The Lion Queen: Burn Baby Burn

The Lion Queen: Burn Baby Burn

Sumayah’s Co-op at an African Wildlife Preserve: 1st Installation

By Sumayah Rahman, Biology, 2015

On September 22nd, after a long journey with three flights, I landed in Hoedspruit, the “wildlife capital” of South Africa! This semester, I am doing a co-op at the Askari Wilderness Conservation Program, located on the Pidwa Wilderness Reserve in the Limpopo region of South Africa. Many people may think that those who work on an African game reserve spend most of their time driving around admiring animals. Although we do get to do that, running a reserve of this size (12,500 hectares) takes a lot of work. For example, in the past two weeks, I have had to use a handsaw to remove tree branches that elephants had pushed onto the road, move sharp rocks from a riverbed to arrange them around a rare tree species to protect it from animals, inject invasive alien plant species with poison, and fill bags of food (lichen) for the antelope in the breeding programs on the reserve.

However, in this blog post I am going to focus on the most exciting thing that happened this week: burning. The South African bushveld is a naturally fire-prone ecosystem. Veldfires cause disturbances to vegetation structure and composition that are very beneficial, and assists with distributing of nutrients. If things were entirely left up to Mother Nature, lightning is what sets off these velfires. But the downside to this type of natural fire is that it cannot be controlled. When communities, agriculture, and businesses are exposed to destructive fires, they suffer greatly, proving that fire management is an important part of running a wilderness reserve.

Here at Askari, we applied prescribed burning, also known as controlled burning, to several large portions of Pidwa Wilderness Reserve. We used a driptorch to set the fires, which is a tool that releases a steady stream of flaming fuel onto the ground. We set fire to the bush in blocks, starting the flame in the corner of each block, carefully controlling which areas are burned. As the trees and grass went up in flames, thousands and thousands of insects sprang up from the earth and flew into the air to escape a fiery death. We did not see any mammals, because they knew to run away at the very first hint of smoke. We walked along the fire carrying beaters and water canons, so that if the fire jumped across the road to the wrong block, we could put it out.

The walk beside the fire was unlike anything I had ever done before. The air was hot and incredibly smoky. I was wearing sunglasses to protect my eyes from the smoke, a long-sleeved shirt and jeans to protect my skin from the scorching heat, and a rag around my mouth and nose just so I could breathe. But it was so smoky that the rag wasn’t much help at all. I can honestly say that I never realized what a commodity fresh air was, and after spending many hours monitoring the controlled fire here at Pidwa, I have a newfound appreciation for each breath I take.

When the summer rains begin next month, we expect to see an abundance of green shooting up from the burned black ashy areas. This gives the herbivores on the reserve a fresh supply of food, since the moribund plant material has been burned away and replaced with new green grass that has increased protein and mineral content.

Burning is a necessary part of bushveld management, and is just one of the many jobs we carry out here at Askari. For the next few weeks we will continue with the burns (depending on the weather) as well as work on other tasks. For the next three months, I will be chronicling these experiences for NUSci. One never knows what to expect when working on a wilderness reserve, and plans can change in just a minute. A giraffe may have been killed by a pack of lions, or a hyena den may have been located! In cases such as these, we jump into our Game Viewer vehicle and rush to the site so that we can observe these wild animals, which is an absolutely magical experience.