Khutse Game Reserve

Three lion prides and not enough Khutse to hold them

Sandra Ramsauer, a zoologist from the University of Zurich, collared every female in two of Khutse’s lion prides and then watched where they went. In the pride she had finished analysing, a lioness spent about a fifth of her time with no pride sister for company, even when all of them had cubs. On average they were 3.4 km apart, further than the 2.5 km at which other studies had found lions could hear one another. So she played recorded calls to them, and in those first trials they still reacted from as far as 7 km.

Regulars on the overlanding forums say you hear Khutse’s lions and do not see them. Her numbers show why. She told the resident lions apart by their whisker spots and counted three prides, averaging close to six females and two or three males, much the size of a pride in East Africa. The difference was the ground they needed. A territory came to about 1,000 square kilometres and the territories did not overlap. The reserve is 2,600. Three prides do not fit, which Ramsauer gave as one reason resident lions keep walking out of it.

A reserve made for the Bakwena’s benefit

Khutse exists because the Central Kalahari was shut. Alec Campbell, writing in 2004 on how Botswana’s parks came about, says the big reserve to the north was closed to tourists at the time and wildlife looked like a way for rural Bakwena to earn something. So in 1971 a block of Bakwena land became the second game reserve in the country set up on tribal ground. The first was Moremi. Campbell also notes that it protected the most southerly country where giraffe were still to be found.

Nobody lives inside it. People do live outside its boundary, and not all by choice: Kaudwane took about 500 of the residents the government moved out of the Central Kalahari in the 1990s. The pans are older than any of this. They are what is left of a river system that once ran north-east into the ancient Lake Makgadikgadi.

The three-year leopard study that never ended

Monika Schiess-Meier, a Swiss researcher, came in 1998 meaning to study leopards for three years and stayed. Her project, Leopard Ecology and Conservation, dates from 2000 and took on lions in 2004, once they had started killing livestock and farmers had started killing them. Its head of trackers, Pogiso Africa, was himself moved from the Central Kalahari to Kaudwane. In October 2024 he told Botswana’s Daily News they had lost four lions that year. Seven were then wearing collars.

Ramsauer and Schiess-Meier went through the wildlife department’s records of stock losses and the figures are blunt. Between 2000 and 2003 predators killed 2,272 head of livestock in Kweneng District. Leopards took the most (38%), all over the district and at any time of year. Lions took 26%, close to the reserve and in the dry months, mainly full-grown cattle. Most of the sixty farmers interviewed still said predators should be protected. Cattle left out of the kraal at night and hobbled donkeys made easy prey, so the local schoolchildren put on a play about it, a comedy, and the village turned out to watch.

Moving problem leopards into the reserve did not work. Four stock raiders were released there and none stayed put. Three are reported to have gone back to raiding and were shot outside it, and one covered 1,249 km. When the study came out in 2010 that was the longest movement on record for a leopard. So were the ranges of the three resident females it followed, which averaged 513 square kilometres.

A fence went up along the south-eastern boundary at the end of the 2000s. In 2018 Genevieve Finerty and the project’s San trackers walked stretches of it for spoor and set camera traps along it. Each camera was tested by somebody walking past pretending to be a lion. They photographed lions and leopards on the boundary, an aardvark and an African wildcat. The team also recorded a serval, nearly 200 km outside its known range.

Who broke the fence

Elephants. In July 2014 the wildlife minister told parliament that they had been coming into Kweneng since January 2013 and that the department had driven them back into Khutse and the Central Kalahari. In August 2017 another minister said elephants looking for water had been damaging the Khutse fence for two years, and that lions and hyenas were getting out through the gaps.

Campers picked up the same trail. Two July parties writing on the 4x4 Community forum in 2018 found fresh elephant spoor and dung and no elephants. A Tracks4Africa writer noted signs of them again in March 2022.

Molose in July, Moreswe in August

Read enough trip reports and cheetah come out better than the reserve’s reputation suggests. One party that spent five July nights at Molose saw them almost every day, plus a lion at the waterhole and a leopard in camp on the last night. Twice they found fresh lion tracks 30 metres from the tents, having heard nothing. In the same thread, someone who went in August called the game “almost non existent”, though a couple in that group did see a cheetah at sunrise.

Moreswe is the gamble. Jacques le Roux, who camped there in August 2013, passed two giraffe bulls and a herd of eland on the way in, then found the waterhole ringed with tracks and empty. He heard jackal and an eagle owl that night and no lions. His other surprise was a tick that came at him across the floor of the long drop. A forum member writing in 2011 had a leopard walk through camp one evening, stalk springbok grazing 70 metres off and catch one. In March 2022 the Tracks4Africa writer watched wild dogs and gemsbok square up to each other at Khutse Pan.

That writer also explains where to look: the bush is mostly thicket, so the pans are where the viewing is. A 2014 forum poster wrote of a famous Molose lion called Mexico and his pride. Nobody else in these threads mentions him, so take it as campfire talk.