The African Wild Dog (Lycaon pictus) is endangered. There are only 350-400 wild dogs left in South Africa. Wild dogs are vulnerable to other large predators, lions and spotted hyaenas especially, but what has threatened their numbers most of all has been direct persecution by humans and the shrinking of their habitats. The packs need a large area (between 100 and 500 square kilometres) to move around in and sometimes existing protected areas are smaller than their ranges. Small single sex groups escape and roam across farm and community land looking for mates, where they face enormous risks. The project is managed by the Endangered Wildlife Trust and works closely with Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, seeking to research the dispersal patterns and facilitate the expansion of the range for wild dogs in order to protect them as they move across KwaZulu-Natal.
People respond to wild dogs with fear and this leads to their persecution. There are a lot of people surrounding the reserves in KwaZulu-Natal with very little land that is undeveloped or unmodified in some way. This means there is limited space for the dogs to move in and tolerance and understanding is needed for their movement without interference. The Wild Dog Project has worked hard at reaching out to communities and farmers in the areas surrounding protected areas such as Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in order to make them aware of the possibilities of wild dogs passing through their areas and the need to report sightings. Brendan Whittington-Jones is the manager of the KwaZulu-Natal Wild Dog Project and explains that there has been significant progress in this regard.
“In early September 2009 eight male wild dogs broke out of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park and headed via Ulundi to Vryheid and then towards the Mkhuze area. We had good support from communities, and some quite outstanding support from commercial farmers, some interested members of the public and land owners. We had game reserve staff helping us through nights, and a helicopter donated for an hour. It turned out to be a group effort. It was hugely encouraging how little resistance we met from people along the way and I think a large part of that is through the relationships developed, not just by us but by our predecessors and conservationists in places like Mkhuze.”
Two of the escaped dogs were collared, so Brendan and his colleague were at times able to track the pack. Over several weeks, two of the dogs died, and six were captured and put in a boma at Tembe Elephant Park with the intention of starting a new pack at this reserve. At Mkhuze Game Reserve there were four captive reared male wild dog in a boma, and it was decided to move those to the boma at Tembe Elephant, and relocate the six from the Tembe boma to Mkhuze. The swop was due to the logistics of females available and the new pack size needed in each reserve.
At the Tembe boma three females were introduced, translocated from Hluhluwe Imfolozi Park, and in March 2010 the dogs were all darted and collared with “good behaviour collars”. It was anticipated that these pheromone collars would reduce negative and aggressive interactions between the wild dogs when the partition between the boma compartments were opened. It is planned to release the new pack into Tembe Elephant Park in the course of 2010, which is a significant addition to the regional metapopulation as Tembe does not currently have wild dog in the reserve. This means there is one more reserve from which genetics could be moved into or swapped out of, increasing the resilience of the metapopulation.
In 2009 the project also translocated a male wild dog to Hlambanyathi, a private game reserve near Mkhuze town in KwaZulu-Natal, to be bonded with a pair already in a boma there. Thanda Private Game Reserve was the first private reserve in KwaZulu-Natal to introduce Wild Dog where there are seven dogs.
Said Whittington-Jones: “Funding and logistical support to continue these projects is critical. Cooperation between NGOs and provincial and national conservation agencies is key, with conservation of the habitats and species being the priority. The KZN Wild Dog Management Group is a good example of that co-operation. Private reserves, landowners, conservationists and NGOs are working together to make a success of the species restoration and to manage Wild Dogs in the province.”
The Wildlands Conservation Trust supports formal conservation agencies through their Biodiversity Management Support Programme (BMSP). From July 2007 to March 2010 a range of Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife projects received funding from Wildlands through their Conservation Capital Fund (CCF) as well as from the Wild Series, a set of multisport challenges held across KwaZulu-Natal. Many of these projects seek to protect rare and endangered species and habitats, some of which are vulnerable to environmental crime such as poaching.
WILDTRUST (registered as the Wildlands Conservation Trust - IT No: 4329/1991/PMB)