Namibia has a unique population of lions that have adapted to life in the Namib Desert and the Atlantic seaboard in the north-west of the country. They are a unique tourist attraction and visitors from all over the world come to see these very special predators. But their range overlaps those of livestock ranchers, and the threat of conflict is high, as the landowners retaliate with lethal consequences for lions that kill their domestic animals. Now an innovative project is underway to keep the peace between the lions that earn tourism dollars and the ranchers whose livelihoods depend on the survival of their stock.

Namibia’s successful communal conservancy programme has resulted in the growth of wildlife numbers and diversity, especially in the arid areas in the north-west. The growing herbivore wildlife populations have provided opportunities for predators to increase as well. The lion population of north-west Namibia is one of the few to thrive in the wild, outside National Parks, and it has a number of unique characteristics. The average lifespan of the lions is greater than 18 years; their ability to thrive in an arid environment, including mountains, sand dunes and beaches is exceptional; their prey selection, such as giraffes, birds and seals is unusual; and their early independence is uncommon. This population of lions is the only large terrestrial carnivore (with the polar bear) to prey on marine creatures like seals and birds.

As numbers have increased, the conflict between lions and the local people has grown, as lions kill livestock more regularly. In retaliation, farmers often shoot, trap, or poison lions. These rural stock owners bear the costs of living with lions, but do not share equally in the economic benefits from tourism, and they receive little assistance in managing their conflicts with lions.

Philip Stander grew up in Namibia and became involved with wildlife from an early age. After leaving school at 17, he worked as a ranger in Etosha National Park where he developed an interest in science and especially the behaviour and ecology of large carnivores. During a four-year study in Etosha, Philip discovered that lions hunt their prey using an advanced level of coordinated co-operation, with individual lions repeatedly occupying the same position in the hunting formation. This discovery was new to science, and was published in the Journal of Behaviour Ecology & Sociobiology, Germany.

In 1989 he was offered a research fellowship at Cornell University, USA, where he spent two years writing and publishing scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. He then moved to Cambridge University, England, where he completed his MPhil (1991) and PhD (1994) degrees. His PhD thesis on social evolution and the cooperative hunting strategies of lions was awarded the Thomas Huxley Award by the London Zoological Society.

Over a 36-year period, Dr Stander has conducted studies on all six large carnivore species in Namibia and has published many scientific articles in international peer-review journals. In 1998 Philip started the Desert Lion Conservation Project, where he is continuing a lifetime dedication to the conservation of the desert-adapted lions in the northern Namib Desert. Although not directly involved in tourism, he recognises that sustainable tourism is key to the conservation of lions and other wildlife species. He works closely with the tourism industry and his research aims to promote the tourism value of desert-adapted lions in Namibia.

Lions are fitted with radio collars and are tracked and observed to record behaviour, movements, grouping patterns, reproduction, and mortality. Lions are tracked using GPS and satellite technology from a light aircraft (fitted with radio-tracking equipment) and by vehicle. Direct observations and monitoring lions in the field for extended periods are the primary means of collecting data.

​Lions over the age of two years are marked or radio collared, and individual records are kept of all lions in the population. Emphasis is placed on monitoring lions that disperse and occupy new habitats, and on those that live near local communities. Human-lion conflict is addressed by developing localized conflict management plans.

In 2017, Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) approved the Human-Lion Conflict Management Plan for northwest Namibia, developed by Dr Stander and the Desert Lion Conservation Trust (DLCT). The goal of this plan is to reduce the number of conflicts in order to protect the farmers’ livestock, and to preserve the unique population of desert-adapted lions of the Namib. Male lions are killed more often, which leads to an unbalanced ratio of males to females 1:3. This is not sustainable for a healthy population.

The Desert Lion Conservation Trust has a website at www.desertlion.info. This has lots of detailed information about the work of the DLCT, as well as links to some excellent video material.

To reduce the conflicts, the plan implements a variety of measures to protect livestock at night, alert the communities to the presence of lions and to deter them when they are close to human settlements. The following measures are being used:

• Mapping ‘high-risk corridors’;
• Studying and tracking the movements of the lion prides;
• Reducing predation by building lion-proof corrals;
• Implementing a network of ‘logger early warning systems’ to alert settlements and scare approaching lions;
• Advocating the importance of the project to the local communities by educating and training farmers, game guards, tourists, guides, and residents on living with lions and promoting the value of lions; and
• Involving the tourism industry and operators in the conservation of lion populations.

 The Logger Early Warning System is of particular interest and consists of several components.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) collars that include a GPS recorder, a special RFID tag, and a VHF transmitter. These collars are attached to lions in each pride that is being monitored in the project area.

The Early Warning Logger consists of an antenna, an electronic circuit board that acts as a small computer processor, four powerful LED floodlights, and a siren, all mounted on top of a four-metre steel pole.

The unit is also fitted with a solar panel and a 12 Volt battery to provide sufficient electrical power throughout the night. The logger is orientated so that each of the four LED floodlights point towards one of the four wind directions (North, East, South and West). Each logger continuously transmits RFID signals to scan for any RFID Tags (fitted to the lion collars) that may be nearby.

When the Logger detects a RFID lion collar, it will instruct the collar to record a GPS position every five minutes and relay the information to the Logger, which calculates the direction and distance of the lion from the settlement, and triggers one or two of the LED floodlights to ‘point’ in the direction of the lions. The floodlights are very powerful and will allow people to see the lions as well as deter the lions from approaching the corral.

A control/display unit that is mounted lower down on the Logger pole will display the distance of the lions from the settlement. When the lions reach a distance of 200 metres from the settlement, a powerful siren is triggered to deter the lions from approaching any closer. Generating disturbances associated with settlements, people and livestock is an effective way to scare lions away and thus prevent conflict.

Another important component of this lion-human conflict management project is the employment of ‘Lion Rangers’ by various community conservancies in the project area, providing jobs for people where there is very little formal employment. This is another example of Namibia’s innovative wildlife management policies, which make it a leader in this field on the continent. Wildlife tourism, subsistence hunting, and trophy hunting all co-exist in areas where people live with their livestock, in a unique and economically viable land-use system.

Acknowledgement: The material for this column was gleaned from a document submitted by the DLCT to the Wilderness Wildlife Trust, which is one of several financial supporters of the project. John is a Trustee of the WWT.

By Quintin Whitehead

It was a classic case of love at first sight when I first set eyes on the famed Kilombero Valley in 2019.  The Kilombero North Safaris story starts a lot earlier though. It was founded in 1994 and later purchased by the current owner, Akram Aziz. The original purchase was mostly to create a family retreat for the Aziz family, but the seed was planted for what was to become one of the biggest hunting operations and conservation success stories in Africa.

In the early 2000s Kilombero North Safaris and the then Miombo Safaris joined forces, Kilombero Ruhuji/Ifinga West concession (2199km2) (Dhala Camp) as part of the deal. Akram’s dream of creating a wildlife refuge in the Kilombero Valley really started to take shape when Kilombero Ruhuji/Ifinga East (2310km2), (Ruhuji Camp) was added a few years later.

For the next nearly two decades, through careful management, intensive anti-poaching and minimal takeoff, these two areas were transformed from relatively marginal miombo woodlands areas to two of the finest hunting blocks on the continent. The puku population grew from a few hundred scattered individuals to the biggest population in East Africa. Today they count in their thousands. A haven was also created for the thousands of buffalo that the flood plains at the lower end of the Valley used to be famous for. With massive human encroachment in the floodplains in the early 2000s wildlife had to make space for cattle and rice farms. Fortunately, by that time Kilombero North Safaris areas were well established, and it didn’t take long for the clever bovines to figure out where they are safe and the big cats in turn were soon to follow their primary food source.

with a very healthy big-cat population, and eland, Roosevelt sable, Lichtenstein hartebeest and general plains-game populations as healthy as they have ever been.

Our management style, being very hands-on, means that we don’t run the company from behind a desk in the city. From day one we spent a lot of our time on the ground, guiding hunts and supervising camp building and anti-poaching operations. It didn’t take us long to figure out that it is not just our two areas that benefited from Akram’s decades worth of conservation efforts. The neighboring vacant hunting areas also flourished with game spilling over from the areas, KNS effectively turned into wildlife refuges.

In 2020 we had to make some big decisions, with the hunting industry at an all-time low amidst the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the four neighboring areas came up for auction. Do we put everything on the line to secure the whole Valley or do we play it safe?

Fortunately for the Valley and conservation in general, Akram’s passion for wildlife has never known any financial boundaries, and we added the Kilombero Game Reserve, Furua/Mwatisi Game Reserve, Mwatisi Game Reserve and Mahenge Game Reserve to the list of areas (All newly established Game Reserves). With winning back the original two areas in the latest round of auction in January 2022, we now have six neighboring hunting areas in the valley covering a total of 3,460,000 acres (to put it in perspective, that’s roughly the size of a third of Switzerland). Our only neighbor in the valley is the newly established Julius Nyerere National Park, formerly part of the old Selous Game Reserve, with which we share more than 100 kilometers of boundary.

Every day spent in the new areas comes with new surprises, and every block, as can be expected in such a vast area, is unique in habitat, terrain and seasonal game movement.

Kilombero GR. (2788km2) is situated at the bottom end of the Kilombero Valley, and is mostly made up of floodplains, islands and river channels. This area was once home to most of the buffalo now in our areas further upriver, and had suffered tremendously from the pressure of human encroachment over the past decade. It is a crucial part of protecting the whole valley though, and with it now being a game reserve and the cattle and people being moved out, it will not take long for it to return to its former glory. We are implementing the same intensive anti-poaching measures with minimal take-off here that we had such great success with in the original KNS areas. Within a few years this will once again be the paradise for buffalo that it was fifteen years ago.

Furua/Mwatisi GR. (1315km2) is turning out to be the best leopard area I’ve ever had the privilege to hunt. On an exploratory safari in 2021 we had 23 leopards on bait in 14 days, and we discovered the best spot casting for Tiger fishing for fly fisherman any of us have ever seen in the upper reaches of the Pitu River. This is never-fished-before virgin water.

Mwatisi GR. (2186km2) is every adventurous hunter’s dream. The Tanzania Wildlife Authority (TAWA) created this area when they combined the original Mwatis and Furua areas into one hunting block. It is 2186 square kilometers of completely untouched wilderness that has never been hunted before. Unlike Ruhudji and Dhala, you do not see the herds of buffalo numbering in their thousands, but with its deep valleys and abundance of springs it is the favorite hangout for bachelor herds of Dagga Boys and some spectacular big-bodied lions. The top end of the area is part of a big migratory route of elephant moving between the Nyerare National Park and the headwaters of the Kilombero River system in the Southern Highlands.

Mahenge GR. (3075km2) remains relatively unexplored, but is probably the most exciting project for the next few years. The area includes the Mahenge and Mbarika Mountain ranges. When rugged country comes to mind, think Mahenge Game Reserve. The mountain ranges remain largely unexplored. Previous helicopter surveys showed big numbers of eland, buffalo and elephant on the grassy plateaus. The ravines and valleys are home to some giant leopard and bushbuck. Red duiker and suni are a common sight in in the mountain forests. As we continue to explore this unique area there are bound to be plenty of new, exiting discoveries.

At the time of writing the article we have a permanent anti-poaching crew of 60 people divided into six teams on the ground, all accompanied by

Tanzania Wildlife Authority game scouts. To keep all our teams mobile is a momentous task in itself, with four Toyota Land Cruisers, six boats and six motorcycles dedicated to the anti-poaching operation alone. During the rainy season, from January to May, large parts of the valley is inaccessible by motor vehicle, and the boats play a major role in giving our people access to the most remote areas from where they patrol on foot. As part of our long-term feasibility studies, we are planning an aerial game count in conjunction with TAWA later this year to establish accurate game numbers to help establish conservative and sustainable quotas for all six areas. Following on that, the purchase of a light aircraft to support our teams on the ground is also part of our game plan.

We learnt a long time ago that wildlife does not stand a chance if the communities surrounding our areas do not directly benefit from the hunting activities. Over the years Kilombero North Safaris has had a tremendous impact on the quality of life of the people in and around our hunting areas, not just in the Kilombero Valley but all over Tanzania. Heavy emphasis has always been on education and medical facilities; we also create employment opportunities for people from the local communities at all levels of the operation. We can proudly say we are making a difference. The knock-on effect of this is that this has enabled us to win the trust of the people closest to the wildlife, resulting in a network of informers that would make any government spy agency proud. With this close cooperation we often manage to be proactive in avoiding wildlife crimes before they ever happen.

What makes this project unique is that from day one Akram insisted that it always remain privately funded. We are now sole custodians of what is, to my knowledge, the biggest tract of huntable land operated by any private company in Africa. It is a big commitment and takes a lot of reassurances and effort to maintain. We are winning the battle, though, to a large extent thanks to the fact that the Kilombero Valley is no longer one of Africa’s best-kept secrets. To fund the project, we must create a lot of revenue, and that means hosting a lot of foreign clients. The response from the hunting world has been tremendous, and the past two seasons has been incredible, despite the COVID pandemic. Ninety percent of clients who hunted in the Kilombero Valley since 2019 have rebooked, and the 2022 marketing season added a considerable number of new bookings. There is no better place than the Kilombero Valley to prove the point that hunters’ dollars created through sustainable utilization is the only hope for wildlife and wildlife habitat in large parts of the continent. I credit a large part of our success to the fact that our clients realize that by booking a safari with Kilombero North Safaris, not only do they get to experience Africa as it was a century ago, but they also become partners in an incredible conservation success story.