On the Blyde catchment’s steep slopes, a pine tree left beyond the reach of a clearing team can continue spreading seeds into the surrounding landscape. Restoring this important water source means reaching those trees too, and investing in the people who can do so safely.
While government departments are still investigating the cause of the mass sardine die-off along the South African coastline, conservationists fear that the main food supply of the critically endangered African Penguin is disappearing.
The termite mound had been breached by an African honey badger. The excavation bore the characteristic signature of its typically furious, single-minded digging, a cone of loose red soil fanned out across the surrounding ground. The mound itself, a two-metre column of compacted earth on the edge of a drainage line in the Sabi Sand, had a jagged opening at its base roughly the size of a football.
Many of us fortunate enough to reside in Hoedspruit were drawn here to share our lives with the rich and diverse animal life that thrives in and around the area. From the cool forests of the escarpment, to the glistening waters of the Blyde River Canyon, and the expansive paradise of the Kruger National Park, this region is a mecca for wildlife lovers.
I have spent much of my birding journey fortunate enough to listen for birds before I see them. Long before a Narina Trogon reveals its almost incomprehensible palette of colours, its harsh, frog-like call often gives it away. Long before you begin to realise that summer has arrived, the duet of a Woodland Kingfisher pair echoes through the woodland. Their arrival marking the true onset of summer. For anyone who has spent time birding, sound is not a supplement to birding. Rather, it is often the first, only, and most reliable clue that nature presents you with.
Dr Mike Peel, Specialist Scientist and Ecologist at ARC Animal Production, Range and Forage Sciences, has received the Southern African Wildlife Management Association’s 2026 Wildlife Excellence Award, presented on 3 September at the SAWMA Conference Gala Dinner at Cradle Moon Lakeside Game Lodge.
In 2021, a three-year-old female African wild dog spent a year travelling more than 2,300 kilometres across southern Africa. She climbed in and out of the Rift Valley in Zambia, swimming rivers, crossing major highways, and slipping past towns before crossing the Zambian border into Mozambique, then on to the border of Zimbabwe. It was one of the longest journeys recorded for the species.
Conservation management has always been difficult. Managing wildlife, ecosystems, people, budgets, politics, and competing land-use expectations, has never been an exercise for the faint-hearted. Recently, what has changed dramatically is not necessarily the complexity of the ecological problems, but the environment in which conservation decisions are now made.
At a place called Lone Tree in the central Kalahari, a band of San hunters picked a young kudu bull out of the herd and started running it down. Louis Liebenberg, then a young South African researcher with no distance-running background, wasn’t meant to be part of that – the hunters told him the heat made the chase too dangerous for someone untrained. He talked his way into staying anyway.
I have watched countless breeding herds of African elephant consisting of a senior cow, elder females and younger cows, all the way down to juveniles of both sexes – the young males are banished from their natal herd around their early teens – yet I’m ever fascinated by the quality of synchronised attention this matriarchal sisterhood constantly pay to one another.
