Erindi Private Game Reserve

Thirteen wild dogs, one camelthorn and a bolt of lightning

In November 2008 a pack of wild dogs at Erindi lay up under a camelthorn after a hunt, with rain coming down. Lightning hit the tree. Thirteen dogs died where they lay.

Three tries at a pack

That was already the second go. The first dogs arrived late in 2007 and within months every male in the group was dead, leaving three females. New males were brought in to join them early in 2008. By the reserve’s own account the females passed their hunting tricks on to the newcomers, and by July there were eleven pups. Then the storm. Three months later one of the females that was left produced six more, and staff who feared heavy rain and cold had finished them off found all six alive with their eyes open.

The third attempt came at the end of 2011, when fourteen dogs were let go. Only two or three of them had ever hunted. Timothy Smith, who wrote them up for Travel News Namibia in 2015, describes chase after chase coming to nothing before the pack pulled down a blue wildebeest calf in front of safari vehicles, seven months after release. The alpha female was Kaya. She had her first litter in July 2012 at a den of old aardvark burrows, and a second female, Half-Moon, gave birth at the same den that September. Half-Moon later walked off with two males to start her own pack and came back. By 2014 Kaya had seven and had moved to a den on far more open ground, where the adults could see trouble coming from any side.

What they ate is the surprising part. Between June and December 2013 the pack was getting through two or three warthogs a day. The odd kills on Smith’s list were an ostrich, two giraffe calves, a bull oryx and an eland cow, the biggest thing they had taken. Compare that with Etosha, where a release in the late 1980s, built around seven orphaned pups from the Mangetti, ended with lions killing the dogs one after another. Erindi has lions too, and lodge guests and campers were still reporting its wild dogs in 2019.

The 200 elephants that never arrived

Erindi’s elephants began as twelve animals bought from Etosha in 1994. Gert Joubert, the owner who did the talking, wanted far more. By 2009 he had an offer of 200 from Sabi Sand, the private reserve next to Kruger, free if Erindi paid for the transport. His case was bush. Roughly 20,000 hectares of the property had been lost to bush encroachment, and in his words “God gave us the elephant” to sort it out.

The environment ministry said no in July 2009, pointing to a moratorium on game imports gazetted that April. Joubert went to court. In November 2011 the High Court threw the import ban out, and three weeks later the ministry refused him again, offering instead to lease him no more than 50 elephants from the Tsumkwe area. He told the paper he no longer had the strength for the fight. In July 2012 a lease was still being talked about and the reserve still had fewer than twenty elephants. The newspaper trail I could find stops there.

Joubert thought big. At a Windhoek press conference in April 2005 he talked about 500 km of tarred access road, up to 1,500 foreign tourists a day, and a dream of turning the whole of Namibia into a game park with the towns fenced off. In late 2006 it was still a hunting ranch taking about 50 trophy hunters a year, with about 300 giraffe and some twenty hippos living in two dams built for them. The switch to photo tourism came in June 2008. Those hippo dams are on a property where, the lands minister said in 2019, you have to drill about 200 metres to reach water. In 2009 the prime minister, Nahas Angula, complained in Parliament that driving past he “only saw (wild) animals but no people”.

Honey, Phantom and a male called Houdini

On 18 April 2010 ITV opened a Ray Mears series with an episode shot here. Mears tracked with Natasha De Woronin, who ran the Global Leopard Project on the reserve and had radio collars on females. One, Honey, she had followed since birth. Honey’s mother was Phantom, and another female she knew was Yana. The males were the gap in the work. None had been collared, and the big one the film crew went after was called Houdini because he had already got out of two capture attempts. Behind it all was the boundary: Erindi is ringed by farmland, and a leopard that wanders onto a stock farm is liable to be shot. AfriCat has studied leopard at Okonjima since 1997 and collars some of them for the same sort of reason.

What people saw from Camp Elephant

Until it shut, campers and chalet guests could drive three marked routes on their own, the Canyon, the Zebra and the Eland, and check a sightings board at the camp shop. The verdict from several unconnected people on the 4x4 Community forum was blunt: on your own you saw plains game and not a lot else, and the guided drives were how you found predators. A reporter on a guided drive in August 2016 had a white rhino within ten minutes, then hippos and crocodiles at a waterhole, two male lions sleeping off a hartebeest caught the day before, and elephants to finish. One lodge guest noted that buffalo is the only one of the Big Five that does not occur here.

Luck did happen. One camper early in 2019, when a lot of rain had spread the game all over the reserve, got back to camp in the late afternoon and within minutes watched the wild dogs kill an antelope about 50 metres away at the waterhole. Several campers found that the lodge and its deck were closed to anyone not sleeping there.