morning two more wild dogs were spotted outside. No one knows where they suddenly appeared from and how the seven came to be on the business side of 80km of brand-new high-tech electrified game fence.
“It’s still a mystery,” said Xolani Nicholas Funda, manager of Marakele National Park.
African wild dogs roamed the area around Thabazimbi before our species was a glint in a distant stone-cracking hominid ape’s eye. For nearly two million years their chattering packs witnessed our evolution into the dominant species that for the past few hundred years has cast out all others from the land we occupy so relentlessly.
Each pack of about 10 to 20 wild dogs hunts in a territory 450km2
to 900km2 in extent. Few pristine areas of this size exist alongside
each other anywhere in Africa for neighbouring packs to establish a
viable population — not that wild dogs recognise man’s borders or
his claims to the livestock and
game within them. A group may be hunting in Zimbabwe one month, pop up in Botswana the next, then be spotted in the Limpopo or North West provinces of South Africa a week later.
Everywhere they roam stock farmers traditionally treat them as mortal enemies and everywhere they are in danger of extinction. Humans wiped out the last breeding pack of wild dogs in the Thabazimbi area early last century, continuing a process the colonisers began when they arrived in the Cape and started raising livestock.
Hundreds of thousands of African wild dogs once roamed the sub-Saharan savannahs, woodlands and grasslands all the way south to the Cape Peninsula, hence the popular old name Cape hunting dog. Now only 3 000 to 5 500 survive in their ancient territories across the continent in about 600 to 1 000 packs, of which 500 or so animals live in South Africa. As in most parts of their former range, African wild dogs are extinct in the Cape.
In South Africa only the Kruger National Park is large enough to support a viable population of sufficient packs to avoid the genetic suicide brought on by inbreeding. Numbers cycle widely, but over the past 10 years Kruger has been home to 250 to 400 or more dogs in between 22 and 36 packs, said Gus Mills, a specialist scientist with South African National Parks (SANParks) who specialises in the conservation of carnivores.
Kruger’s 20 000km2 are home to one of only six viable populations of more than 100 dogs that still survive across Africa. The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is the only other South African reserve large enough to sustain a population of wild dogs, but lacks the prey density to support these active animals.
Wild dogs are susceptible to a range of diseases borne by their domesticated cousins and face other threats that have decimated whole populations. So, beginning in the mid-90s, conservationists decided to establish another population in South Africa to prevent the type of crash in Kruger that all but eliminated wild dogs in the Serengeti.
Based on a principle well establishing in breeding programmes at zoos, the Wild Dog Advisory Group now oversees a metapopulation scattered across smaller reserves that can only sustain a pack or two of these intensely social animals. New packs form naturally when a group of young sisters or brothers breaks away from their natal pack and meet up with animals of the opposite sex that have left their own families.
“We have to manage these islands of animals as one population,” said Gus van Dyk, a ranger at the Pilanesberg National Park in North West, which had housed a few members of the pack released at Marakele last week. “We transfer animals between reserves based on genetic principles.”
Seven or eight packs now exist in this metapopulation scattered across Hluhluwe-Umfolozi, Pilanesberg, Madikwe, Venetia and other smaller reserves. The Wild Dog Advisory Group believes the metapopulation will be viable only once it has at least 10 packs and the group plans to reintroduce Africa’s second-most endangered carnivore at other reserves in the near future, said Mills.
Marakele itself is a work in progress. The 50 000ha national park was established in 1986, but is being augmented by private land in a public-private partnership that will produce a reserve of about 110 000ha when it is formally opened at the end of August.
The seven adult members of the Marakele pack have also been patched together to incorporate wide genetic diversity. The five males were confiscated from a Free State farmer who is believed to have captured them somewhere in Limpopo, said Markus Hofmeyr, the SANParks veterinarian who has overseen the animals. The two females are a mother and daughter from Botswana stock.
They have been kept in a 1ha boma at Marakele for the past year, where they learnt to fear electric fences. They clearly found circumstances to their liking and successfully raised a litter of nine pups, now healthy sub-adults.
Their time in the boma did little to curb their hunting skills and the pack has successfully hunted impalas and warthogs every day since being released, said Lynne Shaw, the nature conservator appointed by the Endangered Wildlife Trust who will follow the pack and monitor its activities every day for the next year.
The pitter-patter of tiny wild dog paws will soon be heard in Marakele. Both adult females are pregnant and are expected to drop their pups within the next few weeks.
Unfortunately, both litters are unlikely to survive to adulthood. “The alpha female may kill the second female’s pups,” said Mills. Where two females produce litters in one pack, on average 80% of the surviving pups belong to the dominant bitch and only 20% to her subordinate, he said.
Hofmeyr says he hopes to put a radio collar on at least one member of the seven-dog pack found this week. He fears the two dogs seen outside the fence will be ranging far and wide and will be long gone before rangers can corner them.
At the time of going to press, Eugene Nemavholo, a provincial chief nature conservation officer in Limpopo, said he had not had time to track down the two wild dogs seen outside the fence.