WILDLIFE NUMBERS ARE BOOMING
For decades Gonarezhou was considered too remote, virtually inaccessible to tourists. Besides, visitors want to see animals, and most had been shot out by hunters and poachers. But today, wildlife numbers here are booming. The name Gonarezhou is generally accepted to mean ‘place of the elephant’, an apt description of this brooding lowveld region of Zimbabwe. The 2014 aerial survey counted just over 11 000 in the park, up from 4 000 in 1994. Gonarezhou has more elephants than the whole of Mozambique, and one of the highest densities in Africa (at about two per square kilometre). And it gets better: the tuskers of Gonarezhou are the biggest in Zimbabwe, clearly sharing DNA with the famed large bulls in Kruger. In 1979, Kabakwe was the legendary bull that was the first to be given special legal protection from hunting. One of the biggest of recent times (tusks of 45 kilograms each) was shot in the Malapati hunting area adjacent to Gonarezhou in October 2015. So the bulls with big ivory are still here, only there used to be far more of them. Gonarezhou is not just about elephants. In 10 days we saw lion four times and heard their roars most nights, as well as the howls of spotted hyenas. We also saw a pack of seven wild dogs and several pups; Gonarezhou has one of the strongest populations of these endangered carnivores, a dozen packs. ‘I never saw a lion or leopard for the first three years here,’ says Hugo van der Westhuizen, the park’s conservation manager for the past decade. ‘You’d wake up early in the morning and there were hardly any animal sounds. It was depressing.’ Now, thanks to stringent anti-poaching measures, the animal statistics makes for reassuring reading. The last predator survey in 2015 showed that there are approximately 125 lions, up from just 31 in 2009. Other predators have also increased significantly: 642 spotted hyenas (from 407), 279 wild dogs (from 30) and 90 cheetahs (from 22). All herbivore species have increased significantly too. At the last count in 2014, there were 8 000 impalas, 1 700 kudus, 6 000 Cape buffaloes, 1 300 Burchell’s zebras, 900 wildebeest, 500 giraffes and 500 hippos. Roan and sable have never recovered to former levels, and black rhinos and Lichtenstein’s hartebeest are now locally extinct, but on the whole things are much better. If all goes to plan, the increase in tourism revenue will allow the reintroduction of rhino, which Hugo says could happen as soon as 2018.