Limpopo-Lipadi Blog

Limpopo-Lipadi's ground-breaking wild dog reintroduction project is, this month, the subject of a special feature article in Africa Geographic. You can download a copy of the article on our site and read more about the fascinating history of our wild dog pack.

The trail-cameras have once again brought us a stunning set of candid images from distant parts of the reserve. Towards the end of December one was sited at Mac's Pan and has captured a sequence of shots of elephants visiting the trough to drink, wash and socialise - and at some point give the camera a nudge so that the rest of the shots are at a jaunty angle!

As previously announced in the blog early December saw attempts to locate and dart some of our adult wild dogs to allow us to fit two additional animals with radio collars and replace the old collar on Two Spots, our dominant female. Shareholders and guests were invited to participate in this exciting event on the reserve.

July has brought more news of the wild dog pups, born to Two Spots at the end of April this year. For such an endangered species (estimated at only 3-4000 left in the wild) it is great news that a new pack has been created that are genetically diverse and well established enough to breed. Photos taken in the last week or so reveal a total of seven pups, who look very well nourished!  

Wow, time for more celebration!

Jacquie has confirmed that during the week of April 20th Two Spots had her first litter. The five males, especially the alpha male are very protective over the den site. Warning growls can be heard whenever you are in the vicinity. The pups will not come out of the den until approximately three weeks of age, and even then the adults will not allow them to be out of the den if there is a threat in the area.

Two Spots looks very proud as she lays close to the opening of the den. When she goes hunting with the pack one of the subdominant males will stay to guard the den during her absence. On return from the hunt, the other dogs will regurgitate food for this subdominant male and once the pups start to eat solids, all dogs will regurgitate for them as well as the adult guarding the den.

Our Alpha female, Two Spots, is now heavily pregnant and will be looking for a den within the next week to have her litter. We are all excited about this second wild dog litter soon to arrive at Limpopo-Lipadi!!

An opportunity to again visit Limpopo-Lipadi came our way with friends John and Yolande Fulton visiting us from Canada. We together did a Botswana trip including the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Savuti and Chobe and John and Yolande were very keen to visit Limpopo-Lipadi, which was much simplified by having Peter arrange our grocery shopping for the visit. Following the Limpopo-Lipadi stay, we were also able to include 2 nights at the new South African National Park of Mapungubwe, which we highly recommend in combination with a stay at Limpopo-Lipadi.

As previously announced on the blog on May 1 2010, our wild dog family was released into the reserve. The females came out quickly, but the males were not so trusting. Almost an hour later, Lekona and Mathebole took a running dash through the main gate of the enclosure and were gone - all five wild dogs disappeared into the bush. Freedom for our wild dog family at last! This was what it was all about, for the wild dogs to run free in the wild where they naturally should be. All of us had a great feeling of success and accomplishment. We were extremely proud to have been able to contribute, even to such a small degree, to wild dog conservation.

It is overcast today and a little cool, a huge cold front must have moved across South Africa and extended into Botswana. So we decided to skip our morning game drive and relax a bit at our River Camp accommodation, home for most of the last 5 weeks (with a 10 days break, while camping at Okavango and Savuti), during our vacation in Botswana. This is a good time to reflect a bit on our Limpopo-Lipadi stay and share with you some of the exciting moments we have been fortunate enough to witness.

Knowing that the wild dogs were released in the first half of 2010 I knew that this time I had a very good chance to see them in our own Limpopo-Lipadi Game & Wilderness Reserve (LL) during my stay for six days with three good friends at Unit 6 in August 2010. For the last 15 years, in which I visit South Africa at least twice a year for holidays in the bush, I never saw them in the wild. Of course I saw them in the boma at LL (August last year) and at Kapama (the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre (HESC)) in Hoedspruit but that doesn’t count. The wild dogs are the last of the "bigger" mammals I didn’t see so far and it would be nice to tick them of the list.

You can hardly call it “news” when everybody knows it is going to happen, but for me it is still a big story and I know many of you feel the same. This morning, Saturday 1st May 2010, at 9.30am, the gate to our central holding facility at the main boma was opened and our pack of wild dogs was free to roam away into the reserve.

Our wild dog puppies were growing quickly and becoming closer to maturity. Our main priority now was finding genetically different wild dogs to exchange for some of ours in order to create an effective wild dog breeding program. Being related, our siblings could not be a viable breeding pack, and so we needed to exchange all of our females or males with unrelated wild dogs. We thought that we had a chance for this in September 2009, when male wild dogs, leaving their pack at maturity, of the same age as our dogs, were available from Mashatu, Botswana. Unfortunately before capture, this wild dog family went over into Zimbabwe and were not seen again. Our hearts sank because it is not every day that wild dogs become available for exchange. We are aware of only about 3000 registered African wild dogs in the whole of Africa, which underlines how endangered this species really is.

Limpopo-Lipadi’s wild dog breeding program was launched during mid-July 2008. Cheetah Conservation Botswana contacted Limpopo-Lipadi to see if we could accept into our care nine orphans, each one an adorable wild dog puppy. They were estimated to have been between 9 and 11 weeks old at the time. Apparently, the wild dog pups were dug out of their den on a cattle farm in the Ghanzi area of Botswana. They were temporarily placed in the care of Cheetah Conservation Botswana on 15 July who were tasked with trying to find a suitable home for each wild dog puppy, preferably someone who would engage in a wild dog breeding program. If a suitable home could not be found, the wild dog pups were likely to be put down. We literally had only hours to decide if we would be willing to take them. Needless to say...