Cheetah and other animals

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What do you do with a free ten days in Namibia when the early appearance of the rainy season (6-8 weeks ahead of its anticipated arrival) makes driving on your own to the few parts of the country that you haven’t yet visited somewhat unwise? Faced with the option of kicking my heels in Windhoek - don’t get me wrong, I’m fond of the place: it’s just that there isn’t a vast amount to do and I feel as if I’ve “done” most of it - I arranged to go back to the Cheetah Conservation Fund where I’d had such a ball back in September.

But first to “pay” for the loan of a vehicle to get me up and down the country. Keith Leggett, the scientist with whom I’d worked on the desert-dwelling elephant project, agreed to lend me his stalwart steed, a ten-plus year old Hilux, if I would first take him to Windhoek and the airport. Seemed like a reasonable plan to me, and we had a busy but productive couple of days in Windhoek before he left. Although I felt that I’d got to know the city at least in outline, it made so much difference driving round with a near-native. By the time I was taking the car in for service and doing a few other chores myself before leaving to head north to CCF, I felt pretty close to becoming a native. I’d been introduced to the best-equipped (and emptiest - a key requirement!) gym that I’ve ever seen, the best coffee shop in Namibia, the best fresh-juice place in town, The cinema (we didn’t go: it was school holidays and the choice of films was, to put it politely, not quite to my taste), the variety of places where you can get different bits of cars fixed (exhausts, tyres, the whole caboodle), etc., etc. - what more does one need?

Initially, after getting back to CCF, I was a little low: some of the folks I’d so enjoyed working with in September had moved on - as was inevitable - and there were new faces to get to know in their place. Many of these folks were the latest intake of Earthwatch volunteers and, as such, were often higher up the pecking order in terms of the generally-perceived-to-be more exciting tasks, such as feeding cheetah and going up to the Waterburg Plateau. But I pulled myself up by my hiking boots’ laces before I could wallow for too long: even if I was stuck in the office completing The Scanning Project which I’d started in September (I won’t bore you with the details: suffice to say it’s a touch mundane, but its longevity earns it capital letters), I was HERE. Looking through the window behind my PC, I could see a hornbill pecking on the glass, confused by its reflection; just outside the door, the Centre cheetahs, Chewbaaka, the Hogwarts and the Girls, were lounging in the shade in their respective enclosures; the sun was shining, the sky blue and the temperatures nicely into the thirties; and, most of all, I was still in Namibia. I stopped grumbling.

One of the biggest pluses of life at CCF is that no two days are the same. Whatever The Schedule says for that day is bound to get overtaken by events such as phone calls to tell us that a farmer has captured a perceived “problem” cheetah, CCF animals getting sick, the discovery of a broken-winged barn owl in one of the cheetah enclosures, Andrew’s cage traps yielding results, or, most mundanely, rain - all of which happened during this week.

One day I took a call from a woman at a farm near Windhoek airport. They’d found three young cheetah cubs on their property, clearly orphaned and not in the best of shape. In trying to capture them, two had died of stress and heat exhaustion, and she wanted advice about how to deal with the third. Bonnie Schumann, CCF’s longest serving member of staff and guru of all things there, including veterinary procedures, rang her back and duly arranged to go down to Windhoek the next day. While Bonnie wasn’t prepared for CCF to take the cub - we had no other cheetah that age, and it’s considered best to bring up a cub with companions (we didn’t know its exact age, but, described “knee-high”, the cub was assumed to be 4-6 months old) - she was going to collect it anyway, having arranged for Africat to take it as they did have others in that age range. The next day, we got an update: the cub was in far worse shape than we had been led to believe - indeed, the last cat that Bonnie had seen in that condition was already dead - but the vet at Africat had agreed to look at it anyway, assuming, of course, that it survived the three-plus hour journey north. Everything hinged on how the cub fared overnight, and we were all delighted to hear the following day that it had perked up and, although still connected to a drip, was eating minced chicken.

As the new Earthwatch crew were occupied with the “business as usual” matters of cheetah-feeding, pen-cleaning, etc., I decided - when I could escape from the office - to volunteer for jobs that I hadn’t done before. Feeding the cats was almost “old hat” by now anyway!

First up was a job as carpenter’s assistant. Brian, Lorraine’s dad, was visiting CCF for the first time. (Lorraine is the lynchpin of CCF: although her job title is “administrative officer”, she deals with all of the minutiae of running CCF with regard to volunteers, The Schedule, the kitchens, the accommodation, the tourists… the list is endless.) His arrival had been much vaunted for some time with “don’t worry, my Dad’ll fix that when he comes”. And, sure enough, Brian was more Mr Fix-It than Jimmy Saville ever was! However, even he needed a second pair of hands when it came to constructing nesting boxes for hornbills, and, as I like to think, I played a vital and difficult role holding bits of wood together while he did the easy-peasy stuff like drilling, screwing and gluing it all together!

Next was my induction to things veterinary. Timone, one of the resident Anatolian dogs, had developed something-or-other (oops, wasn’t paying attention at that point) which necessitated an injection and a 7-day course of pills. Once again, I played a key role (well, lent a hand) holding Timone’s muzzled head while Marianne, the vet tech, stuck a needle in the relevant part of his anatomy and then patiently fed him his first pill. I was relieved not to be on pill-duty thereafter. Timone, it transpired, was a positive expert in eating round the piece of meat or cheese into which Marianne had put the pill - or, latterly, a slightly soggy bit of pill - and leaving aforementioned alien object on the floor. She finally settled for unceremoniously forcing it down his throat - a course of action she’d initially avoided as having not been effective with this dog in the past.

But my forte was goat-handling. Skipping quickly over my complete inability to catch a kid in the big kraal - the farm workers make it look so easy! - ending up unceremoniously face-down (or at least, on my knees) in the proverbial on the ground, I discovered that at least I could grapple the goats in the smaller quarantine pens. Three of the goats had developed infected hooves and one an abscess on its neck. Once again - and I’ll admit, this time, who did the real work - Marianne beavered away at the affected part while I straddled the goat (I’d watched the experts) and held it, elevated for those with infected hooves, by the horns. And, believe you me, those animals wriggle and they’re not exactly light. I felt afterwards as if I’d done a decent weights session at the gym! I won’t go into any further details about the procedures - you probably don’t want to know! Even the ass-over-tip incident had its positive side: I could now perfectly empathise with the animals here when we sprayed them with the nasty blue disinfectant and dabbed at their wounds with iodine-soaked swabs - both substances sting like fury!!

Andrew’s cage traps had been amazingly successful in the previous week with a leopard and a hyena, on separate occasions, being sufficiently intrigued by the delightful bouquet of rotting gemsbok to trigger the closing of the trap’s door. His luck continued on my second day back at CCF with a further brown hyena. Contrary to its predecessor the previous week, an animal which had been caught and ear-tagged during my first stint at CCF, this one was “new”: a young-ish male that Andrew estimated at three years old. As with the second hyena caught in September, the animal was worked up in the field, Andrew running what was now a very slick operation. To avoid the hyena overheating while it was being checked over, four volunteers held a blanket over the operation and we covered the cage trap with blankets when the animal was put back inside to come round from the anaesthetic. We humans could have done with the same kind of TLC as we sat in the vehicle in the midday sun watching the hyena slowly raise its head and then tentatively stagger round the cage until Andrew pronounced himself satisfied that it was out of danger. I count myself hugely privileged to have seen, now, three brown hyenas in such close proximity.

I didn’t miss out on cheetah-feeding duty entirely and was delighted to be able to check up on the “girls” at Bellebeno, although they were singularly unimpressed at that day’s menu of giraffe with several cats returning to the vehicle hoping, in vain, for an alternative. The elderly Elsie was still, amazingly, in the land of the living and looking perkier than she had done a month ago. Armani, the cheetah who was so reluctant to approach the vehicle to be fed with the other cats last month, to the extent that she was slowly starving to death, was now in a separate smaller enclosure and looking completely transformed from the scrawny bag of bones I’d seen before. I also helped feed the “boys” nearer the Centre and clean out their enclosures. Athos was still the last of the “five musketeers” to feed, intent on checking up on everyone else’s swiftly-emptied bowls, before trying to work out which bowl still had something in it: he isn’t the brightest of cats. Cruise, the big lone male, was still as grumpy as ever, hissing at us from behind his fence as we set out that day’s meal. The two newest additions, siblings unsexily still called “95” and “96” while deliberations continued as to their names (I thought Jennie’s suggestion of Shakira and Elvis was the best), were now housed next to the Wild Boys in preparation for being moved into the same enclosure so that the three males could bond to form a coalition prior to being released back into the wild, we hoped; the female would then be moved to Bellebeno.

The biggest change at CCF since my last visit was not people-related, but weather-related. Central and north-west Namibia’s rainy season has started incredibly early this year, to the extent that CCF has already had about a third of its average annual rainfall, and the land has been transformed. No more the dusty yellow grasses and bare bush of my last visit: CCF’s farms are turning a verdant green. When we were “skofalling” in September, it was easy: we simply tackled anything that was green because only the weeds were thriving. Now, nearly everything was. The grasses (and, it must be said, the weeds) in the five musketeers’ enclosure were so high that the cats could almost stalk up to the fence before becoming visible, and I was amused to see that their feeding enclosure more resembles an English garden than the African bush. There’s something incongruous about seeing a tawny spotted cat lying on green grass!

On Friday morning, Phil found a barn owl with a broken wing in Chewbaaka’s enclosure. CCF isn’t exactly expert in dealing with injured birds, but a place down the road is: the Vultures’ Rest. Set up by an American woman in 2000, Rest is seeking to highlight the plight of the Cape griffin vulture, of which there are only twenty or so left in the wild in Namibia. The decimation in their numbers is the result of farmers using poisoned meat in the traps that they are setting for potential predators. Vultures are an unfortunate male-ficiary of this. As they only eat carrion, they are not guilty of preying on farmers’ livestock but yet are being poisoned by the bait set for animals that may be doing so. So, on Friday afternoon, an ambulance mission set off, its subject carefully housed in a plywood box sitting on a passenger’s knee. The rest of us went along for the ride - and to have a look around Rest.

As with CCF’s resident cheetahs, Rest has a number of birds that cannot be released back into the wild because of the lasting effects of their injuries. Nelson is the Chewbaaka of Rest: an elderly Cape griffin (he’s twenty-nine; the species has a life expectancy of thirty or so), he loves the limelight and stalked up and down the front of the aviary for the clicking cameras. He has a number of Cape griffin companions, as well as a rock kestrel and a batteleur, the impressive black, red and white eagle that I had got to know in Tanzania. As well as the aviary, we visited to the Vultures’ Restaurant: not for human customers, you understand - at least, not unless you like carrion of various origins and of some age. About once a week the animal debris from the local abattoir is put out beside a waterhole and you can watch from a hide, high up on the neighbouring hillside, to see who comes to visit. It was nearly a week since the last feeding-time, and the “buffet table” was empty of all except a vast acreage of bones at which some marabou storks were still pecking hopefully (an ugly bird, they are the last to clean up a carcass after the vultures have had enough), but we were delighted to see a wild Cape griffin descend briefly to the waterhole: a real treat. Avarian attractions apart, the hide gives a stunning view across CCF’s farms to the Waterburg Plateau.

Lest you think I neglected office work, let me assure you that I did, eventually, complete The Scanning Project, at least as far as I could given the requisite piece of software for the next stage was not functioning properly, and hadn’t done since the IT volunteer in September had re-built the system - need I say more? My scanning skills were then put to further - and far more interesting - use by Andrew. He was in the process of dismantling the camera traps that he had placed up on the Waterburg, and needed help with the photographs the cameras had taken. In particular, he wanted to collate all photographs of rhinos, both black and white, in case anyone did research on them in the future. (His PhD is on leopards and brown hyenas, so this was outwith his remit but typical of his generosity.) If I thought I wasn’t too dusty at differentiating between these two sorts of rhino, pride certainly came before a fall. How do you tell which one is which when all you have is a photograph of a vast stomach, a backside or thigh? Still, with the date and time automatically logged and photographs from two cameras at each location (thus giving you both sides of an animal passing between them), it was surprising how much I could actually figure out. I also applied my elephant-identification skills in order to work out which photographs were of the same animal and which were of different animals, in which I was assisted by the Waterburg’s staff having put notches in the ears of the rhinos they released on the Plateau about five years ago.

All in all, it was an interesting week, though, come Saturday morning, I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to leave. Twelve hours of rain from the middle of Friday night threatened to create havoc with the 45km of unsurfaced road into Otjiwarongo, and my concerns were not helped by rumours that it was now impassable to 2-WD vehicles. Fortunately, others were heading in the same direction so I joined a small convoy of vehicles making the journey to town. A 4-WD virgin, so to speak, I was immensely grateful to Keith’s vehicle for taking good care of me: feeling that you’re not in control of a vehicle is not a pleasant sensation, but this old duchess of Hiluxes didn’t waver much and we reached town in one piece. After a well-earned lunch at the much-loved Kameldorn Garten, a charmingly kooky place just beyond the centre of Otjiwarongo run by the delightful Hannah-Dora and her menagerie of daughters, cats and dogs which I take any excuse to visit, I headed off up the road to Outjo to check up on Keith’s dog as I had promised, and to take advantage of the oasis-like calm of the place that has been, at times over the last few months, my second home.

Next stop Windhoek, to collect my great friend and oft-travel-companion, Amanda for a girls’ trip… Watch out Namibia!

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