January – April 2021

An amazing season by the rearing team at the Baobab Conservation Rearing Centre, led by Delecia Gunn, of Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency, we have three young males and a young female fledged and ready to become part of the national population restoration programme.

We ringed this little fellow (and he is a fellow as his DNA sexing results are back in) and he has fledged successfully and is now safely out and about in the big wide world!

It was a glorious few weeks doing the final nest productivity checks. The bush was lusher and greener than we have seen it for years.

The rivers had flowed but sadly the rain may have been too much! The nest productivity was lower than usual.

And we found that some of the nests had some little visitors - several predations took place too.

And we learnt new things - as always - our field ranger in Kruger showing us this beautiful Cleome spp. flower looks like an elephant, with two yellow ears and two skinny tusks. It is always a pleasure working with the SANParks teams.

We were very privileged to be able to present our work at the IAATE Conference where we were presented with $5000 towards our work - THANK YOU!

We were also invited to share our work in the Maryland Zoo Virtual Field Talks - a really cool way of connecting their staff and visitors with their conservation partners on the ground.

The Kruger National Park is the largest population in South Africa, safe-guarding about 180 breeding groups. However, we need to be able to support the young dispersals looking for new territories as they will have to wait potentially for decades to replace one of the current alpha's.

Patience Shito will lead this research as part of her MSc with the Univ. of the Witwatersrand. She will be supervised by Prof Neville Pillay, Dr Louise Swemmer and the MGHP academic team.