After an overnight stop in Durban to celebrate the birthday of friend and fellow writer Sue Derwent, Pat and I headed up to the oldest game reserve in Africa – the Hluhluwe iMfolozi Park.
HiP as it is know, is located just to the west of the Isimangaliso Wetland Park that incorporates Lake St Lucia, the largest estuarine system in Africa. Our mission? To link up with Endangered Wildlife Trust researchers Brendan Whittington-Jones, Zama Zwane and Carla Graaff, all wild dog specialists and what followed was a number of highs and lows.
It has been our intention all along, to include as much traditional knowledge as possible in this book about the wild dogs. Getting this traditional information has been a bit of a nightmare as, what is becoming apparent, is that there is simply not that much out there. The much more readily available scientific information is easy to get. Few people, certainly in the areas that we have been to, seem to have any knowledge of these animals at all, often confusing them with both side-striped and black-backed jackals. Our reading of old hunting and travel books (by the likes of Kirby, Stevenson-Hamilton and others) have shown that there was also some confusion about exactly what a wild dog was. Cape hunting dog, hyena dog and painted wolf, are just some of the names that there were given.
Anyway, Zama said he knew of a Sangoma (Diviner or Traditional Healer) just to the north of the HiP that would be willing to talk to us about dogs and so off we went. Now there are no street names in this part of rural Zululand. No street numbers. No nothing. So it took a bit of a while. A couple of stops along the way to check directions with a few locals, and we arrived at a small homestead where the Sangoma lived. What a gentleman! Helpful, courteous and knowledgeable, he provided a real insight into using various objects (both animal and plant) to treat patients. All too soon our time with him was up and it was off to continue our search for wild dogs so we could photograph them.
That was where Carla came in. There was actually a pack of about 16 that was quite close to where we were staying at Hilltop Camp. We’d got fairly close to them on the first morning using some telemetry equipment that Carla had. They were in very thick bush in a rather deep donga system and there was simply no way we could get close enough for photography. It was now 5 days later and we were no closer to getting pix of them and our time at HiP was fast running out. And then this morning after a long and completely uneventful drive in the area we rounded a corner and there they were – right in the road. I stopped about 50m from them, got off a few very quick shots and they up and offed into the very thick bush. And that was that! 5 days. About R1000-00 in fuel in the Game reserve and another R1500-00 to get here and home again and a few very early mornings. About 10 images and I’ll probably be able to use just 1. Oh, the joys of wildlife photography!
We also had a long chat to Brendan regarding his research, sitting under a huge marula tree in the iMfolozi section of the park. (The result of the sitting under a tree in the grass if a bunch of tick bites where you really don’t want tick bites!) He had some fascinating insights into the life of dogs which will certainly find their way into the book.
We’re off to do one of our photographic workshops after this and I’ll post the results next week. But if you’re interested in joining us on one of these please visit www.africaimagery.com to find out more.
