In our last week in Zambia, we were lucky enough to visit the headquarters of Conservation South Luangwa (CSL) – an organisation we had been hearing about since we arrived. Boy were we in for an exciting afternoon!
The facility looked serious – to enter we had to drive through a big metal gate watched by a guard; and a tall brick wall hid the buildings behind it. But when we started to meet more of the staff at CSL, we could tell that behind the seriousness of the headquarters was a lot of passion for conservation! We first met Jennifer, the manager of the Human-Wildlife Conflict division. She gave us a brief overview of what CSL does, and the different teams that work under the organisation. We hugely enjoyed meeting the resident dogs and cats that lived at the base, as although we had only been away from home just over 2 weeks we all desperately missed our pets!
Les, the pilot at CSL, gave us a presentation on how you can make a difference to conservation from the air! The team have a small plane which they fly over the national park to detect an illegal activities or even help to track animals for research with the Zambia Carnivore Program (ZCP). It was clear that conservation work from the sky required lots of practice – although the footage taken from so high up showed tiny dots, a skilled pilot or spotter could easily identify the animal and even if it was young or old! Having never considered the use of planes in anti-poaching, it was so interesting to hear about all the logistics of flying and actually how helpful the aircraft has been since CSL started using it!
We then rolled up our sleeves and joined the human-wildlife conflict team in preparing some elephant deterrents. The first deterrent measure was called a “chilli bomber” which consisted of ping-pong balls and an air gun. We injected the ping-pong balls with a potent solution of ground up chilli (locally grown), oil and petrol and then sealed them with superglue. We loaded the bright orange projectiles into the air gun and got to practice our shooting skills on the toilet block. Billy (affectionately known as Chilli) told us that when villagers have a recurring problem with an elephant they can use this method and fire the balls at the elephant, where they will explode and cover the animal in chilli. Elephants have such a strong sense of smell that they really dislike chilli, so they are more likely to choose not to return to that village if they know they will get sprayed with chilli! The great thing about this deterrent, and all the other ones, is that it is elephant friendly, as the elephants have such thick skin that the ping-pong ball does not cause them damage. The next deterrent we helped to make got us up-close with a large pile of elephant dung! The chilli brick, as it is called, is a block made up of elephant dung mixed with loads of ground up chilli which is then dried. If a farmer were to see or hear elephants coming close to their crops, they could put one of these bricks out in the field and burn it. It wont start a fire, but it will release lots of smoke and fumes that smell strongly of chilli, acting as barrier to the elephants.
We had done lots of work with the chillies in creating deterrents, but now it was time to step back to their source. We hopped in the truck and drove for about 20 minutes through villages until we reached a crop of small bushes, that when you looked closely were covered in hundreds of small, red chillies! The woman who owned the crop came out and gave us buckets and we started collecting. It was really easy to pull the chillies off, but the source seemed never ending! The tobacco chillies were very hot, as Zoe could confirm when she dared to eat one! After about 30 minutes we handed back our buckets and headed home. What an amazing day we had at CSL!
Thank you to the whole team at CSL for showing us some amazing insights into the work you do – it was a huge privilege to work with the human-wildlife conflict team and we had lots of fun too!
Celia (MATZ Member)
