SAFARI OPERATORS STEP UP

A number of tourism companies are playing a far greater role in African conservation

As dusk settles over the Okavango Delta, we spot him ambling through the grass — vast and grey, like a battleship at sea. He looks up, spots us, and turns his focus back to the grass he’s grazing.

While any encounter with a white rhino is special, this one is particularly so: we’ve just seen Serondela, one of the first white rhinos moved to the Delta in a translocation project that started in 2001 and still continues.

By the mid-1980s, only a handful of white rhinos were left in Botswana due to poaching; the country’s last black rhino was shot in 1983. That was the year Wilderness

Safaris was founded in the Delta.

It was this outfit — which now runs 48 lodges and safari camps in seven African countries — that proposed bringing black and white rhinos back to Botswana.

With the resurgence of poaching in SA and Zimbabwe over the past decade, that

relocation served to establish founder populations in Botswana, and provided these animals with a relatively safe habitat.

The reintroduction of rhinos has largely been funded by donations and managed by Wilderness’s nonprofit wing, the Wilderness Wildlife Trust, in collaboration with Botswana’s department of wildlife & national parks (DWNP).

Map Ives, a former Wilderness director who now heads Rhino Conservation Botswana, says many of the safari company’s guests “have an interest in helping conservation. So if you can appeal to them to donate via your company trust, you have a very good model of a ‘win-win-win’ for everyone.

“The company doesn’t have to spend money from its bottom line, the guest feels good to be donating to a trust that oversees an important project … and the company gains very positive conservation credentials.”

What it means:

The contribution of high-end tourism operators is vital for underresourced state conservation agencies in Africa

Besides in-kind support — accommodation, staff, equipment and fuel, for example — Wilderness Safaris contributed just 12.1% to the trust’s coffers for 2018. But 87.07% came from Wilderness guests and trade partners. So it’s clear that without high-end ecotourism, the ability of the trust to carry out its work — 40 conservation projects in 2018 and collaborations with the likes of National Geographic — would be compromised.

Wilderness Safaris also sponsors a monitoring team that spends its days tracking the rhinos through the company’s concession in the Delta.

In 2017, it assisted with the training of monitors affiliated with other operators, who now report their data to Rhino Conservation Botswana, which collates and analyses it for the DWNP.

And Wilderness’s own sustainability team conducts semi-annual counts of herbivores and birds, while predators are monitored throughout the year.

This baseline data can be used to assist other researchers, says Baz Sandenbergh, sustainability co-ordinator for Wilderness Safaris Botswana.

But it’s a boon for government too — good data informs good policy.

Several of Wilderness’s camps house research units, where visiting third-party researchers live and work.

One of the most important such programmes is the Okavango large carnivore survey. It is part of the trans-kalahari predator programme run by the University of