​Our research team has been busy recently with our ongoing biodiversity monitoring in the Ghanzi District. Covering an area roughly the size of the state of Maryland, where roads are scarce and the terrain consists of rocks reminiscent of a Martian landscape and sand as thick as the most voluptuous tropical beach, conducting such surveys is no mean feat. And yet every year, in a bid to monitor wildlife populations in our areas, our teams spend three months placing camerasall over the farmlands of Ghanzi in order to count wildlife and estimate population densities for not only carnivores but the variety of other wildlife species that make up the delicate Kalahari ecosystem. 128 cameras are placed during these monitoring exercises and it is a full-time job for our research team just to check the cameras, which need new batteries and SD cards every two weeks. 
 
Placing and checking the cameras is only half of the work though. Each three-month period of monitoring results in upwards of 1 million photographs that need to be sorted, saved and processed so that the individual animals, locations, dates and time stamps can be fed into the computer models to predict the population densities of each of the species. In the past, photos had to be processed manually; a veritable nightmare when you have, for example, a herd of cattle lying in front of a single camera resulting in hundreds of photos of a cow chewing her cud. Or a wayward piece of grass caught in the fresh Kalahari breeze which you watch hundreds of pictures of like a sped-up movie with your finger clamped on the advance arrow key on your computer. Thankfully, with technological advances, this manually processing is now a thing of the past. Through our partnership with the Wageningen University in the Netherlands we are testing their newest AI technology which analyses the photos and automatically groups them into species, calculating all the photo metadata and automatically compiling it in vast databases for analysis. This process allows quicker analysis of the data and frees up our research team for further field studies. 
 
We look forward to seeing the results from this latest monitoring period which concluded this month. It will be interesting to look at how the wildlife numbers have fluctuated after this year’s unprecedented rains that came off the back of years of debilitating drought. We are very thankful to the cooperation of all the farmers involved who allow us regular access to their farms to place and check the cameras. Without them, we would not be able to conduct this important work, monitoring the wildlife of the Western Kalahari. 

Lucas and the other research staff check cameras almost constantly during the 3-month long sampling period. Cameras are placed in these protective boxes to keep them safe from animals.

Around one million photos will be collected from this year's biodiversity monitoring study

CCB works in conjunction with the Department of Wildlife and National Park's research division to train them in camera trapping techniques

​In 2016, CCB became the proud owner of yet another Tswana puppy who was promptly named Loeto. Unlike most puppies we receive, this little puppy did not go to our demonstration farm for a life of livestock guarding. Loeto would be the first of his kind — the first ever Tswana dog to be trained as a cheetah scat detection dog.
 
With a smelling capacity 30 times that of a human, dogs have been used for detection work for decades, identifying everything from dangerous substances like drugs, illegal wildlife products, bombs and invasive species of plants and animals, to things that you want to find, like evidence of threatened and elusive species such as cheetahs. Finding cheetah scats (poop) helps us to get biological samples for our research and can help us to widen the distribution map for cheetahs if evidence is found in areas where cheetahs have not previously been known to exist. Cheetah scat detection dogs have been successfully trained before, but not utilizing local breeds of dogs and we were intrigued from the success of our LGD efforts to know what else our indigenous dogs were capable of! We knew that being able to train our own scat detection dog would not only mean we had that skill available to us all year round and at a much cheaper rate, but that the local “Tswana” dogs would be more resilient to the local heat and environment in which they’d be working, helping to make them more efficient. In that fateful year, CCB began the complex process of training Loeto to detect cheetah scat, the first ever local-breed dog to be trained by an NGO for such purposes. 
 
Initially Loeto showed great promise in his mission to find cheetah scats. Our research team worked long and hard placing cheetah scats around our farm and training Loeto to sniff them out. Soon he developed a bad habit of trying to eat the poop that he found, rather than simply sitting to announce that he had found it. He also struggled to distinguish between the cheetah scats and the very similar leopard scats that we placed around the farm. Despite our team’s most valiant efforts, our staff had to come to terms with the realization that perhaps Loeto wasn’t going to have a fruitful career as a cheetah detection dog. He received an early retirement package from CCB and settled in as our Ghanzi Camp’s new guard dog, staff personal trainer and much-loved companion. 

Loeto is a beloved furry member of the CCB team

Loeto finding a cheetah scat (poop) in the bush

​As a beloved furry member of the Ghanzi Camp, Loeto was suspiciously absent one day in late January. The staff searched for him in his favourite places – by the office, near the kitchen and at his old enclosure. They even checked with our livestock herd to see if he had tried to initiate a new career as a livestock guarding dog; but he was nowhere to be found. Many days passed with no sign of Loeto and we started to fear the worst. But a suspicious set of car tracks found on the day of his disappearance on the main road adjacent to our farm made us think that the unimaginable had happened – Loeto may have been stolen. 
 
The Ghanzi staff got busy, asking around Ghanzi town (which is 20km from our farm) and all of our known contacts in the area if anyone had seen him. They placed wanted posters up around town and searched high and low. Weeks turned into months and there had been no sign of him. A few false leads were investigated but it was never Loeto. All hope began to fade of us ever being reunited with him again. 
 
Then, on the 23rd May, four long months after his disappearance, the Ghanzi team received a call from a man who had found a dog fitting Loeto’s description near Ghanzi town’s nightclub and he kept him safe until our staff arrived to confirm whether it was him. To our absolute delight our team confirmed that it was indeed our beloved Loeto and he was in great condition, despite his long absence. We still have no insight as to what he had been up to for those long four months or how he went missing in the first place, but we are so thankful to have him back safe and sound at our Ghanzi camp. Upon his return, we reflected wryly that he had certainly been named appropriately, for in Setswana “Loeto” literally translates to “journey”.

Loeto arrived back at cheetah camp happy and healthy, despite being missing for four months

Loeto was reunited with the CCB staff, including Chris, who was instrumental in his training

​The Kalahari San Bushmen are renowned for their incredible wildlife tracking skills. What appears to be a smudge in the Kalahari sand to any mere mortal can easily be interpreted by a skilled tracker as not only a particular species, but sometimes even the sex and age of the particular animal that left the track. They can even look at a track and sometimes identify an individual animal whose tracks they have seen before. Sadly, this is an indigenous knowledge system that is becoming rare within the San communities, as modernization reduces the need for these traditional skills. CCB’s research team regularly engages with the trackers in our target communities, hiring them to help us count spoor (footprint) tracks on the sandy roads throughout the Kalahari, which enables us to estimate population densities of wildlife species in the area. This work is critical for us to monitor wildlife population numbers and keep an eye on increasing and decreasing trends in species like cheetahs, lions and African wild dogs and their prey. Unfortunately, it is getting harder and harder for us to find skilled trackers as this talent slowly disappears. 
 
In line with our mandate to support communities in the transfer of their wildlife-friendly indigenous knowledge, we facilitated a tracker training session in April. This 2-day training camp, saw youth from our target communities team up with researchers from the Department of Wildlife and National Parks to learn how to improve their tracking skills from some of the area’s most celebrated trackers. This training not only helps to preserve this indigenous knowledge, but equips local youth with the skills needed to assist us with further spoor surveys in the area. With regular spoor surveys needed for our research and wildlife monitoring, this tracker training session capacitates more of the local community to be employed in our research activities, creating income opportunities from wildlife-based activities. The more income that can be derived from wildlife-based economies, the more communities are motivated to help preserve the natural world around them. Well done to the tracking teams! 

The participants, from CCB, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks and youth from the community, investigate some carnivore spoor

Passing on traditional knowledge like wildlife tracking has been a top development priority for communities in the area

The participants walk away with a greater understanding of spoor (footprint) tracking, helping them to conduct wildlife population monitoring and to more accurately identify animals involved in conflict reports

Everybody’s favourite conservation project, CCB’s livestock guarding dog (LGD) programme, got a significant boost in September with a delivery of 14 local “Tswana” LGD puppies from the Botswana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BSPCA). The unwanted “Tswana” puppies were collected from the shelter in Gaborone and driven the 600km to our LGD training facility in Ghanzi where they are now learning how to guard livestock from our experienced LGDs under the watchful eye of our demonstration herd managers N’xau and Dingalo. These puppies will receive the best possible start to life with optimum health care and expert training, before being placed with farmers experiencing conflict with carnivores. All dogs are monitored and farmers supported with free veterinary care for their dogs, to ensure that they are in the best possible shape to protect goats and sheep from predation, thereby protecting cheetahs and other wildlife from persecution from farmers. Recently published research from our LGD placement programme has demonstrated that LGDs cause a reduction in livestock killed by carnivores of at least 85%, so we are confident that these little puppies will create much needed relief for farmers experiencing human-wildlife conflict. 
 
We are extremely thankful to the BSPCA for their work rescuing animals and for the efforts made to get these puppies to us. We also wish to thank Vetswana for their veterinary support and the Botswana Government’s Department of Veterinary Services for the permits needed to transport the dogs from Gaborone to our training facility in Ghanzi. Together we are achieving sustainable positive change for coexistence in the Kalahari! 

Above: The puppies in CCB's new transport box, being driven from the BSPCA in Gaborone to our cheetah camp in Ghanzi

Above: The puppies arrive at our demonstration farm, ready to start their training as livestock guarding dogs

Above: CCB's livestock manager Dingalo oversees the initial meeting between the puppies and the goats and sheep