Where the lion prowls tonight
BAOVENTURA NHANGALE isn’t scared, just as long as the sun is still up.
He has been told that lions only wander at night, so he should be safe in the midday heat, selling cool drinks at the intersection of the R500 and the Potchefstroom road.
But as the sun dips towards the horizon there is a rush to get off the R500 or any of the dirt roads that criss-cross this corner of the highveld.
For this area, which lies not far from the town of Fochville at the border between the North West and Gauteng, is now Big Five territory.
Within sight of Nhangale’s stall on the Old Potchefstroom road is the farm where a young lion was apparently seen on CCTV. That was four months ago, and since then there have been other sightings in the area.
The last was about four weeks ago when hunters, while out looking for jackal, claimed to have spotted a lioness and two cubs.
It’s news like this that keeps Drew Abrahamson, chief executive of Captured in Africa, on standby, ready to go out and catch the big cats.
“The plan now is that we need to wait for confirmed sightings,” Abrahamson explains.
If there is a confir med sighting, Abrahamson has at the ready a team that consists of vets and three special- ly-trained dogs that can sniff out lions.
The plan, according to Abrahamson, will be to get the dogs on to the lions’ scent. Once the dogs have tracked the big cat down, it would be darted and moved to a lion sanctuary. But it is not that easy. Abrahamson and Pittrack K9 conservation and anti-poaching unit founder Carl Thornton searched for the lions in September, but the scent trails went c o l d, spoor seemed old and the cat or pride remained elusive.
Back then there were a whole lot of sightings of the lions.
When Abrahamson and Thornton searched for the big cats they came across spoor and kills, but they could not work out just how many lions were out there.
There could be one, or if a sighting on September 8 is to be believed, five. That night, SAPS members came across a pride feeding near the R54 road. One of the earliest sightings of the lion was on that farm, which Nhangale can see from his roadside stall.
Far mer Gordon Muir was lying in bed that night when something on the CCTV monitor caught his eye. He watched an animal walk in front of his gate.
“I grabbed a torch and ran out,” he recalls. “My first thought was leopard.”
His son Grant was outside smoking a cigarette, and would have been metres from the animal. But he saw nothing. Muir told the police about the sighting and when experts saw the footage they said it was a young lion. The lion’s mane can be seen.
Lion tracks were found and the trackers even followed the cat’s spoor into the cattle kraal. The lion for some reason left the cattle alone.
T he q ues - tion everyone in the area is still scratching their heads over is: just where did these lions come from? Abrahamson points out that there are no game reserves or farms near Fochville that have lions.
“They could have travelled from the Free State, there are lot of breeding farms there,” says Abrahamson.
But the lost pride of Fochville might not be the only lions prowling an area where they shouldn’t be.
Abrahamson knows of a pair of lionesses in the Brits area that were last spotted just three weeks ago.
Lion expert Kevin Richardson is sceptical that there are lions in the Fochville area. A lioness eats between 15 and 20kg of meat a week, and a male eats double that, he says. There should be a trail of livestock carcasses, but there is nothing.
“I heard that some of those carcasses that were found were fed on by jackal and the likes and they had died from natural causes,” he says.
“But while I am a bit sceptical, lions can, if they want to, fly under the radar and be leopard-like.”
Grant Muir is careful where he stands and smokes these days. He also takes the quadbike when he heads out on to his farm.
Back when the lions were thought to be roaming the area, in September last year, father and son believe it wasn’t just people who were wary of the apex predators.
They noticed that for those couple of weeks, the jackal didn’t call. Now the jackal are back, but the locals are still cautious.
“We use to see people riding on bicycles but we don’t see that anymore,” Grant says.