​Last month we wished an emotional farewell to CCB’s Management Officer, Mingie Masuga. Mingie has been an integral part of the CCB team since she joined us in 2016. After starting as an intern in the Management team, she quickly evolved to become our first Management Officer due to her excellent organizational skills. She worked hard to secure grants which enabled us to expand into more community development work. She efficiently managed our monthly planning goals and targets with the departments and she was instrumental in assisting with the set up and activities of our newest “Communities for Conservation” department. We have spent a very productive four years together! Mingie will be moving into a new role in the Botswana government and we are very pleased to see her excelling in her career. She will be at the forefront of assisting communities with COVID-19 challenges and we couldn’t be prouder of the work that she will be doing to keep people safe. Tsamaya sentle Mingie, we will miss you and hope to see you back one day!

​Do you remember your favourite picture book from your childhood? Books have the ability of unlocking imagination, inspiring kids and helping them to fall in love with characters and animals. This year CCB published its first children’s picture book, the inspiring tale of “Xabe: The Cheetah Hero!” After an online art competition launched during lockdown, we took drawings from kids around Botswana to inspire the illustrations in the book. As part of our celebrations for International Cheetah Day on December 4th we visited the schools of the winning students and delivered prize packs, including complementary copies of the book for the winners and their respective schools. Thanks to the generous support from our network during our Giving Tuesday fundraising drive, we managed to raise the $10,000 we needed to print enough books to give copies to every primary school in the country! Botswana’s Ministry of Basic Education is working alongside us to provide the books to schools in their “library packs” to be delivered at the start of the new school year in 2021. We hope that the book will inspire kids all around Botswana to fall in love with cheetahs and to do their best to protect our nation’s precious wildlife. 

In November one of the commercial farmers we have been working with for a decade was having problems with cheetahs eating his livestock and the stocked antelope on his game farm. We provided suggestions of different techniques he could use to minimise the vulnerability of his stock and offered to collar cheetahs on his farm, so that he could adapt the management and movement of his animals to avoid areas where the cheetahs frequented. Despite adopting a livestock guarding dog from our LGD programme, and using some of the techniques we suggested, he became disgruntled with the cheetahs. Despite our best efforts to convince him that catching and relocating cheetahs off the farm would be risky (especially considering his farm seemed to be a hot spot for cheetahs, with many different individuals using his farm), he set traps to catch cheetahs for translocation. The success rates of cheetah translocations are notoriously low – our research identified that less than 20% of cheetahs were still alive one year after they were moved, and farmers continue to have conflict even after cheetahs are translocated off their farms. For this reason, CCB no longer conducts translocations unless every other possible non-lethal technique has been tried first. Knowing this, the farmer phoned the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) to take the cheetah off his farm. Limited by strained resources and broken vehicles, the DWNP team called us for assistance and we rushed to the farm to help them to move the cheetah into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve for release. 
 
We are happy to report that the farmer has been experiencing no losses since he removed this cheetah. He even adopted one particularly interesting technique suggested by our team, of spreading lion faeces around certain areas of his farm, to try to deter the cheetahs from where his animals are. Cheetahs are naturally afraid of lions, and although he was hesitant when our team arrived with a bag full of lion poop and explained the process, his faith in us led him to give it a try, and so far, it seems to be helping. We look forward to analysing the trends of cheetah movements on the cameras we have placed at the farm to see how this intervention may have altered the behaviour of the cheetahs on his farm. We will also keep a close eye on the number of losses he experiences in the long term, to assess how long his problems remain at bay. For now, we are very glad that he was able to mitigate his problems using a non-lethal solution and we hope that his other techniques are able to minimise his losses in the future. At times we have to be flexible in our approach in order to maintain dialogue with farmers and appreciate both sides of the challenge of human wildlife conflict.

​This incident has shone light on how important it is to maintain good working relationships with farmers in core cheetah areas, something that we at CCB take great pride in. We know that farming alongside carnivores can be incredibly challenging, but we implore farmers to try non-lethal solutions first in order to find sustainable, long-term protection of their livestock. 

CCB receives financial support from a huge variety of wonderful organisations, businesses and individuals from all over the world. We are so incredibly grateful and humbled by the support we receive and we work very hard to make sure this money is put to its best possible use protecting cheetahs, the beautiful Kalahari and helping the people who live alongside wildlife. 
 
Every now and then though, we are completely blown away by the efforts people make to help us to carry out our mandate of protecting the Kalahari’s cheetahs. This is Gio – he is 9 years old. Gio raised an amazing €1421 for CCB by cycling 15 kilometers around his local safari park — Safaripark Beekse Bergen — where he enlisted the help of zoo staff and local celebrities to ride with him to help him raise funds to help protect cheetahs in the wild. Even the cheetahs at the Safari Park ran alongside him in their enclosure in a show of support! The money Gio raised will pay for a satellite tracking collar which will be placed on a cheetah early in 2021 to help mitigate human-wildlife conflict. We will send the GPS points of the cheetah to farmers in the area so that they can adapt their livestock management to minimise conflict and to promote coexistence between farmers and cheetahs. We will also send the GPS points to Gio and his family so they can keep track of their very special cheetah. 
 
Thank you Gio and to everyone who supported his fundraising efforts! Gio — you are such an inspiration for everyone across the world who wants to do their part for conservation but is not sure where to start. One person can really make a difference and you have certainly shown that. Thank you!!