‘152, 153, 154… Done!’ I wiped the sweat from my forehead, tied the end of the white and red barrier tape around the roller and let my gaze wander over the black, burnt field. It still smelled distinctly spicy, and the black, knee-high bushes hinted that this had been a very different sight not so long ago.
‘Curry bush. This place was full of curry bush – and before that, there was a pineapple farm,’ groaned Kevin as he hoisted one of the shoulder-high, thin but already heavy ficus saplings from the nursery onto the flatbed of the white, dented pickup truck.
Kevin works in nature conservation and is the manager of the Wild Tomorrow Fund reserves in the KwaZulu-Natal area. I wanted to learn more about the role of a field ranger through him, and he invited me to accompany him on his workday today.
The Wild Tomorrow Foundationis a non-profit organisation dedicated to restoring and preserving wilderness in South Africa. Based in New York, it is very successful worldwide in generating donations and is therefore financially strong enough to buy and renature more and more land for wilderness purposes.
“Our ultimate goal is to reopen the old corridors and allow the animals to migrate naturally. These old corridors were increasingly closed off in the past. They were bought up, cleared, fenced off and converted into farmland. Almost every game reserve today was once farmland. To restore the corridors, we primarily buy land, but we also work closely with surrounding reserves such as Phinda and try to remove the fences between the reserves,‘ Kevin explained to me as we sat in the car and drove to one of “his” huge properties.
’What will you do with the land once you’ve finished “renaturing” it?” I asked thoughtfully.
‘Nothing. Manage it. Nothing else.’
‘So you don’t want to open it to the public, to tourists?’
‘No! We’re in the conservation business. Preserving, protecting. Tourism is what others do. Phinda, for example. We don’t want to get involved in that. I mean, we have a safari vehicle. But that’s more for our donors or volunteers. We don’t make any money from it.’
‘What is wilderness to you?’
‘A place where humans don’t interfere,’ Kevin replied without hesitation.
‘Would you say this is wilderness?’
‘No. Wilderness is untouched by humans. We have to manage things here, otherwise an imbalance would arise. If all the fences were gone, balance could be restored. But that’s unrealistic nowadays. We make do with the corridors. That’s the closest thing we have to wilderness.’
‘Is there no wilderness left in South Africa?’
‘Yes, very little. In Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, there is a sector where no cars drive, there are no roads, and no one intervenes. It’s even called “wilderness”. There is also such a zone in Kruger National Park. But they are small. Very small.’
We had actually planned to do game counts today. That means counting the number of certain species in a specific area. But days of heavy rain had turned the roads into muddy pits that were difficult to pass, which would have made the animal count unnecessarily time-consuming and tedious.
‘This rain is bad for animal counting, but good for planting,’ Kevin exclaimed as he steered the rattling pickup truck through the driveway onto the newly acquired 18,000-hectare property.
The road was riddled with deep sand pits and the pickup truck swayed heavily from side to side, while the small trees on the flatbed took over and continued the wave-like motion. I had been with Kevin since 7:15 a.m. and noticed that he was spending an astonishing amount of time outdoors for a manager.
“Yes, I’m actually a practical person. I need to be outside. But it’s true that most of the physical work is done by others. I’m mostly in the car, finding out what needs to be done and then distributing the work.”
Kevin was supported by his nine-strong group of locals, whom he called ‘Green Mamba,’ as well as his field rangers. Of course, I wanted to accompany them again, but they weren’t on patrol today and were busy away from the parks. The fence of a community nursery needs to be repaired!
‘You do that too?’ I ask, somewhat surprised.
‘Yes. Nothing works here without the community, and we’re happy to support the little ones because they’re the future. It’s also a requirement for the “charitable” label we need to receive enough donations. We can go there later and see how far they’ve got, but first we have to get these trees in the ground. The weather is perfect.’
His ‘Green Mambas’ also had a different task originally, namely to rid the land of invasive alien plants. But today it was time to plant. Creating instead of destroying.
The diversity of everyday life
Kevin’s responsibilities were wide-ranging. In addition to purchasing land, removing invasive plants, renaturation and supporting the communities, he organised and financed rhino dehorning, trap clean-ups and support for other groups working in the conservation sector.
‘No two days are the same, and every day is dominated by the weather and the seasons,’ Kevin explained as we bumped past huge piles of rolled-up fence sections and stacked posts – a symbol of the restoration of the wilderness.
“When we buy a new piece of land, we usually have to remove the old fences, clear the invasive plants and sometimes even burn the native grass. Many farm owners don’t use fire to clear the land. But this is a natural process and, for many grasses, it’s actually necessary for them to grow at all. It also reduces the tick population. It was so bad here that some antelopes had their ears literally “eaten away”.
The pickup truck with the new plants screeched to a halt next to the Green Mambas, who had made themselves comfortable in the shade of a large tree and were unimpressed. No wonder. They had been digging holes and planting new trees all day long, in 27-degree heat – wearing rubber boots.
New boundary
The sky grew darker and darker, and dark blue-grey clouds gathered on the horizon, while the bright green leaves of the freshly sprouted trees and bushes created a beautiful contrast. There was a flash of lightning, and I counted silently, ‘21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 2…’ Like artillery fire, a wall of thunder rolled across the landscape and my chest began to shake. ‘Six kilometres to go, this is going to be intense,’ I thought, enjoying the increasingly dense cloud mountains. I like thunderstorms – and it wasn’t even cold yet.
Between dozens of tree transport trips, we were now on our way to a hardware store. We needed nails for the daycare. The ‘tool shop’ was at the end of a huge sandy square in a very small town and gave me the impression of being rather makeshift. Next to the hardware store were a few other colourfully painted shops, more like corner shops and small kiosks than proper shops. The sandy square gave the place a very rough, rudimentary impression that somehow seemed ‘typically’ African to me – completely different from St. Lucia, Durban or even Cape Town. You could tell that we were close to the border with Mozambique.
On the way to the nursery, we had to stop several times because cows or goats were blocking the red-orange roads, and here too, the pickup truck was rocking again.
‘Looks good,’ I said appreciatively, walking along the obviously newly erected fence. I’m no fence expert, but I had seen many fences and barriers in various states of disrepair over the past few months, and these were very sturdy and looked neat.
‘The old one was full of holes, the goats kept getting through and wrecking the whole playground,’ Kevin explained as he fished a saw out of the back of his pickup truck. ‘But that’s all in the past now.’
‘What kind of training do you need to be a “ranger” here?’ I asked as we were on our way back and the first heavy raindrops splashed against the windscreen.
‘We train most of them ourselves, but it would be nice if at least one of them had a licence to carry a rifle!’
‘Do you need that as a field ranger?’ I asked in surprise.
“It’s better to have it. We don’t carry out armed patrols here because we don’t have any rhinos. So we only have to deal with poachers, who are usually unarmed. But you never know. And sometimes we also support other reserves. Then it comes in handy. But the main task of my rangers is to check the outer fences. It’s the first hurdle, the first line that a poacher has to overcome. So they have to be in good condition! But as soon as the fences around Phinda come down, Phinda’s anti-poachers take over fence security and my rangers can concentrate more on conservation work again.”
Orchids in the eucalyptus forest
Kevin checked the numbers on his mobile phone again, then turned off the display and seemed satisfied.
‘500! We planted 500 trees today. It feels good to plant trees, doesn’t it?’ Kevin asked with a grin, brushing the sand off his hands.
Yes, it did! Even though I hadn’t actually planted the trees myself. I had hoisted them onto the car and back down again, distributed them with a touch of creativity across the black stubble field, and later marked each individual tree with barrier tape so that they could be monitored more easily later on. Because ‘monitoring’ is important in wildlife management. Sure, someone else could have done it. But he or she didn’t. It was me. Thanks to my support today, a new forest will soon grow here. ‘Yes, that feels good!’
‘There, can you see the yellow flower?!’ Kevin pointed into the eucalyptus plantation forest and I saw several long stems with small yellow flowers.
‘Those are wild orchids!’ Kevin exclaimed, bringing the car to a sudden halt, grabbing a pickaxe and rushing into the plantation forest, while a cloud of dust settled over the car from behind. After a few minutes, the entire loading area was covered with yellow orchids and a few small red blood lilies, and Kevin grinned at me.
‘I love orchids. I have a whole garden full of them at home. These ones would have been destroyed when the wood was harvested. So I gave them a new chance.’
He turned the ignition key and started the car again. We slowly set off, while raindrops pattered down on the landscape. Kevin really loves preserving nature. I could tell that clearly.
