David Robert Mills

Kalahari Leopards

In 2004, I joined Leopard Ecology & Conservation in Khutse Game Reserve, Botswana. Leopards in the Kalahari face the daunting task of scratching a living out of a harsh and unforgiving landscape. To be fair, Khutse is what is called a “fossil desert”. This means it used to be a desert, but now receives slightly more rain than a true desert (300–600 mm/yr). The main challenge is the fluctuations in rainfall that roughly follow a seven year cycle. In the rainy years, Khutse is green and bursting with life. In the dry years, antelope die by the hundreds. During the driest period in my six years in Khutse, we lost a large portion of the lion population to starvation and disease. This is not the stable, relatively easy existence of the rainforest, where there is still greenery and at least a little fruit in dry season and food is often hyper-abundant.

We started by collaring leopards to see how they used space in the park and in cattle grazing area. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the individual they collared before I joined the project was not a great example of a conflict leopard. Farmers reported seeing her with duikers (wild antelope), but never livestock. She was even seen walking through a herd of cows. Even so, we gained valuable data on her and many other leopards, showing that they covered huge territories of 500–800 km2 in this arid landscape. This means that the density of leopards in Khutse is very low and every individual counts.

One of our longest collared leopards was Ronja, who was first collared in 2008 and died in 2018. She provided us with valuable data on space use and reproduction in the desert. While it is difficult to find, capture, and collar a leopard when they use such huge areas of roadless sand and scrub, we aim to study more leopards in this habitat to help conservationists and Botswana to ensure that conservation management practices is addressing their needs and ensuring their survival.

It’s not only leopards

We quickly realised that if we were going to work with farmers to protect livestock and stop killing predators, we had to include lions in our study. In fact, in the farmer’s eyes, lions were the only serious problem. They are huge, potentially dangerous, and travel in gangs. No farmer wants to encounter lions.

We quickly discovered that they also use huge home ranges. The male pictured here (Kgosi) traveled over an area of 5000 km2. When they have to travel over this range to find sufficient resources, effective conservation becomes difficult.

Conflict With Humans

Through years of interacting with farmers, we realised that the most important factor contributing to livestock loss to lions was poor farming practices. Specifically, it seems to be normal in Botswana to “miss” a cow when bringing in the herd. When cows are left out of protective enclosures, the lions are grateful for the easy meal. Unfortunately, some breeds, like Brahmins, tend to disappear and have their calf under a bush in private. This means that if a predator finds them, the farmer loses two cows in one go.

In the old days, a farmers children would herd the cows, and thus would have guidance from their father and incentive to keep track of the cows because they belonged to the family and they would probably get a beating if they lost any. Today, children obviously have to go to school, so farmers must herd the cows themselves (which they might be a bit bitter about because they already did their bit as children) or hire herders that have no real incentive to guard the cows and are unlikely to be trained.

Education!

We addressed this problem by going to the cattle posts near the park and talking to as many farmers as we could find. We didn’t go with a message that they shouldn’t kill predators and we didn’t tell them what we thought. We just asked questions and listened to what they had to say. It’s amazing how open some of them were. We ended each interview by asking what each person wanted to learn. We even had one farmer tell us he wanted to learn how to herd kudu. We told him they are wild antelope. They herd themselves. You just have to know how many there are and how many you can safely hunt.

We took the list of requests to the Ministry of Agriculture and Botswana Veterinary Department, discussed options, and then held a workshop in Gaborone to invite all interested parties. This brought together poor, rural farmers, richer people who happened to keep cows in our study area, and Government officials responsible for things like disease management, rangeland management, and other aspects of livestock husbandry. This led to an education programme that seeks to empower farmers with knowledge of things like how to identify treat diseases (predators are supposed to kill sick animals), how to manage birthing so that it happens in the enclosure, how to build and maintain predator proof enclosures, and how to employ good rangeland practices to avoid overgrazing (cows that must walk long distances to graze or are undernourished from not eating enough are also easy targets). Helping the farmers to improve their livelihood helps us to protect predators.

The Future

I have rejoined Leopard Ecology & Conservation to help to continue the important research into the lives of these big cats. We will build on the data collected over the past 19 years by the project and affiliated students and researchers to understand more about what these cats need to survive in the Kalahari and how that compares to populations in other habitats. We will continue to work with farmers and local communities to foster an appreciation for this unique wild place, to minimise conflict and protect these beautiful wild cats.