Far and wide

Lise Hanssen guns her 4x4 through dense scrub in Namibia’s Mudumu National Park, a 285-square-mile swath of wilderness that hugs the eastern edge of the Kwando River. Prickly branches scrape the vehicle’s side as she leans out the window, steering with one hand and searching for signs of movement. “There,” she says, braking suddenly and pointing to a lion snoozing about 15 feet away. “This guy and his brother were born here; I collared them after they split from their pride when they were 2 years old.”

Mudumu National Park lies in the Zambezi Region, a narrow, densely populated strip of land in Namibia’s northeastern corner. Though smaller and quieter than many of Namibia’s better-known protected areas—and home to far fewer lions than the Okavango Delta—this park plays an outsized role in the ecosystem. Together with neighboring Nkasa Rupara National Park, it forms part of the Kwando River Wildlife Dispersal Area, which links populations of lions and other carnivores within the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA).

“These two tiny parks are like stepping stones,” says Hanssen, founder of the Kwando Carnivore Project, examining the lion through beat-up binoculars. “If it wasn’t for them, there’d be almost no connectivity between Botswana and Zambia.”

Yet over recent decades, villages have expanded, agriculture and livestock grazing have pushed into wildlife habitats, and roads and fences have sliced up key corridors, leaving carnivores to navigate an increasingly crowded landscape. “Mudumu and Nkasa Rupara are surrounded by up to 50,000 cattle and about 25,000 people,” she says. “There’s only so much space.”

Few animals feel the pressure of shrinking, fragmented habitats more acutely than adolescent male lions. Forced from their natal prides at a young age, they spend their early years on the run, skirting areas held by more dominant males until they’re strong enough to claim prides and territories of their own. In the process, they often wind up in proximity to communities—and in conflict with people.

Protecting these animals requires a better understanding of where they’re going and how they get there, says Hanssen. From a modest but well-equipped field camp near Mudumu, she’s spent more than two decades tramping into the bush to collar lions, spotted hyenas, African wild dogs, and cheetahs to track their movements through the Zambezi and beyond. Supported by WWF, her research has illuminated the hidden geography of these species’ dispersals: when they leave protected areas, the routes they follow, and where they run into barriers.

“We’re looking at how they travel through all those human-dominated areas,” she says, “and how we can make coexistence work.”

Late one afternoon, in a small village around 15 miles south of Mudumu, Kwando Carnivore Project operations manager Tanaka Muradzikwa balances a laptop on the hood of his truck. On the screen, a map is populated with lion icons, village names, and the zigzagging paths of GPS collars. “This is a pride from Botswana that moved into Namibia—all females and their cubs,” he says, tracing one line with a finger. “They’ve been bounced around by alpha males and have recently started causing problems north of Mudumu.”

For the most part, though, data suggests lions actively avoid people, roving through dense forest along omurambas—ancient, dry riverbeds. “Typically, incidents happen when cattle are left out at night,” says Muradzikwa. He oversees the Kwando Carnivore Project’s monitoring system, and his job is to marry collar data with thorough fieldwork to pinpoint hot spots where local people are losing livestock, and where the organization can intervene before conflict escalates.

To that end, since 2013 the Kwando Carnivore Project has been providing farmers with predator-proof kraals—reinforced livestock enclosures that, unlike weaker structures, keep panicked cattle from breaking through and running into the bush, where they’re vulnerable to attack. Initially focusing on villages near Nkasa Rupara, the program later expanded to Mudumu and farther west, to the Nyae Nyae Conservancy. Upgraded livestock enclosures are proving effective across KAZA as well. “They give farmers a sense of ease at night and greater accountability for their livestock,” says Muradzikwa.

Carnivores don’t recognize political boundaries, he adds, so the Kwando Carnivore Project’s work has to be highly collaborative and take entire landscapes into account. That’s why the organization also partners with neighboring conservation groups—including Communities Living Among Wildlife Sustainably (CLAWS Conservancy), Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), and others—to relay information and alert one another as collared carnivores cross borders or move toward conflict prone areas.

“Animals don’t have passports,” says Muradzikwa. “We have to think the way they do.”