Episode 5
Why do we need Game Reserves like Botlierskop?
Most people only think of Game Reserves as places to see wild animals. But what you pay to stay does more much more than give you a comfy bed and coffee at breakfast.
Jaco Koekemoer of Botlierskop Game Reserve explains what these reserves do for conservation: listen to stories about how they fight alien species, how they work with their neighbours to save the red-billed oxpecker birds, and how some cheetahs need to be taught to hunt.
Jaco tells us about the 300 year history of the reserve (in brief!) and about the type of guests that the rangers love having on game drive.
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Botlierskop Game Reserve: https://www.botlierskop.co.za/
Ashia Cheetah Conservation: https://ashia.co.za/
Info on the Black Wattle Trees: https://invasives.org.za/fact-sheet/black-wattle/
Red-Billed Oxpecker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_oxpecker
South African Tourism: https://www.southafrica.net/
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Transcript
Episode 5: Why do we need Game Reserves like Botlierskop?
Welcome to a new episode of Africa with André, where we celebrate Africa - One story at a Time.
[:Hi Jaco and welcome to my podcast.
[:[00:00:41] André: You're very welcome. Tell us a little bit about who you are Jaco and what you do at Botlierskop.
[:I've been here for about two years now, but I've known the owners for a very, very long time. And, while I was actually traveling around the world, working on cruise ships, in my vacation time used to do some videography and photography work for them,
So, ja I have a long-lasting relationship with the property and absolutely love being here.
[:[00:01:26] Jaco: I actually grew up here in the Garden Route, actually very close to where the property is located. I grew up in George, and then I went to university in Port Elizabeth and then I left for the big open ocean.
[:[00:01:53] Jaco: So, if I can go into a bit of a longer story, I actually want to start off back in the 1700s. As it's such a rich story of the physical piece of ground that we are situated on. The whole entire area was very well known, for, yellowwoods trees and for getting timber products from here, especially with the rivers flowing through. And there was a gentleman named August Frederik Beutler, and he owned this piece of land. And there's a little mountain hill or in Afrikaans, it's called a koppie. And on this koppie, he, what he used to do is whenever ships used to come into the harbours, he would create a nice big fire on top of this hill.
And this would sort of signal for all the farmers in the area. Listen here there is a ship on the way, so please bring your produce so you can sell it to the ships.
[:[00:02:52] Jaco: Yup, that is correct. And no, it was more for the farmers in the areas, as he could see, of course, from this mountain hill, he could actually see the ships coming, as we are quite highly elevated. And yeah, he then actually used it as, I almost want to say like a sort of lighthouse for the farmers.
on actually started from the:[:
But I interrupted you carry on with a bit of the history.
[:[00:04:18] André: I'm going to interrupt you again, because for those listeners that don't know what an impala is, some people might confuse it with a springbok, they look very similar, but an impala is basically a small antelope that is found, in a lot of the game reserves and national parks where there are animals, right?
[:[00:04:37] André: It's just so that, those listeners who don't know what we're talking about, know to picture a small, usually light brown and white coloured, antelope,
[:[00:04:47] André: which makes a very good happy meal for the lions is what we always joke.
[:But what Dr. Dirk did, because, it was this genetic mutation, at the end of the day they weren't too healthy or didn't grow too old. So, his whole idea was to bring a conservation edge to these very rare animals.
And what he did was he actually had two and he had them breed with normal impalas. So that way, the gene pool got widened again and then even though you weren't getting only black impalas, you were getting a lot healthier black impalas when you do get black impalas. And it's come to the point now where the populations of impalas have grown so much that we're almost now at a 50, 50 between the black impala and the normal impala on the property.
So, what Dr. Dirk then did was he wanted to start involving tourism into this wildlife conservation efforts. He then started also pulling his son Arnold Neethling, who is the current owner; they then started bringing the tourist element into it all. They started literally from their own farmhouse in their kitchen, making coffee and tea and snacks for the guests arriving for game drive. And from there they just kept on growing and growing.
And then in:[00:07:24] André: Yeah, yeah. Botlierskop has overcome quite a few challenges along the way from, as you said, the fire and two floods, but you've come out, you've come out stronger and, in many ways, more beautiful afterwards. So well done on that to the team.
But conservation is the main purpose of the reserve, correct?
[:[00:08:22] André: Because accommodation on a reserve is, it's not just about giving people a nice holiday. Doing conservation work - and we can talk about one or two of the other projects that you do later - but these conservation projects, cost money. And so, the accommodation side of things that you offer for visitors to come and stay and do game drives and see the animals, it's not only because you want some people to have a nice experience. It's also to fund all the conservation work that you do so when people come and stay they're actually helping to conserve the nature and to make sure the animals are well looked after. Do I understand that correctly?
[:We need to look a lot further than that. And that's why our conservation projects stretch very far into Africa and northern Africa for that matter, where a lot of the times the animals are there, you have the volunteers who are willing to work, but you don't have the funding that they need to successfully protect these species.
And in some of these countries, it's really, some of them are literally still war-torn countries where civil wars have wiped out colonies of animals to the point of extinction. And now we need to get these animals from neighbouring countries back into their natural habitat. And we all know what a flight ticket costs nowadays.
Because it's not just the flights. It's medicine. It's the staff that have to train to look after the animals, but it's also the anti-poaching units that need to protect these species. That's the other part lots of conservation costs, are that a lot of people don't realize.
[:[00:10:44] Jaco: So I want highlight three projects here that we've seen the best results of. And the one I want to start with is where we are removing alien plant species.
Over here, we have lots of wattle trees and the wattle trees are very thirsty when it comes to water. They will literally suck our rivers and our underground water tables dry. So, you have big projects of removing these wattle species. But when we started removing them, we thought about it a little bit different.
We said, okay, we can just go and remove these trees and great, we've done a great job. But how can we make it more? How can we involve other elements that we stand for here on the property as well. And the first one was, the community aspect of it. So, what we did is, we offered a gentleman in the community an opportunity to start his own woodworking business where he actually has a team of workers working for him.
He then goes and chops down all of the trees. But then we buy the wood from him. So that way we're destroying alien plants. We created a business helping the community with job creation. We now also purchasing this from him. And these are now the same wood that's used in all of our log fires, whether it's the fireplaces in the rooms or in the restaurants, then to add a cherry on top, what we also do is, instead of just removing these alien plant species, what we do is for every tree that we remove, we'll actually plant an indigenous tree back into the ground. So that way, not only are we removing the things that are destroying the property, but we're actually adding back into the ground, again, these beautiful, large, lush trees that used to, be a staple of the area,
[:[00:12:50] Jaco: 100%.
[:[:
[00:13:28] Jaco: One of the other ones is a small little bird called the red billed oxpecker. The red billed oxpecker was very well renowned in the area, but due to lots of the cattle farms in the area, what happened is as soon as these organophosphate dips started being used on the cattle, all of these birds died from this bad, uh, pesticides that were using on the animals. So, it was one of those things where we could see them on our animals all the time, on the giraffes and the buffaloes and the rhinos busy eating off all of the ticks and all of these bad parasites, and all of a sudden, they were just gone.
So, then it was time to bring them back. But this is where it gets really complicated. Because the thing is, we couldn't just bring them back. Now we have this new bird colony, they go out and they just eat the same pesticide ridden ticks again, and the whole colony will just disappear.
And this is why I love this story, because for me a big part of conservation is education.
And we had to go and educate the farmers in the area to let them know, listen here, not only are these organophosphate dips bad for the quality of the meat but it's also for these beautiful bird species. Now they've disappeared. Now you'll notice the ticks on your animals are getting more.
Now you have to use more dips, and it's just this bad cycle that keeps on continuing. So, we then had agreements with all the neighbouring farmers: we're going to bring all of these colonies of birds here. They're going to start breeding again. And it took about two to three months where they had to be kept inside, let's call it an enclosure, just so they can get used to the temperatures and then we set them free.
And this is now the second season where the colony actually grew. So, I think it's really, a successful project to help out these little birds to flourish and to once again, have this positive impact of eating all of the ticks off of these cattle. So now the farmers don't have to use bad dips. So, it's once again, one of those very amazing stories stemming from the smallest little bird.
[:[00:16:00] Jaco: No, it definitely wasn't. What you said is so true. And I don't think any conservation project in that sense is easy.
And like you said, for them, of course, in the beginning, there were additional costs involved more expensive dips that they have to use, that's oxpecker friendly, but at the end of the day after three years of us having this project I think the benefits from their side are also starting to be seen, as they now have to use less dips, less pesticides and the animals are also a lot healthier because of this natural pesticide that's being used.
[:I think you had a third project that you guys are quite proud of.
[:[00:17:08] André: It's a long story about the amazing work they do. Tell me before you go into that, how do I spell Ashia just so that we all know what we're looking for?
[:[00:17:22] André: Okay. Yeah. Tell us what they do and how you work with them.
[:They'll work with orphaned cubs. They'll work with, animals that are once again in these war-torn countries where they also get used as pets, shipped as pets, so really amazing work that they do in getting cheetahs safely to them. And then spreading these cheetahs out in a healthy way again. There's also these diseases that have happened now because of the free-roaming cheetahs in the wild being so little, there's also lots of inbreeding that has started to happen where new diseases are now starting to creep in.
So basically, what Ashia is trying to do is to widen this gene pool again by moving cheetahs around to different properties where it's different cheetahs from different areas.
And where we slot into this, whole story is like for example, now with the cheetahs. So, we recently got two new boys, Percy and Jackson, and these two boys were not related at all. When they did arrive from two different reserves, they noticed that these two connected quite well.
They started eating together. There was no fighting and that eventually decided these two can actually be sent, together. Now, because lots of these cheetahs were at Ashia from very young Ashia then had to teach them how to hunt, teach them how to activate those hunting instincts, which is a very tricky thing to do without having direct human interaction with these amazing cats. Because very quickly negatively imprint to humans. And that's the exact opposite of what we're trying to do. Right?
[:[00:20:13] Jaco: exactly right. They, I almost want to say they are like dogs in that sense where They will quickly become your best friend, and they'll never leave your side.
Then the next phase of their rewilding process, as we like to call it, will be a Soft Reserve. So that is what we are. Because we don't have vast amounts of space, you know, the 100, 000, 200, 000 hectares for them to go and search for the food. Because we are a bit smaller, it makes it easier on them because now not only do they need to learn how to hunt, but they also need to learn what can we hunt and what can't we hunt?
[:[00:21:06] Jaco: I can actually tell you a quick story that I actually witnessed with my own eyes So, after Percy and Jackson were released from the boma where they spent about two weeks. So now they're starting to chase a couple of things, and we were following them the one day to check how the guys are doing, are they at least catching something, and we saw the two of them, and there was a baby rhino, and the two of them thought, huh, this looks like a nice little snack let's see if we can get this guy. And they were sort of starting to creep closer, creep closer. And when they were about 50 meters away, this gigantic mother rhino came around the bush with her horn raised, she was ready to destroy. I've never seen cheetahs run as fast.
[:[00:22:03] Jaco: So, I think the two quickly realized, okay, we need to look for something else. This is definitely not gonna work, but yeah. They've been with us now since about February of this year (2024) and they are just doing spectacular.
They are hunting for themselves. They've noticed now Impala and Waterbuck are their go to’s, but also every now and again, they'll tackle a wildebeest or two.
I don't think a lot of people actually realize how endangered cheetahs are. And that's where this amazing work Ashia does, I really feel is so important
[:And really learn about how nature works, how it interacts, and I think that's an opportunity that a lot of people have when they go to a reserve like yours.
[:So, you need to be so careful in giving everyone more than just one or two stories. You need to make this a real great experience. And I think that's what makes our guides so incredible is that they can do that. They love the curious guests just as much as they love the guests who wants to take lots of photos and go share with their families.
And at the end of the day if we look back at the conservation standpoint, I think both of these guests are very important in the grander scheme of conservation because the photography guests, they relay that image through pictures.
They can show people on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, all of these beautiful animals. Look at how beautiful this lion is in his natural habitat. This is not a zoo. This lion is running young, wild, and free. And just as much as the curious guest who puts his camera down and asks, but listen, what's the story with these cheetahs? And that person will also once again, go and share those stories.
So, I think both of these guests are extremely important for a conservation perspective as well.
[:Tell me just before we leave, what is your favourite animal and why?
[:Look at this thing. This must be a dinosaur. And it's for me, simply just how peaceful they actually are, because if you're driving in the bush and you notice a rhino, you're going to be fine. As long as you just show him, you're no threat to him or her, you're giving them the right of way. They're the most peaceful and chilled animals. And in the poaching game, they're currently the underdog. And I'll always vote for the underdog.
[:You will be able to hear the next conversation in about a week's time. And I hope that you've enjoyed listening and please do give us a rating on Spotify or Apple and tell others about this podcast. Until next time!
