Waterberg Plateau Park

The vultures that gave up on the cliffs

In the 1940s and 50s about 500 Cape vultures lived on the cliffs of Okarukuwisa, a 1,884 m mountain at the Waterberg. By 1970 there were roughly 300. In 1987 the count was 14. When a helicopter flew the cliff face around 2000 the crew found no nest in use, and at least eleven birds were still roosting there. Rob Simmons, a government conservation scientist, warned that on that trend they would be gone within twenty years.

Teabag, Sky Banker and a bird called CV6

Maria Diekmann’s farm, Uitsig, faces those cliffs. In September 2000 she set up the Rare and Endangered Species Trust there, and in January 2004 caught the first Cape vulture to carry a satellite tag. It was named Sky Banker after the bank that paid for the transmitter. A year-old bird called Teabag flew to Angola, then Kamanjab, then the Skeleton Coast, came home and was dead by the first days of January 2005, poison suspected. Farmers lace a carcass for jackal or leopard, and because vultures feed in a crowd Diekmann reckoned one carcass can kill anything from 50 to 500 birds.

The best traveller of the lot was CV6, an immature female tagged on 15 February 2005. In less than two years she covered at least 64,000 km over six countries. An adult male, CV5, spent at least 46 nights asleep on the pylons of a power line instead of rock.

Then came the odd part. By 2008 the few old males left were nesting again, but in trees, not on the cliffs, and their mates were female white-backed vultures, a different species. Nobody had recorded that before. A University of Cape Town student, Pippa Schultz, used Diekmann’s tracking data to ask how the birds find food in thick bush. She laid out offal in woodland of different densities and the vultures found none of it where there were more than 2,600 trees to the hectare. Around the Waterberg the thornbush runs from about 1,000 to 10,000. Kudu and eland, the carcasses they like best, are plentiful out there. The vultures just could not get down to them.

Peregrines and Verreaux’s eagles are on record as breeding on the same sandstone.

One buffalo, 26 farms

Bernabé de la Bat, the conservation director the rest camp is named after, said in 1973 that the plateau should become a last stronghold for the rare animals of the far north. So the founders were brought in: roan from Kavango, sable from western Caprivi, eland and giraffe from Mangetti, wildebeest from Daan Viljoen, white rhino from Natal. The buffalo came from Addo in the Eastern Cape.

Those buffalo are now the only ones in Namibia south of the veterinary fence, and they are certified disease free. The law does not care. A buffalo that strays into farmland is to be destroyed on sight, for fear of foot-and-mouth. On 12 April 2015, while officials were busy dehorning rhino, one broke through the fence. The state declared 26 neighbouring farms restricted, banned every movement of cattle, goats and game, and sent a helicopter. Cameras went up at water points. Within two weeks the animal was spotted on the ministry’s own farm next door, where it had been all along. Near the end of April 2018 a buffalo was seen at Okauarongo village in Okakarara and two whole veterinary districts were frozen for about two months. A communal farmers’ group demanded ear tags on the park’s buffalo.

The traffic goes the other way too. A founder herd went from here to Simalaha in Zambia in 2018, and in June 2020 thirty giraffe were caught on the plateau, thirteen of them bound for Mangetti, where their line started.

The chief who would not sell

The restaurant at the camp is a red-brick German police station from 1908, in use as one until 1955. One of Kambazembi’s kraals stood within a kilometre of it. He led the Waterberg Ovaherero from 1860 until he died in September 1903, is said to have kept 40,000 cattle around the mountain, opposed selling land to settlers and went on wearing hides when the missionaries wanted Victorian dress. Less than a year after his death the war reached his mountain.

The mudbrick ruins at the camp are older still, a Rhenish mission founded in 1873, wrecked in 1880 and rebuilt in 1891. One of the camp walks, Mission Way, is named for it. The farm next door, now Waterberg Wilderness, was bought in 1911 by Friedrich von Flotow, grandson of the man who wrote the opera Martha.

What the top is like on foot

Getting lost is the thing to plan for on the unguided trail. A group who wrote up their four days in 2016 took the return path by mistake on the second day and reached the next hut hours early. The hiker who mapped the route for OpenStreetMap found the resort staff had no maps to hand out and said the bush is thick enough to lose yourself properly. The 2016 writer also stopped every half hour to empty sand out of their shoes. The overnight shelters, by the same report, are a wall around a floor of soft sand, with a tap and a toilet, and the nights get very cold.

What you get for it is sign more than sightings. That group found rhino tracks and dung, and the moment that made their trip was a group of buffalo crashing across the track a few metres ahead. On the last descent they counted four Rüppell’s parrots, more than in the three days before.

On the game drive, be realistic. Among Expert Africa’s travellers only a quarter saw sable and a fifth saw roan, the two animals the park is known for. One visitor complained that the guide preferred Namibian politics to wildlife. Down in camp the reports mention baboons and mongooses outside the chalets, and several praise the walk up to the rim at sunrise, though one traveller got lost on the way down.