World Wildlife Fund

Robin Naidoo
© Greg Stuart-Hill, WWF-LIFE

Robin Naidoo, a conservation scientist in WWF's Conservation Science program, returned from two weeks in the wilderness of Namibia's Caprivi Strip - a long, narrow band of Namibia that runs east-west between Botswana, Angola and Zambia. Get a first-person account of what it takes to capture, collar and release large African mammals - including buffalo, sable and impala. Read about his near-misses, helicopter chases and other adventures in conservation science.

Part 3: Rangers and Radio Collars

These rangers were quick to learn the fundamentals of radiotracking.
© Erica Rieder

In Namibia, healthy wildlife populations help generate much-needed tourism income, so a big part of WWF's support is empowering local communities to successfully manage their natural resources. Before going out into the bush, I spent two days training park and conservancy rangers to use radio collars so that they can incorporate radio tracking into their regular natural resource monitoring activities.

On the first day of training, the rangers were given an introduction on radio-tracking, which included information on the basics of how the collars work and a brief demonstration of how to track collared animals. The next day we moved the training to the Mashi conservancy where three translocated radio-collared giraffes had been released a week ago.

This is when the fun started. First, we hid a collar and challenged two of the four teams to go find it. They located it quite quickly, so I made the next exercise a little harder. The second time we staggered all four teams' starting time, and all four teams again successfully located the collar. I'd detected a little skepticism the previous day from some of the group, but all the rangers today seemed quite excited and proud of their newfound ability to radiotrack.

Finding a collar I had hidden and finding a giraffe out in the wild are two different things, however. So, I was not expecting much success as we set out to see if we could locate one of three radio-collared giraffes. My skepticism was heightened with the initial chaotic scenes of a dozen excited rangers jumping into the back of a pickup truck nearly poking each other's eyes out with their antennas. Imagine my surprise when after about an hour of driving around the conservancy the truck skidded to a stop and the rangers piled out, racing for the nearest anthill. They had located the signal for one of the translocated giraffes! We drove around a bit and narrowed down its location, and even though we didn't actually find it, it was good to see their training bear fruit right away.

Radiotracking is a proven tool for wildlife management.
© Erica Rieder

The guys had done a great job, and they were clearly proud of what they had learned. At mid-day we had stopped for lunch at a convenience store. It was funny to see everyone carrying the equipment into the store until I realized that this was a pretty big status symbol for them. In some parts of the world conservation work isn't very prestigious, so it was nice to see the pride they took in their jobs.