Okonjima Nature Reserve

The alarm clock that timed Okonjima's leopards

Long before camera traps, Wayne Hanssen wanted to know what time of night the leopards on his father’s cattle farm came to feed, and he could not sit up every night to find out. So he tied a bait to the battery of an alarm clock. When a leopard pulled the meat, the battery came out and the clock stopped. Later he rigged a mousetrap to an infra-red beam so that it fired the shutter of an old camera, and the leopards took their own portraits.

That is roughly how leopard research began at Okonjima, with a farmer’s son who had shot his first leopard at 15.

Three leopards a year, and the calves kept dying

The high ground here was used in the 1890s to rest German military horses, because at 1,700 m and more it seemed to be above the reach of African horse sickness. It was a cattle farm by the 1920s. Val and Rose Hanssen arrived in 1970 after drought pushed them off two farms in the Khomas Hochland, and their Brahman herd came up from Windhoek by train to Otjiwarongo.

Then calves started to vanish, and leopard tracks and drag marks led to what was left of them. The family lost 20 to 30 a year and did what every farmer did: gin traps, box traps, a rifle, and trophy hunters who paid for the big males. By their own count they killed about three leopards a year for twenty years, and the losses never moved. What worked was duller. Cows calved inside predator-proof pens at the water points and the calves stayed there until about four months old. Losses fell to three or fewer a year.

The family came to believe that shooting only emptied a territory for the next leopard, and their first proper study bore it out. In June 1998, working with the government carnivore researcher Dr Flip Stander, they caught and collared four leopards within a month. Lise Hanssen followed them daily on foot while Stander flew over twice a month. Four months in, one of the males was killed on a farm 11 km away. A younger leopard had his range inside a week.

A cheetah cub among the pots and biltong

Guests came before conservation did. In 1986 a safari operator wanted an overnight stop near Otjiwarongo, on the way to Etosha, for clients who were keen birders. Rose Hanssen knew her birds.

What the visitors found was a farmhouse shared with a baboon called Elvis (he stayed 11 years), two warthogs named Nympho and Schizo, a honey badger called Benny and a monitor lizard known as T4. In 1989 Val went to a political party’s fundraising auction of chairs, pots and biltong and came home with a caged cheetah cub nobody else had bid on. She was named Chinga. In those years Wayne also began sitting guests on rock ledges after dark to wait for leopards at his bait sites, with little regard for safety, the family now admits. Trapped and orphaned cheetahs and leopards from other farms began to arrive. Rose died in 1992, the cattle were sold, and the rescue work became the AfriCat Foundation the next year.

Why there are no cheetahs any more

Older blogs and guidebooks sell Okonjima as a place to track cheetah on foot. That is over, and the leopards are the reason.

When the 1998 study measured the farm it found about 5.6 leopards per 100 square kilometres. In 2015 and 2016, after the electric fence went up and the hunting stopped, researcher Jenny Noack and colleagues ran 95 camera stations for nearly ten months and identified 36 leopards. That works out at 14.5 per 100 square kilometres, the highest density then recorded in Namibia. Nearly half the kills they logged were warthog.

Into this AfriCat released 50 captive-raised cheetahs between 2000 and 2018. Almost all learned to hunt. Almost half were dead within a year, mostly killed by leopards and spotted hyenas, and the project was stopped. There are no cheetahs in the reserve now.

Brown hyenas did better. They were hardly ever recorded in the cattle days. A camera survey has put them at 24 per 100 square kilometres, among the highest figures for the species anywhere, and AfriCat now counts six clans whose ranges cover more than nine-tenths of the reserve. The fence had to be altered for pangolins. They walk low along fence lines and curl up when threatened, and a pangolin that curls around a live wire goes on being shocked until it dies. A pilot study in 2017 flagged the danger and the bottom wire was raised. Kelsey Prediger then led the pangolin project from 2018 to 2021.

What a tracking drive is really like

The guide stops, holds up an aerial and listens. Often there is nothing and the vehicle moves on. Roxanne Reid, a South African travel writer, went out at seven one morning in 2015 with guide Martin Njekwa, who told her the odds were about even. The first tries picked up no signal. Then, from a slight rise, he got two at once. About 45 minutes after leaving camp they were looking at Shanti, two years old and newly pushed out by her mother, and they stayed with her for roughly an hour. Jojo turned up within 15 minutes of that and spent half an hour eyeing a family of warthogs. A magazine writer on an afternoon drive the following year found the big male Mafana sulking in a gully, then watched a female called Lila come down from a shepherd’s tree after eating an impala.

Njekwa, now head guide, puts the success rate of a drive at around 80%. Among travellers who log their sightings with the operator Expert Africa, 94% report leopard here, about two-thirds brown hyena, under half white rhino, roughly a fifth pangolin, and 7% aardvark.

One blogger warns that the fences and the collars can feel less wild than an open park, and that a drive may be spent following one collared cat. Fair enough, but this is a research site first. Even the 20 square kilometres around the camps, where the unguided walking trails are, sits behind a second fence meant to keep leopards out.