The vuvuzela: A lion deterant

Guest post by Liomba-Junior Mathe, Student Blog Contest Series 2018 

Humans have dominated large landscapes. Where they overlap edges of Protected Areas, there are always people and wildlife interactions. Hwange National Park (HNP) in Zimbabwe, a country in Southern Africa, is one of Africa’s finest destinations for many people visiting as tourists, but for a wildlife conservationist like myself, it’s home and the office all rolled into one amazing place. I’m a human carnivore-conflict expert and I have dedicated the last five years of my life working for Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) under the auspices of Oxford University, this is my story. 

 WildCRU’s Hwange Lion Research Project, which has been running for nearly 20 years, is aimed at understanding, managing and conserving the lion population of HNP through collection of valuable long-term monitoring data of population demographics, ecology and behaviour. However, conflict between humans and carnivores presents serious social and economic challenges for people living adjacent to protected areas. This is a common problem for communities along the borders of HNP where livestock are at risk of attack by predators. Today, far more African lions are lost to conflict with humans and their livestock than from any other cause of mortality. 

As part of this valuable research our focus is to reduce human-carnivore conflict, which poses a significant risk to the survival of all carnivores in the wild, through a detailed understanding of the ecological and social factors that influence conflict. In the Hwange area, this conflict arises from lion predation on the livestock of rural communities who frequently retaliate by killing the lion.

The Hwange Lion Research Project has implemented several strategies to alleviate lion predation. In 2013, we initiated the Long Shields Lion Guardian project in the communities surrounding HNP. The concept, based on a Kenyan version of the ‘Lion Guardians’, is a community-conservation initiative that employs local people who form a link between conservationists and their communities, providing information and encouraging cooperation, using traditional knowledge and novel technology to mitigate incidences of livestock loss, protecting local communities, and conserving predators. The Lion Guardians monitor wildlife populations and alert local herdsmen when a lion is nearby, allowing them to move livestock to safety or to frighten the lion off.

After more than a decade of studying lions, our findings have revealed that only a few lions in HNP population kill livestock. And because we now understand the dynamic patterns of livestock depredation and its factors, we can largely predict which individuals might leave the park to engage in stock-raiding, and even when this might occur. These lions (often the ‘nomad’ sub-adult males but occasionally females) have been radio-collared and their timed location fixes sent via satellite to an internet reception point, almost in real time.  

Fig1. Radio-collared movement pattern of a lion in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. Photo/graphic credit: Liomba-Junior Mathe.

 

We can then alert the project’s Lion Guardian in the nearest village, using a mobile phone. The guardian thus warns villagers to avoid grazing their livestock near the lion.  And if a lion is lurking near a village, the guardian assembles a large gang of village men who, accompanied by dogs (or sound recordings of barking dogs) and armed with Vuvuzelas (strident horns used at African football matches), set off to the exact location of the hiding lion. A noisy, motivated and determined force of such magnitude is more than a match for a relatively inexperienced lion, who takes off without hesitation – empty-handed. Repeating this near the next village soon teaches the lion that his new way of life is going to be a difficult one, thus encouraging his retreat to safer territory. Far fewer livestock lost and far fewer lions killed amounts to a win-win scenario for lions, researchers, wildlife authorities and local people, through a shared sense of ‘ownership’ of both the problem and its solution.

Fig2. Lion Guardians blow vuvuzela to chase lions away from community ground. Photo credit: Liomba-Junior Mathe.

About the author

Liomba-Junior Mathe is a trained field conservationist and involved in the research, management and coordination of mobile bomas and the Long Shields Lion Guardian programme for Hwange Lion Research under the auspices of Oxford University Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU).

 L. J. Mathe, Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Email: matheliombajunior@gmail.com