KGALAGADI CHEETAH TRACKING

The Bateleurs has again undertaken to support the work of Gus Mills and the Kgalagadi Cheetah Project by providing regular flights to track and record, via GPS, the movements of a number of collared cheetah in the Kgalagadi Reserve. The first of these flights in 2009 took place on 31st January, and we are very pleased and proud to report that it was flown by a brand new Bateleurs volunteer member, Andre van Niekerk, based in Upington. This is the report we received from Gus Mills:

Report from Gus Mills of the Kgalagadi Cheetah Project

“Because of the large ranges of Kgalagadi cheetahs it is extremely helpful to be able to track our radio-collared animals from the air. On Saturday 31st January, Andre van Niekerk a new Bateleurs pilot from Upington, kindly gave up his time to do a tracking flight in his Robinson 44 helicopter. It was a very hot day and even with the helicopter door off, and at 2,000 feet above ground, the air was hot! However, between 09h30 and 11h00 we covered most of the southern area of the park and managed to locate six of our collared cats - something that would have taken us at least two days to do from the ground, and with no guarantee that we would have found all of them. The only disappointment was that we did not find one of our females with a large cub up near Mata Mata. I have subsequently heard that she is in the area so it seems that there may be a problem with her collar. Hopefully, as it is a new collar, it has simply drifted slightly off frequency.

The most interesting observation was to find two males deep inside the territory of two other males. This is most unusual. We also located the resident males about 12 km from them. We have spent the last two days following these males and although they have started to move back to their own territory, they are still inside that of the original two. Fortunately these territories are large, several hundred square kilometres, so the two rival groups have not met up. If they did there would be trouble! The question is why? At the moment we are at a loss to understand this, but we will try to monitor the situation. Unfortunately we have had to leave them today because we need to go out tomorrow to check up on one of the females we located, to see if she has cubs.

Normally we expect to find all the animals, but not having found the female near Mata Mata, whose collar may be malfunctioning, led to our failing to find our most wide-ranging female. We spent more time than usual searching for the Mata Mata cheetah, and so did not have enough time to locate the other wide-ranging female. Nevertheless the mission was a great success and is hugely appreciated.”