​You may remember that we previously reported how hard it is to collar cheetahs in the farmlands and how excited we were to have collared two cheetahs late in 2021.
 
We are pleased to announce that in a run of luck, we were able to collar three cheetahs in five days during one trapping event in late July. Immediately following our mid-year review, our research team took advantage of the opportunity of having our veterinarian, Erik Verreyne, visiting Ghanzi for cattle work, and scheduled a 10-day cheetah trapping session. The research staff couldn’t believe their luck when we received a phone call the very first day of the traps being open, that a cheetah had been caught on a game farm just north of Ghanzi town. The cheetah – a male weighing 54kg (119 pounds) was immobilized, given a full health check and fitted with a GPS tracking collar. This collar, (along with the other two that had been fitted of a total of seven collars) would track movements through the farms, give us data on land use, home range size and transboundary movements, all helping to inform our human-wildlife coexistence work.
 
The first cheetah was collared on the Sunday. On Monday a different cheetah on the same farm was also collared. And by that Wednesday a third was collared on the same farm. This is a particularly large farm – the game and cattle sections totaling approximately 120,000 hectares. Our previous research has indicated that game farms tend to attract more cheetahs due to the presence of more varied natural prey species than one finds on neighbouring cattle farms. But regardless, it was still surprising that we caught three different cheetahs in a small area in such a short period of time. Analysis of the data since collaring indicates that two of the three cats appear to be part of the same group (known as a “coalition”) who seem to be holding the territory around the game farm. The third lone male was likely a transient male passing through the farm. He has since moved 40km (25 miles) away in the 10 days since he was collared, whereas the coalition has only roamed 10km (6 miles) over roughly the same time period. This farm has a history of problems with cheetahs and the owners have excelled at adapting their livestock and game management to alleviate conflict by reducing risk and mitigating threats. Not only have they been leaders in conflict management and mitigation, but they also helped CCB by offering their staff’s time to help set and check the three cheetah traps that were set on their farms. This took huge pressure off our research team, who would have otherwise had to sacrifice two staff members for almost 10 full days just to check these three traps. We would like to extend our profound thanks to Tholo Safaris for their dedication to conservation efforts and for their help in this collaring study. Most notably, Clive, Kim and Linda Eaton, Nicklas Gower, Steven van der Merwe and expert tracker Besa. 

​As a token of thanks to our family of staff who work so hard to protect the beautiful wildlife of the Kalahari, we treat the staff to a team building trip each year. This trip is a chance for us to all get away together and have a break from work – to enjoy each other’s company and the beauty of nature. 
 
This year, we arranged our team-building trip as a camping expedition to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park – an area thought to have more cheetahs than any other in Botswana. The various teams made the long trek to a beautiful campsite in Mabuasehube. Ghanzi camp coordinator, Phale Max Seele, was our camp guide and was quickly dubbed “Ranger Max” due to his guiding expertise. Fitting 13 staff and 13 tents into one campsite was a challenge that the whole team rose to. But it was the addition of Tebogo as our camp cook and her deliciously cooked meals like the eland seswaa (pounded meat) dish she served for breakfast and the mincemeat-filled magwenyas (bread dumplings), certainly made the trip so much more enjoyable. Thanks to such culinary delights, she has single-handedly raised the bar of a camping experience for all staff!
 
The team was incredibly lucky during the 3-day, 2-night trip to see a bevy of wildlife. Highlights included a pride of lions we saw hiding quite effectively in the long grass (the first that some had ever seen) and a spotted hyena wandering through the campsite, stealing people’s shoes from outside their tents. Watching Max and Kokole running through the bush at daybreak chasing after the aforementioned hyena as it made off with one of our brand-new blankets was a sight the evoked both joy and unity. The pinnacle of the trip though was seeing a cheetah outside of the park on the cut line back to the A2 highway. 
 
The team-building trip was followed by our mid-year review meeting which saw our entire staff group converge on the Ghanzi field camp and education centre to consider the progress made and challenges encountered in meeting the targets we’d set ourselves for the year, and consider changes to those plans for the last half of 2022. 
 
One exhilarating development is that we recently finalized the purchase of some land in the northern Ghanzi ranchlands. This is the first land purchase for CCB, as we have been renting the farm in Ghanzi since 2008. The new farm is 16 hectares of pristine bushland with an existing smallstock kraal/enclosure, vegetable garden, house, boreholes, small solar system and campsite. Our aim is to spend the next couple of years developing the farm and moving our cheetah camp from its current location on the western farms, to this plot further north. 
 
There are several benefits to having our own property. As well as being a good long-term investment, we will save on the rent we currently pay each month, reduce on the vehicle maintenance for not having to drive down the long gravel road from town to camp daily, and invest in infrastructure and a land use plan that is fit for purpose. Having our current camp situated on rented land meant that we were unable to build permanent buildings – with higher maintenance costs resulting from the semi-permanent structures. On the new farm, we will be able to build permanent offices, self-contained accommodation for our staff and even some accommodation for visitors. We will be rebuilding our cheetah rehabilitation enclosure and education centre so that we can continue our important work – all within a few minutes of the A3 highway with easy access to Ghanzi and our other target communities. We are excited about this new big step for CCB and the new opportunities it will bring!

​Most of us would have heard the age-old saying “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It’s a saying that hits home particularly for us in the NGO space, where resources are tight and where people are at times, literally starving. And although, as a wildlife NGO our mandate is not to feed the hungry, the overlaps between conservation, education and community development in key wildlife areas has led us down the path of some of the other United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, such as poverty alleviation and ending hunger. Our community playgroup in Kacgae is a great example of this. 
 
The “Learn to Play” playgroup was established in Kacgae in 2020 to help fill the gaps in the provision of early-childhood education. The feedback we received soon after was that the attendance of children at the playgroup would be bolstered if we could provide some food for the children while they were there for the 3 hour session. Not only would this boost attendance, but it would help the children to concentrate rather than struggling to participate on an empty stomach. After much stakeholder consultation, we decided that it was within our interests to contract the mamas (volunteers from within the community) who run the playgroup to make healthy, balanced meals for the children so that their bodies could be nourished alongside their hearts and minds. 
 
Thanks to our generous supporters we managed to secure the funds needed to provide food for the children for one year, which we were all ecstatic about. Unfortunately, we then hit a proverbial brick wall with the restrictions and qualifications required in order for the mamas to prepare and provide food for the children. In order for the mamas to receive the necessary licenses from the relevant authority to prepare these snacks, it became apparent that they would benefit from structured skills development. Consequently, the restrictions we were facing, became a great opportunity for us to expand our capacity building work with the mamas. 
 
In August, the three mamas from the programme, together with six other community members from three other villages, ventured down to Botswana’s capital city - Gaborone to partake in a 5-day Food Preparation training course. This course trained participants in skills including etiquettes of serving, health and hygiene standards, setting up tables for tea, lunch and dinner, common food handling procedures, as well as several recipes and tips and tricks on cooking, baking, preparing and presenting food. All of the participants absolutely loved the course. Our hope is that with this training, not only will the mamas be certified to prepare food for the students of the Learn to Play playgroup, but they will also have the skills and training needed to develop catering enterprises should they be so inclined, offering CCB (and others) the opportunity to engage them to cater for site level meetings and workshops. 

Human-wildlife conflict ebbs and flows like the constant beat of the tides. Recently we have seen a shift and a worrying increase in conflict between local farmers and cheetahs. Recently compiled questionnaire data from the Ghanzi Agricultural Show that we attended in late July indicated that carnivore conflict levels had increased significantly for cheetahs specifically. In the last few weeks, we have received numerous calls to our rapid response unit, including a distressing call from the Department of Wildlife about one of our collared cheetahs that was injured in a gin trap (similar to a traditional leg-hold bear trap). The farmer in question had not replaced their livestock guarding dog (LGD) after it had died and had subsequently lost 19 sheep to carnivores and had set the traps in an attempt to catch the perpetrators. The cheetah, was promptly taken to CCB’s rehabilitation facility where it received emergency veterinary care. Its wounds were treated and he was given long-lasting antibiotics in an attempt to assuage any chance of infection. After several days of rest and care, he was released into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve where he is being monitored remotely using his GPS tracking collar. 
 
We have also received a number of calls about conflicts experienced with cheetahs in a particular hot spot around the town of Ncojane, near the border with Namibia. Sixteen goats had been lost across three farms prompting CCB’s Farming for Conservation (FFC) team rushed to assist. Under normal circumstances, any farmer of smallstock experiencing conflict with cheetahs would quickly receive a livestock guarding dog puppy to help with long-term management of their herds. However, due to a recent and devastating outbreak of canine parvovirus across the country, many of the puppies that came into our care had been carrying the disease upon arrival and sadly perished. This has left our LGD programme short of puppies and with the persistent waiting list to receive a trained dog from CCB. Given extent of conflict in Ncojane and the wait for LGD puppies, CCB lent the most severely impacted farmer, Mr. Calvin Seitsang, CCB’s own experienced and highly effective LGD from our demonstration farm. “Gift” has been one of CCB’s LGDs since 2016 and has not only protected a total of 173 goats and sheep, but has also helped teach 130 LGD puppies the tricks of the guarding dog trade – helping to train them before they are placed with farmers in need. 
 
Having Gift on loan from CCB helps create a short-term, immediate solution to their problems, aiming to deter the problem cheetahs from the herds that have been affected, in an attempt to break any patterns of livestock depredation before they become habitual. The FFC team are planning our next mobile farmers workshops in that area to support skills sharing in carnivore-friendly farming techniques with these farmers. The Ncojane area is notorious for desertification caused by poor livestock management practices and bushmeat poaching. These two factors result in a combination of unproductive rangelands, resulting in weak livestock and very few wild prey animals respectively. This creates a perfect storm to increase the risk of cheetahs, African wild dogs and lions preying on livestock. Thankfully, the holistic nature of our farmers workshops, which focus on everything from grazing management, anti-poaching, reducing the risk of depredation and herd health, will certainly be valuable in helping these farmers to make their farms profitable again.