I was listening to the radio as I drove home recently. Well-known environmentalist and TV presenter Dave Pepler was talking about the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park 15 years ago and the positive effect it had on the environment.
‘Their numbers increased, forcing animals who share the area with them to change their behaviour. The number of beaver colonies increased with positive impacts on fish habitats, and the coyote population decreased, potentially providing more prey for predators such as red foxes and bald eagles.’ When you ask if this is a worthwhile exercise, the evidence of the whole ecosystem becoming healthier is quite persuasive,” he said.
There are numerous South African examples of reintroducing animals into the wild and, while there’s an occasional failure, there are many success stories.
Here’s one of the good stories. Three years ago, lions were reintroduced to Karoo National Park. While tourism was one of the big reasons SANParks decided to do this, there are more compelling reasons. Park manager Nico van der Walt explains, ‘The introduction of predators into the park forms part of attempts to restore the ecological processes here, specifically to re-establish the process of predation. This will help to control herbivore numbers naturally and decrease the need for capturing and culling, which is in line with SANParks’ minimum interference philosophy.’
In protected areas with no large predators, herbivore numbers can soar to unnaturally high densities that could be detrimental to sensitive ecosystems such as the Karoo. The lions fulfil their ecological role by removing older and weaker animals from the system and by impacting on the herbivore population size.
So far, so good for these lions originally from Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. The first group has produced two cubs and, although visitors to the park can’t walk about as freely as they once did, it’s never a bad experience to hear lions roaring in the night. The lions have had a positive impact on the behaviour of jackals, which had become a problem, behaving like predators and killing many smaller herbivores and newborns. Now that the lions have taken up their rightful place as apex predators, the jackals don’t have to hunt and have gone back to what they’re supposed to do: scavenging.
The bottom line is that we’re finally realising we have to try to bring back the equilibrium.
Main image by Scott Ramsay.
Related: Three lions released into Mountain Zebra National Park
