The first few months on the ground at Grumeti have been the proverbial baptism of fire. Arriving at the end of the dry season and with the migration returning south, it was all action from the word go. Poaching spiked with the unexpected return of the wildebeest herds. Our challenges were compounded by the fact that much of the game reserve’s grazing had burnt due to runaway wild fires and arson fires. The late arrival of the rains didn’t help matters. The shortage of food forced the wildebeest to move further west into the communal village lands as they went on a fruitless search for grass.
Local villagers – who consider the animals arriving in their backyard as free meat – butchered the hungry herbivores day and night. This caused a major law enforcement dilemma for our Grumeti Fund game scouts, as their authority and mandate to engage poachers officially ends at the boundary of the game reserve. By seconding police and conducting joint ops with government anti-poaching unit officers from KDU Bunda, we were able to engage and arrest a number of these bush meat poachers. The fact that a number of key management posts within the Grumeti Fund stood vacant added to the sleepless nights of those who remained to carry the workload. It was a very tough couple of months, but the experience immersed me into Grumeti Fund operations and will no doubt stand me in good stead for the future. It was also highly instructive in informing and developing my restructure plans for the Grumeti Fund, which will be enacted in 2017.
But it certainly was not all poaching doom and gloom at the end of 2015, there were also a number of successes to celebrate. Undoubtedly the highlight of this period was the arrival of John the rhino. After years of negotiation, painstaking bureaucracy and never-ending red tape, Grumeti was finally rewarded with the translocation of a big bull rhino of the East African michaeli subspecies from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to our rhino intensive protection zone (IPZ) at Grumeti. After spending the first few days in a holding bona for observation purposes, John was released into a larger paddock where he will settle in and acclimatise to his new home before being released into the heavily guarded rhino sanctuary where we hope to see him mating with the young adult female, known as Laikipia.
Despite John’s advanced age, we remain cautiously optimistic that we will see some mating behaviour and breeding success upon his release. With East Africa’s wild black rhino population down to the hundreds – most of which reside in Kenya – this small satellite population and its breeding success are integral to the long-term survival of the michaeli sub-species of black rhino in the Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania and East Africa.
With a mere 740 East African black rhino remaining the michaeli sub-species is critically endangered
After an intense first three months, we were due for leave in December. All senior staff working at Grumeti are employed on a three months on (working seven days a week) and one month off rotation. This 3-1 system is fantastic in that it provides large chunks of time off in which to travel to see family in South Africa or America, or to go exploring.
For our two little boys the main attraction of being back in South Africa in the middle of summer was the beach. Sandcastle building and bashing, swimming, and running through the shallow tidal pools on the beautiful beaches of Cape Town were the order of the day. We then traveled a couple of hours up the coast to spend a week holidaying in the quaint seaside village of Arniston where we rented a huge beach house for the whole extended family and thoroughly enjoyed catching up, braaing and beaching with my siblings and their partners. On the way back to Cape Town we detoured into the Hemel en Aarde valley above Hermanus where we shared a cottage with friends, although our combined contingent of four small kids seriously cramped our wine tasting style!
December is a very hectic – but also a very special – time to be home with family converging on Cape Town from London, the Serengeti and Johannesburg to celebrate Christmas all together, as well as to enable all the young cousins to get to know and play with one another. Special family times indeed.