AWDC, Newsletter June 2003

Welcome to the first newsletter from the field for 2003.

This season has been packed with action so far, some uplifting and some of it entirely depressing. I arrived in Lusaka this season to be greeted by the news that Billy, the radio-collared dog from the GMA pack, had been recently killed by a snare near the Game Management Area. The collar was recovered but there was only a skull left of the dog, a great shame as Billy, although the youngest male of that pack, was a prime hunter and I must admit a bit of a favourite. This is the second observed failure of the anti-snare collar, so it’s back to the drawing board to redesign it, although another wild dog project swears by its effectiveness.

The radio-collared dog from the Mushika pack was then seen with a broken leg, an injury occasionally sustained by wild dogs while hunting. He was being fed by the pack and doing well at keeping up, and I had just observed him starting to put weight on the leg again when he was taken by a leopard. So this left both packs without any collared dog and the project back to scratch for its final season of fieldwork. Last year both packs had denned in the escarpment within days of collaring, so we had only managed to collar one wild dog per pack. In addition to all this bad news, on arrival in camp this season I found a bee swarm living in my canvas shower bag, which meant my bathroom and part of the office was also full of them. This did not improve my mood.

Despite the lack of radio-collars the dogs have been frequently seen over the last few months, and all the safari camps in the area have assisted by reporting sightings to me. Getting collars back on the dogs involves trying to fly a vet in to assist with the darting, after finding the dogs resting in an open area, with full bellies, in the early morning. The challenge is to find them at all when there are no collars on, as both packs now range over more than 1000 square kilometres each. Needless to say the first few times the dogs were found, waiting to be collared, the vet was unavailable to come in (to my knowledge there are only two vets in Zambia qualified for game capture). I then booked one of the vets, Sally Shiel, to come in for a few days at a time.

The dogs had been seen every second day for several weeks, but disappeared for five days over the period Sally was in. They then appeared the morning after she left, and we had been driving up to fifteen hours a day looking for them in that same area. They were seen frequently again for a week, and then I managed to follow them, hunting along the airstrip, the morning Sally was due back in.

They disappeared into the thickets two hours before Sally arrived this time. She was due to leave at 10.00am that Sunday, so I was driving in desperate, ever increasing circles looking for them. They turned up at 10.20am that Sunday, but obviously hadn’t realised nothing happens on time in Africa, and Sally was still in the park.

We managed to collar a yearling male in the 13th hour, after a frustrating day of bad drug batches and dogs refusing to go to sleep after darting. Fortunately the GMA pack is now very habituated to my vehicle and took no notice of the dog-mobile shooting darts at them all day.

I have some entertaining video footage of the yearlings pulling the darts out of their friends and wandering around with pink, fluffy, dart flights hanging out of their mouths.

Since the radio-collar was fitted the tracking has been relatively simple and sightings have been good, including watching a two year old female wild dog, Galadriel, giving three adult male lions a solid telling off when they interrupted her hunt. The lions sat there yawning and mostly ignoring her, nevertheless it took guts for a 25kg wild dog to take on three lions.

Survival rates were reasonably good this year. The Mushika pack lost both of its older adult females over the rains, including Port, the alpha female. Both of these dogs were at least 7 years old, I first found them as adults in 1998, so they had just about reached the average life span for dogs in the wild. Port’s daughter Riddler is the new alpha female, and was already pregnant in May when I first found the pack. There is no risk of inbreeding in this case as the adult males from this pack only arrived in the park last year, so the younger females are all unrelated to them. Four out of the seven Mushika pups from last year have survived to yearling stage; three females and one male.

In the GMA pack, eight out of the eleven pups have survived to yearling stage, the best survival rate for pups recorded in this area so far. They were raised by only five adults and a yearling, which is quite a feat. The high survival rate is likely to be related to the low predator density in the thickets of the Game Management Area, which has been their home range for the last few years.

I ran out of simple names related to coat patterns for these pups, so they have been named after painters because they are painted hunting dogs. Mondrian has stripes on his belly, Manet has quite a few spots, Vincent has a few swirls, and Picasso’s coat is striking but weird.

The DNA (faecal) sample collection has gone extremely well this season, and both litters of last year’s pups have been sampled. The Mushika pack seems to have disappeared into the escarpment in an extreme effort to avoid radio-collars, perhaps drifting towards the old home ranges of the new males, so it was fortunate that they "donated" samples early in the season. I also managed to get faecal samples off two adult dogs I have been chasing for over a year, I was beginning to worry about their eating habits. I had to stop three game drive vehicles from running over one of these samples on the road, after waiting all day for one of the dogs to defecate. Some of the international safari guests have photo’s of me running out into the road, threatening death if anyone damaged the pooh sample, madly wielding a Ziploc sandwich bag ready to grab it. It may be time for me to study trees again.

Thank you to the following sponsors: Yancey Walker and Dwight Hibbard, Cincinnati Zoo USA, Arthur Vorys, Mark Reed and Sedgewick County Zoo USA, The Wallace Research Foundation USA, Afrikeye UK, Danida, The University of Sydney Australia, Werribee and Melbourne Zoos Australia, Old Mondoro Safari Camp LZNP, Conservation Lower Zambezi, Elefriends Australia, Kanyemba Lodge LZNP, Sally Shiel, Airwaves Charters Zambia, The Classic Safari Company Sydney and all the safari camps in the Lower Zambezi National Park.

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© Afrikeye 1999 - 2007 (certain items under permission of original copyright owner)

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