Donate NowBrendan Borrell, for the Pulitzer Center
Last Friday, I headed up to the Northern Tuli Game Reserve, which sits in the remote northeastern corner of Botswana, between Zimbabwe and South Africa on the Shashe and Limpopo Rivers. The rains were generous this year and during my visit the reserve was thick with impala, eland, and other game. In many ways, it is paradise for the male lion that currently heads up the resident pride.
But that paradise will not last long. That's because male lions at Tuli have a habit of disappearing. And biologist Andrei Snyman thinks he knows where they're going.
Just five kilometers from where I am staying is the so-called Tuli Circle. With a radius of about 16 km, the Circle is the only plot of Zimbabwe territory that crosses the Shashe. This geopolitical anomaly came about in 1891 when the British South Africa Company asked the King Khama III in Botswana for a buffer zone to protect their cattle from lung disease.
Today, that semicircle gives one Zimbabwean hunting outfitter the perfect opportunity to capitalize on Botswana's protected wildlife. Although the Circle is unlikely to have any resident male lions – and Northern Tuli has just three – Zimbabwe had been granting two lion hunting permits per year. Snyman tells me that the outfitter has been laying out carcass baits on the border road in order to attract both lion and leopard into his hunting concession. (These baits have included giraffe, which were re-introduced by tourist lodges in the area.) Because Snyman has radio collars on two young male lions, he has recorded them venturing over to the baits. They were not trophy material at the time, but he fears that by next year they will have grown their manes and could end up on some American hunter's living room.
To try to stop that from happening, Snyman convinced the Zimbabwean wildlife department to reduce the lion quota in the Circle to one animal per year, and he has worked out a gentleman's agreement with the hunter not too shoot any of his collared animals. But he's waiting to see what happens. "If that guy's corrupt," says Snyman, who is himself certified as a professional hunter in South Africa, "then it doesn't matter what the policy or legal limits are."
Of course, it's not just international boundaries that pose problems for wildlife, John Power of the Endangered Wildlife Trust explained to me when I crossed back into South Africa the next day. In February, a wandering lion headed south from Mapungubwe National Park on the South African side of the Limpopo. It passed through several fenced private game reserves near the town of Alldays, 40 km to the south, before it was illegally shot by one landowner who saved the skull as a trophy and is now facing criminal charges.
Another lion is still resident in Mapungubwe, and Power wants get a better idea of how far this feline is going to roam to better understand how to protect it. That afternoon, he drove me into the park and proceeded to climb atop his Land Rover with a radio antenna. We could just make out the bleep-bleep of the lion's collar, but it was too far off the road to get a visual. After recording its coordinates in his notebook, we continued driving out to a lookout where we could see the confluence of the Limpopo and the Shashe – and thus the three countries Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa.
After dark, as we rumbled back on the dirt track, some vegetation made a horrible scraping sound on the right side of the truck. Suddenly, a branch crashed through our windshield, stopping millimeters from Power's face. After a deep breath and some swearing, Power pulled out a panga -- the South African term for a machete -- and started hacking. The worst part about the mishap is that EWT had just repaired the truck's windshield the previous week after an errant guineafowl flew into it.