Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Namibia: Poachers or Hunters?

Brendan Borrell, for the Pulitzer Center

Earlier this month, I met Colin Bristow, a bush pilot based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe who has spent 29 years running charters in countries ranging from Mozambique to Angola. He often flies tourists over the Lower Zambezi National Park in Zambia and sometimes visits the park on foot after most of the tourist lodges have shut down for the season. On a recent trip, he was shocked to count over 60 elephant corpses: their ivory tusks shorn from their heads.

It's become a yearly cycle, he says, when the lodges close, the poachers move in.  Some lodge owners may even be aware of the phenomenon, he alleges, but have so far have failed to raise a stink because the poachers have political ties.  It would have been just another unsavory rumor for me to file away from this eye-opening trip to southern Africa, but Bristow offered to email proof in the form of gruesome photos.  Here's the first one I have received, and I will hopefully post more later.

Botswana: Hunters Cross the Line

Brendan Borrell, for the Pulitzer Center

Last Friday, I headed up to the Northern Tuli Game Reserve, which sits in the remote northeastern corner of Botswana, between Zimbabwe and South Africa on the Shashe and Limpopo Rivers.  The rains were generous this year and during my visit the reserve was thick with impala, eland, and other game.  In many ways, it is paradise for the male lion that currently heads up the resident pride.

But that paradise will not last long.  That's because male lions at Tuli have a habit of disappearing.  And biologist Andrei Snyman thinks he knows where they're going.

South Africa: Do rhinos make good cattle?

Brendan Borrell, for the Pulitzer Center

A troop of baboons clambers up the granite rocks overlooking the Mauricedale Game Ranch, some 25,000 acres of South African brush squeezed between Kruger National Park to the north and the country of Swaziland to the south.  For the last seven days, I've been crisscrossing the brush on five hundred miles of dirt tracks learning about the inner workings of a private game reserve.

Some conservationists may shrug at such reserves as wildlife prisons, and, indeed, electric fences line the 42 km perimeter.  But just outside all you see is a patchwork of sugar cane, papaya, and other agriculture – a biological desert.  They say just 7% of South Africa sits on protected land, and many believe that the only way to further preserve the country's rich plant and animal biodiversity is by convincing private landowners to be friendly to wildlife.  But who would want a rhino?  These massive animals eat hundreds of pounds of forage a day and won't think twice about trampling you.