Kruger Park taking back the night from poachers

SANParks says it has had a 90% success rate in protecting rhinos with the use of a R13 million “wide area surveillance system” which allows them to view the perimeter of the Kruger National Park and catch poachers.

“We deployed the system from the end of January and have not lost a rhino, and there have been about 10 poachers in that area. It was a critical area previously, there was no real-time information to reaction teams,” said SANParks technical operations manager Mark Mcgill, during a media briefing this week.

“This system works throughout the night. Trends change, poachers can come at night or in the day.”

McGill said the Postcode Meerkat system was instilled in December 2015 and had had about a 90% success rate in assisting with catching poachers spotted in the park.

The system scans the park in live time, then detects, identifies and tracks poachers, which enables the operator to notify the park rangers of the exact whereabouts of the poachers.

It is able to do a job that would require a large amount of manpower, which would be much more expensive and not as accurate.

“It’s amazingly fast, you see everything in the park. Using people is more expensive.”

SANParks added that they had spent a further R8 million on boosting gate access control, installing devices on the south entrances of the park which would require each visitor to provide their identity document and the full details of the vehicle they were travelling in.

“We picked up that poachers pay like normal visitors. They enter with four people in the vehicle, then when they leave there’s only one left in the car. We call them ‘drop offs’,” said chief ranger Nick Funda. – ANA