Nkomazi Private Game Reserve: Everybody loves a happy ending

Forgive me if I’m being presumptuous as a) a male and b) a nonparent but I imagine there can be no more horrific experience for a mother than having a child abducted. I’m pretty certain this applies as much to mothers in the animal kingdom as it does their human counterparts.

About 1½ years ago, a female leopard somewhere in Mpumalanga left her two cubs in their den while she went hunting. When she  returned, they were gone … stolen  and destined to be sold either as exotic pets or muti.

Officials from the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency  (MTPA) recovered the tiny siblings – a male and female, subsequently christened Jack and Claudi – but obviously had no idea where to reunite them with their mother.

The MTPA handed the leopards over to the Care for Wild Rhino Sanctuary, where they spent three months before being moved to Nkomazi Private Game Reserve near eManzana (Badplaas) in May last year.

The pair has just returned to the wild, and, if you think their lives till now have been fraught, the real challenges still lie  ahead. “It was an emotional moment for me to see those two animals walk free,” Nkomazi Private Game Reserve co-owner Dewyk  Vos told me this week.

Tiger. Picture: Jim Freeman

“They’ve spent 14 months in  a quarter-hectare enclosure and this became too small. The time was also right to release them into  the reserve: any longer in captivity and they would not be able to be rehabilitated.”

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Vos said Jack and Claudi had showed initial reluctance to leave the security of their enclosure and had to be enticed out by dragging a warthog carcass behind a game vehicle as bait.

I disagree with armchair bunny huggers who aver that all cages must be opened and their inmates returned to the wild willy-nilly. This might all be very well with herbivores like buffalo and antelope, whose survival skills are more or less limited to learning how to kill a clump of grass and running like hell when the rest of the herd does, but it does not apply to carnivores.

Reluctant to leave. Picture: Jim Freeman

The biggest challenge facing Jack and Claudi, says Vos, is learning to hunt. To date they’ve relied on “handouts” from humans. Hunting is  something they would have been taught by their mother, so starvation is a real threat.  “We fitted Claudi with a new  tracking collar within the last month and have a student ranger who will track her movements via global positioning satellite.

“We will be able to pinpoint her position in real time for the next 24 months,” said Vos.  “Jack was fitted with a tracking implant so we can follow him via  radio telemetry.”

Nkomazi’s anti-poaching team  will have to watch over the pair at night for at least the next several weeks to ensure the resident pride of lions don’t get too close.

Both lions and lionesses will not hesitate to kill animals they perceive to be competition for resources. Finally, Jack might have to face down larger male leopards when Claudi comes into oestrous. As recent events in Gqeberha showed when one captive Siberian tiger killed another, female pheromones can have appalling effects on males that have no way of scratching their natural itches.

Buff on Mount Camdeboo. Picture: Jim Freeman

The good news, said Vos, is that “the natural environment is on their side: the property is large and there is sufficient food for them to thrive”. Everyone wants to see this story have a happy ending but – forgive the pun – it won’t be a stroll in the park.