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5:15am, my watch keeps telling me. I throw back the covers and tiptoe out onto the cold deck of our river tent at Antelope Park. It’s been a year since I was last able to peek out and see the light come up over the river here. Still as beautiful as ever. Kim and I are slated for an early morning walk with Paza and Penya, and we’re both anxious and excited to see how these two lovely ladies have grown in our absence. Will we recognize them? Will they remember us? It’s also an opportunity to break out some of the video gear I’ve brought along and take it out for a proper field test. We walk out to meet the Ps at their old enclosure on the other side of the river, and as their gate is opened they both come springing out into the field and start playing with each other; excited to be in the cool morning air and going out for a proper romp. Any fears of not recognizing them are quickly dispelled. Both their outward appearances and individual quirks are just as recognizable and on comic display as they were a year ago. So good to see you again, ladies!

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I am a patient boy,
I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait.

-Fugazi.

“As easy as putting you on a bus,” I laugh. It’s mid-September and we’ve been standing around the parking lot of a Chicken Inn (Gweru’s de facto bus stop for private cross-country coaches) for over an hour now waiting to be picked up and taken to Antelope Park. I’ve finally turned my cell phone on, accepting that I’ll be paying a small fortune in roaming fees in order to get a connection in the middle of Zimbabwe, and I’m desperately trying to remember the right calling codes for the country. It doesn’t matter, because once I do get the number sequence down no one at Antelope Park answers. I call a backup number I have and get voicemail. Great. The sun is starting to set and it’s the end to a long day that began before sunrise twelve hours earlier in Zambia. Scratch that. It actually began some days ago when we first tried to coordinate the trip down here from Livingstone.

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For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

-Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

We wanted to share two videos with you which we feel helps illustrate the terrible cost many of Africa’s iconic animals face from poaching. The first is a clip from Big Life Foundation and the work they’re doing in East Africa to fight poachers and help save elephants and other animals. Big Life was co-founded by photographer extraordinaire Nick Brandt. The second is a trailer from The Price, directed by Melinda MacInnis and Matt Fife, and filmed by Emmy-winning cinematographer John Mann of Whale Wars and National Geographic’s Great Migrations fame. This feature-length documentary, scheduled for a 2013 release, focuses on the threat rhinos face from an international black market that values their horns as being, ounce-for-ounce, worth more than gold.

Both are heartbreaking, but both contain hope in that they’re reminders that we can make a difference if we so choose. So please, stand up and help be that difference, regardless how small your part may be. Help make the world a better place by defending those who cannot defend themselves against such unspeakable cruelty. Because extinction means forever.

My mother groan’d! my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

-William Blake

About an hour after we begin collecting data during our first elephant research session, the truck rounds a small corner in the road following a pair of slow-moving juvenile bulls when something else catches my eye. “I swear I just saw a baby rhino,” I tell Kim. Sure enough, about fifty meters into the bush a rhino calf and her mother stand perfectly still, warily watching us. Jacqui, ALERT’s research technician, tells the driver to stop the truck and proclaims, “Baby rhino wins out over elephants every time!” Figuring the calf to be six-to-seven months old at best, we spend the next twenty-odd minutes snapping photos, grinning from ear-to-ear, and positively gushing as we watch babe and mom slowly make their way towards the Zambezi for a late afternoon drink.

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In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.

-Stanley Kunitz

Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy. As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants.

-Thomas French.

It’s our first elephant research session and we’re supposed to be gathering census information on the make-up of the various elephant herds and individuals that pass through Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park in the hopes of better understanding their migratory routes. It’s part of a more comprehensive look at how to best mitigate the human-elephant conflict that so often occurs around here. In the dry season elephants and a host of the other wildlife come from miles around in the early morning and late evening hours to sake their thirsts in the Zambezi River. With Livingstone nearby, a major highway running parallel to the river a kilometer north, and various farms and other settlements dotting the landscape in-between, there can often be a high level of friction between man and beast. But it’s like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack, and it certainly shouldn’t be this hard. How is it that after bouncing down rutted roads in the back of a pickup truck for hours on end, covering mile-after-mile of bush inside the park, up and down the banks of the Zambezi and circling back around every which way, we’ve been unable to find a single wild elephant? How does 7,000 kilos of pachyderm hide itself so effectively?

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You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

-Thomas Wolfe.

We’re up at Lion Encounter’s BPG site in the Dambwa Forest and I’m getting an inordinate amount of affection from Subi, who’s rumored to be pregnant (and of this writing may very well have given birth to a litter of cubs). Having finished cleaning out the enclosures and getting ready to feed the group, everyone is milling about. But me? I can’t seem to give Subi enough attention. Every time I stand up to leave she gives me the most forlorn look and eeowws ever-so-softly, following me along the fence line. So I crouch back down and continue rubbing the side of her face through the fence and scratching behind her ears, which by the contended look on her face appears to be exactly what she wants.

Several days earlier Kim was the focus of a similar kind of attention from Toka – the resident male lion here at Dambwa – but in a completely different way. Wrapping up our maintenance duties and standing outside the enclosures talking with LE’s assistant volunteer manager Mulenga, Toka decided to spray Kim. Caught completely unaware, in the blink of an eye she was doused in full by the golden-maned heartthrob. As she tried to clean herself up there was nothing to do but laugh; although I did give Toka a sideways look and half-heartedly challenged him to a gentlemanly duel for thinking he could simply impress such beauty and intelligence by scent marking her. Oddly, Kim seemed rather aflutter over it all.

As much fun as the BPG crowd are, it’s the single male lion inhabiting a nearby enclosure that remains the focus of our attention at most times – for in that enclosure is Dynamite.

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Our first walk with Munali, Madoda and Zambezi – the 2MZeds – was a training walk for all the volunteers who arrived that week to learn how to safely walk and interact with the lions. It was just a bit ironic that it immediately followed our walk with Dendi and Damara, where we witnessed a heart pounding standoff between the 2Ds and a herd of buffalo, and were ordered to run as fast as our legs could move us.

Nevertheless, safety is taken seriously at Lion Encounter, which is essential as the current walking lions are not little cubs anymore but more like unruly teenagers testing their limits and their human pride-mates’ patience. This was the first of two training and safety walks we were required to participate in, the second one focusing on dominance with the 2Ds. During these walks we listened, we observed, and we took turns practicing some basic maneuvers. On subsequent walks throughout our stay the ever-watchful lion handlers would correct, reprimand, and sometimes compliment us on how we interacted with the lions when they, or we, misbehaved.

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We’re excited to announce that we’ve been featured in Travel Buzz!

Charles contacted us while we were in Africa about doing a brief and informal interview, having found us through our participation with Getaway Magazine. A simple five-question format, how could we resist?

We’d also like to remind our readers that we have Instagram and Twitter pages, where you can further follow our adventures.

As well, after our 2011 Africa trip we created a Facebook group – the Wildlife Volunteers Support Network – dedicated to helping animal conservation volunteers, and anyone else similarly associated or interested, to build networks and share information. Is there some place you’ve always wanted to travel to or an organization you wanted to volunteer with that you didn’t know much about or who to ask to find out more? Chances are one of the WVSN group members can answer your questions, offer advice, or simply encourage you to seek out your dreams in some beautiful far-flung corner of the world.

So come join us!

Prior to our arrival at Lion Encounter we heard tales of volunteers on lion walks running for their lives from herds of buffalo and elephants, and sometimes even climbing up trees for safety. While this sounded very exciting, and not just a little scary, I tried to recall the last time I’d climbed a tree. When my memory drew a blank I realized I’m not sure I ever have climbed a tree, and I tried to assure myself that if I were to find myself in a similar situation adrenaline would see me through.

This illustrates one of the main differences between Antelope Park and Lion Encounter. At Antelope Park, we encountered a variety of antelope species on lion walks, as well as zebra and giraffe, but the only real potential danger was between the lions and their prey. In contrast, Lion Encounter is located in the midst of the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park. There are no predators in the park in the form of big cats or hyena, but there are crocodiles in the Zambezi River and there are plenty of hippos, elephants and buffalo, all of which can and will kill you despite not being predators. Because of that, in addition to the lion handlers accompanying us on our walks, there were also at least two armed Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) scouts. They walked ahead of us and made sure the coast was clear and safe for the humans, the lions, and the wildlife in the park. This is not to say they won’t allow interactions to naturally occur between the lions and the wild animals, as we would soon discover on our very first walk with Dendi and Damara.

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