NamibRand Nature Reserve

A sandgat, five cheetahs and a gecko named after a safari firm

The Brückner family found out over lunch. Two weeks earlier Albi Brückner, a Windhoek businessman, had made the winning bid at an auction for Gorrasis, a drought-beaten sheep farm on the edge of the Namib, and he had told nobody at home. His daughter Christine said he had bought a sandgat, a sand hole. The business set up in 1984 was called Sandgat Farming Ventures, and he used to boast that the farm had cost him what a secondhand car would.

From 1959 he was a partner in an engineering firm that sold pumps and diesel engines, and he worked the south. On Thursdays, when farmers came in to Maltahöhe for their post, he sat in the hotel selling to them and hearing how badly things were going. By the early 1980s the karakul trade had collapsed and the rain had stayed away. Around Gorrasis the neighbours were shooting oryx and springbok to get by.

The meeting at Wolwedans

He meant to farm it, with Damara sheep and Nguni cattle, and when the stock needed more ground he bought the farms next door as they went under, Wolwedans among them in 1987. It still lost money. In 1991 he called a meeting on Wolwedans. Chris Brown of the government’s nature conservation department and David Peddie, a planner from Zimbabwe, both told him to give up stock for game and visitors. The farm’s name is older than any lodge on it: “wolf” is what Afrikaans farmers called the spotted hyaena.

The first wardens, Mark and Charlie Paxton, took down fences and flattened old kraals. Trophy hunting paid most of the bills until 1995, when Eric Hesemans asked the board if he could fly hot-air balloons. The blesbok, which do not belong in Namibia, lasted longer. The reserve culled them in 2008 and fed the meat to its new cheetahs.

The state had wired off the eastern edge of the Namib-Naukluft to hold its game in, away from poachers, and oryx walking east in dry years died against it. By 2009 more than 2,000 km of boundary and internal fencing had come down. Brückner died on 8 December 2016, aged 86.

Kia and the Keerweder five

Cheetahs were common on these farms until about 1980, by which time stock farmers had cut them right down. In 2008 two groups tried to put them back. N/a’an ku sê let a male and two females go at Straussenwasser in the south that May.

The Cheetah Conservation Fund brought five males that had spent six years in captivity. Let out in July 2008, they crossed the mountains on to farmland and were darted and brought back within a month. For the second try, on 9 December, two captive females called Misty and Rosy were put in the pens at Keerweder so the males would stay close. By February 2009 the five had stopped taking handouts and were killing young oryx on Keerweder Pan. Their names were Kia, Mushara, Cadbury, Ra and Lindt, and in those first months every kill anyone witnessed was Kia’s. A researcher who followed them for ten and a half hours one day later that year watched them set off in a 1-2-2 line with Kia in front, botch a run at fifteen hartebeest, then pull a springbok out of a herd of more than two hundred in the midday heat.

They were not kind to the giraffe. In November 2009 a young cow died giving birth, and the Keerweder males killed her calf the following night.

What you will and won’t see

Expert Africa keeps a tally of what its travellers report. Nearly all of them see oryx and more than nine in ten see zebra. About one in six sees giraffe, which keep to the north. Brown hyaena comes in at 7 per cent. Cheetah and leopard are at nought. The cats are there all the same. Staff saw a leopard with cubs near Straussenwasser over Easter 2025, a brown hyaena was drinking at the Kwessi waterhole almost every evening in late January 2026, and the reserve’s July 2026 newsletter has a photograph of a male cheetah in a cage trap, about to be collared.

Expert Africa’s own team counted ten aardwolves and eight jackals on a single cool, overcast June afternoon and were told by their guide that they had been luckier than most.

Rain decides the rest. The reserve averaged 4.3 mm in the 2024 season and the count that May found 119 springbok on the routes. A year later, after 56.7 mm, the same count gave 684.

Plaques in the fairy circles

Here and there a fairy circle has a numbered ceramic plaque in the middle. The reserve raised money by “selling” circles to Wolwedans guests, and wrote down the buyer, the date and the GPS position of each. Walter Tschinkel, a biologist from Florida State University, saw a use for that. He had two satellite pictures of the sand between Jagkop and the Bushman Hills, taken in 2004 and 2008, and from the circles that appeared and vanished between them he worked out in 2012 that an average circle lasts about 41 years. The sold circles, found again years later, pointed to something nearer 60. What makes them is still argued over. Norbert Jürgens blamed sand termites in 2013. Stephan Getzin, whose team dug up hundreds of grass plants and found the roots unchewed, says the grass dies of thirst, and in November 2025 he was at Wolwedans teaching the guides his side.

There is also a gecko. In 2011 Bill Branch and three colleagues described a banded species under 45 mm from snout to vent, known for certain only from the grounds of Sossusvlei Desert Lodge, then part of the reserve. They named it Pachydactylus etultra. Etultra is Latin for “and beyond”, a thank-you to &Beyond, which runs the lodge.

In the south, John and Jill Kinahan mapped something older: 51 stone hunting blinds in three rows below a saddle that looks out over the Gorrasis basin. They reckon it took fifty or more people, some hiding and the rest walking oryx gently towards them. The oryx paths still cross that saddle.