Mozambique is using science to save Gorongosa National Park wildlife after civil war

The 14 African wild dogs were ravenous, dashing back and forth along the fence of their open-air enclosure, or boma, bouncing madly on their pogo-stick legs, tweet-yipping their distinctive wild-dog calls, and wagging their bushy, white-tipped tails like contestants on a game show desperate to be seen.

Since arriving at the park three months earlier, as they acclimated to their new setting and forged the sort of immiscible bonds that make Lycaon pictus one of the most social mammals in the world, the dogs had grown accustomed to a daily delivery of a freshly killed antelope to feast on.

But it had been nearly 48 hours since the pack’s last meal and, hello, anybody out there?

Ah, here comes the food truck now.

Paola Bouley, the park’s associate director of carnivore conservation, and two of her colleagues rode up to the fence in a pickup, opened the gate, edged the vehicle just inside the boma and began lowering the carcass of a male impala.

As she stood in the back of the truck, Ms Bouley gripped a rope tied to the antelope’s rear legs, with the intention of luring the dogs from the comfort of their enclosure by slowly dragging their breakfast outside. Nice idea, but the dogs could not wait.

They snatched at the carcass, tried disembowelling it in mid-air, yanking at the rope so violently they practically pulled the extremely fit Ms Bouley to the ground.

Stop, stop! She cried.

New plan: Let’s tie the rope to the pickup instead.

Again, lure and vehicle inched out through the gate, and this time the dogs followed, their coats the colour of army camouflage, their ears the size of soap dishes. One, two, three, four, a baker’s dozen.

The dogs bounded to freedom and fell on the impala en masse, just as the scientists hoped they would do.

Except something was wrong. The dogs stopped eating. They ran around in confusion. One dog was missing, and not just any cur: It was the top dog, the alpha female of the pack.

Where was their queen?

The scientists scrambled, too.

“It’s Beira — she’s still inside,” Ms Bouley called out, referring to the name chosen for the alpha female by local schoolchildren in honour of the capital city of their province.

Loping over to the assembled observers, Ms Bouley said: “She’s not coming out. She’s cautious. She’s always been cautious.”

Now more than ever: Beira was pregnant with pups that the entire pack would help raise. There was too much commotion. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave,” Ms Bouley said.

It’s tough trying to resuscitate one of Africa’s most storied and biologically diverse national parks from a state of near-annihilation, the result of a brutal 16-year civil war in which an estimated 1 million Mozambicans were killed and a huge swath of Gorongosa’s wildlife destroyed. Tough, but by no means impossible.

Thirty minutes after dispersing her guests, Ms Bouley sent a joyful update: All pack members had left the pen, and the gate had been closed to prevent their re-entry. The dogs had polished off their last free brunch and were exploring the neighbourhood, clearly eager to resume their career as team hunters par excellence.

Over the next several days, the ebullient carnivores managed to dispatch another impala and two waterbucks — beefy, handsome antelopes with bright bull’s-eye markings on their rears.

They are all too common in Gorongosa.

Beira’s pregnant belly bulged ever more visibly, and the pack was digging a den for her. Lions were no longer the only resident meat-eaters able to keep the spreading herds of grazing mammals in check.

Another apex predator, absent for decades from the park’s 1,500 square miles, was back — yet more evidence that Gorongosa is on track for a great second act.

A Massive Experiment

Gorongosa has attracted the attention of scientists from around the world who see an opportunity to address, in real time, fundamental questions of ecology, evolution, the rise and fall and shifting distribution of species, and changes in what researchers call the landscape of fear.

The bushbucks of Gorongosa, for example, are unusually brazen about venturing away from the concealing foliage that surrounds termite mounds, where the shy, slender antelope traditionally are found.

Instead, Gorongosa’s bushbucks are grazing in open grassland, with all the cockiness of African buffaloes or zebras.

Is that good, neutral or destructive to the local habitat — to the mix of vegetation and its micro-faunal throngs, the flow of water, the cycling of nutrients, the ease with which dung beetles can put the far-flung bounty to use? And how long before the insouciant bushbuck realize that Gorongosa’s predators are multiplying and headed their way?

Gorongosa is at once more and less “natural” than other game reserves in Africa. “There are no fences around Gorongosa, and that’s the way a park is supposed to be,” said Test Malunga, a field guide at the park.

At the same time, park management, with the blessing of the Mozambique government, has decided to “actively encourage and promote science,” said Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton University who is on the Gorongosa Project’s board of directors.

As a result, researchers are not confined to simple observational studies of the park’s free-ranging wildlife.

They can manipulate field conditions to narrow down the spurs to animal movement and foraging choices. They can dart animals to take blood samples, measure their vital signs and then outfit them with GPS collars — and for the elephants, that means necklaces big enough to girdle an oak tree.

“Many parks limit or even prohibit such activities,” Mr Pringle said. “But without them you can’t have a truly science-based management strategy or definitively answer burning questions at the forefront of ecological knowledge.”

Gorongosa is also preternaturally lucky to have a wealthy benefactor dedicated to the park’s restoration and future.

Since 2004, Gregory Carr, who made a fortune in telecommunications before turning to full-time philanthropy and human rights advocacy, has spent tens of millions of dollars on the park and the 1,300 square miles of buffer zone that surrounds it, where some of the poorest communities in Mozambique, and hence in the world, can be found.

His foundation and various donors-in-arms have invested in local schools, mobile clinics, bee farms, sustainable coffee plantations, girls’ clubs, and a master’s program in conservation biology for Mozambican students. The classroom is Gorongosa.

“It’s the only conservation biology program in the country,” Mr Carr said. “We’re told it may be the only one in the world taught entirely in a national park.”

Behind the park’s splendour, explained Piotr Naskrecki, an associate director of research at Gorongosa, is its location at the southernmost tip of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, a massive geological formation that, over millions of years, has channelled huge amounts of biodiversity into Mozambique’s midriff.

Spanning elevations from sea level to 6,000 feet at the top of Mount Gorongosa, the park is a great mixtape of “nearly every conceivable habitat,” Mr Naskrecki said: alpine forest, montane meadow, woodland savanna, grassland, scrub forest, a touch of true rain forest.

And as you drive through it, bumping over roads so deeply rutted you feel like a human castanet, you realize you’ve never been so happy in your life.

Ecological Disaster

In the 1980s, the music stopped. A civil war broke out, the park was shuttered, and government and rebel forces turned Gorongosa into a battlefield and makeshift abattoir.

Elephants were slaughtered for their tusks. Elands, sables, wildebeests, zebras and other large herbivores were hunted for meat or sport. Lions, leopards and hyenas were killed for being in the way, and many animals simply died of starvation.

By the time the fighting and rampant hunting ended in the mid-1990s, the park’s thundering census of large mammals had been slashed by 95 per cent, to numerical whimpers: 15 African buffaloes here, six lions there, five zebras, a few dozen hippos and elephants.

After consulting with a broad range of experts, Mr Carr proposed to the Mozambican government a public-private partnership that he hoped would both hasten the recovery of Gorongosa’s grandeur and lift the economy, too.

“Being an economic engine and a promoter of human rights, that’s a new way to think about national parks,” Mr Carr said. “The people who live around here, this is their homeland, and they have a right to live in a decent environment that can sustain them.”

The team started by restocking the larger herbivores, importing 200 buffaloes and 200 wildebeests from South Africa.

As the bulk grazers began trimming back the overgrown grassland, the park’s array of smaller antelope species, with their twisty, calligraphic horns and their Modigliani faces, could get through to feed and more reliably breed.

The expanding prey options soon lofted the lion count, which in turn began luring back tourists for whom a lion sighting is synonymous with a safari vacation.

But the lions alone could not handle the swelling ranks of herbivores and omnivores, and Gorongosa’s scientists realized the park needed a more diverse guild of predators.

The researchers’ efforts to import leopards from elsewhere in Africa have proved legislatively challenging, and so they were thrilled when an adult male leopard, a voluntary immigrant from the buffer zone, showed up in late March and as of midsummer appeared to still be around.

The scientists admitted they have made mistakes. “We tried to introduce the cheetah,” Mr Naskrecki said, “but we learned this is not the right environment for them, and historically they have not been here.”

African wild dogs, by contrast, have a history in Gorongosa and are under fewer trade restrictions, and Ms Bouley said another pack would be introduced in 2019.

The New York Times