Dedicated poacher hunter takes break
Meet the adrenaline-junkie poacher hunter and her loyal sidekick‚ Blu.
She is Nicci Swartz, who works for security company Dark Water Ops.
On Friday, Swartz spoke about her five years of adrenaline-pumping action – fighting perlemoen poachers and high-speed cars chases.
“I’m not actually sure how it happened – it’s just one of those things that unfolded in front of me,” she said.
Swartz has decided to take a break‚ along with her crimefighting German shepherd Blu‚ to spend more time with her family.
Swartz’s husband‚ Survivor SA winner Tom Swartz‚ moved from East London to Port Elizabeth at the end of 2013 to help start an anti-poaching unit at the Cape Recife lighthouse.
“I’ve got a degree in fine arts‚ so I thought I was going to start painting there and sending off some paintings to Cape Town and that sort of thing.
“And the next thing I kind of got roped in,” Swartz said.
She started helping out with intelligence gathering by taking photographs in early 2014, before she ended up managing the unit after her husband left.
“From literally making them coffee and taking the odd photo‚ I ended up managing the anti-poaching unit.”
She said she had to really prove herself as a woman alongside men who had worked in Iraq‚ Afghanistan‚ and police K9 and gang units.
She pushed to do the K9 training because she thought it was the most incredible thing to work with a dog daily.
Eventually someone donated Blu, then aged six weeks.
Swartz calls Blu her guardian angel.
“Most of the poaching happens at night‚ on Marine Drive. “When you run out there . . . you don’t know what is in the bush next to you and there have been countless‚ countless times when Blu saved my bacon‚” she said.
“She just knows that as soon as she gets her leash on it’s time to work.”
One of their highlights was Blu snagging seven tons of perlemoen in a container at the Port Elizabeth harbour.
Swartz said fighting poaching was impossible without tip-offs from the public.
“We couldn’t do it without information.”