If you have been on facebook lately, you would know by now that we have recently rescued four little cheetah cubs here at CCF. It all started with a phone call from a farmer (that’s how most things start), saying that an adult female cheetah was found trapped in a fence by one of his farm workers. The cat had apparently become wedged by her hips between two wires in the fence and could not get out, by the time they found her she was dehydrated and exhausted – when they cut the fence and pulled her out she breathed her last breath. The farmer called us because the cheetah was radio collared and had an ear tag with CCF on it.
Just over six months earlier, the CCF staff had captured this female (then with a litter of three nearly full-grown cubs), collared her and released her on a friendly farmer’s land. Since then the collar had been sending GPS data on a weekly basis, showing where she was every day after her release. Near the end of May and beginning of April, she started restricting her movements and staying near a specific site. From this it was quite clear that she had given birth and was staying close to the den site.
On the day of the fateful phone call, we went to the farm to collect the body and the collar and checked the maps that had been produced by the collar. When talking to the farmer our suspicions were confirmed as he said that the farm worker that found her saw four small cubs run into the bush as he cut the fence wires. I spoke to him, showing the maps that we had with us and we then went to the exact location where she was found – the fence was unusual in that it was part of a cattle kraal and therefore had more wires than most farm fences. After taking a GPS point and several photos of the site, we headed back to CCF to discuss a plan of action.
The next day, we headed back to the farm (between Otjiwarongo and Okahandja, a two hour drive from CCF) to set up a trap cage. The farmer supplied one cage and we brought another one. We decided to place one trap cage right next to the spot in the fence where the mother was caught and rely solely on the fact that she was there to lure the cubs into the cage (the cubs were too small to use live bait). Once everything had been setup, we headed back to CCF and asked the farmer to check the cage twice a day and call us if anything was caught.
There were several worrying questions that made that bothered me all that night. Was the scent of the mother enough to attract the cubs? Did we scare them too far away when we set up the trap? Would we be able to trap all four cubs without one of them being crushed by the trap door? Would the many jackals that we heard in the area find and kill the cubs before they entered the trap? Eventually, seeing that there was nothing I could do about any of these problems (other than pray, which I did), I put them out of my mind and went to sleep.
The next morning, there was no phone call. I had hoped that the farmer would call at 8am with good news – all four cubs caught with no injuries. By 10am I could no longer take the suspense, so I called him. He picked up and I barely had enough time to ask him the question before he said, “Yes, we found one in the trap this morning and the workers just came to tell me about it”! Oh, happy days, that was a huge relief, if one was trapped it should be easy to trap the others. Back we (Kate, the cheetah keeper, and I) drove to the farm, filled with relief and hope.
When we got there we found one very wild, very upset little cub going absolutely nuts in the trap cage. He was fine, though, so we transferred him from the trap cage to the other cage (next to the trap cage, on the other side of the fence) using a cheetah box. In this cage, he would be safe and he would be able to call his siblings to come closer. We hoped that he would call them right into the trap cage next to him. So we set everything up and drove to a point where we could see the cage through the binoculars but hopefully weren’t conspicuous enough for the other cubs to be scared away.
Fairly soon, he started chirping (as cheetahs do) to his littermates. We waited, and waited, and waited. After a few hours, we got the first sighting – three little heads popping out of the bush about five metres from the trap cage. They chirped back to their brother and slowly came closer to him. Kate and I strained our eyes through the bino’s, we were sitting on ice. They crept ever so slowly closer until, finally, in they went! All three of them together sitting perfectly in the trap cage, it’s all over now isn’t it? Not quite, they sat in the cage without setting off the trigger to the trap doors. There they were, in an open cage and there was nothing we could do about it – other than wait.
After what seemed like forever (probably about 30min), Kate and I were still watching the three little cubs sitting in the open trap cage. Just as we started talking about what could be wrong with the cage, BAM down go the doors. It was all systems go: we drove quickly up to the cage, and peered into it – just to find not three, but two cubs in the cage. How could that have happened? We saw all three cubs in the cage not five minutes earlier! We scanned the bush, and there she was (we assumed it was a female, to be so clever) – running around looking very stressed and trying to get to her brothers, while staying away from us. There was nothing for it but to get the other two cubs into a box and reset the cage, hoping that she would come back into it. By this time the sun was low in the sky, and the jackals had started howling in the not-so-far distance.
After setting up for the third time, we drove to a different point than previously, where a reservoir partly obscured our view of the cage (with the cub being on the far side of the cage). Then we waited. After about an hour, the sun was setting and nothing happened in the cage. Kate decided to try and get a better view of the cage – she got out of the car and crept up to the reservoir. Slowly and as quietly as possible, she inched around to get a better view. As I watched, suddenly she stopped creeping, stood up, looked at me incredulously, waving her arms as if to say “I can’t believe it!”. When she got back to the car, she said that she peeked over the reservoir – just to look straight into the eyes of the little cub standing a few metres away from the cage and looking straight at Kate as if to say “Do you think I’m so stupid as to walk into a cage with you sitting there watching me?”.
She had won this round. We decided to drive further away and wait another hour before coming back to check on the cage. When we came back, we stopped the bakkie a few hundred metres away and looked through the bino’s (by now it was quite dark, so it was difficult to see clearly) at the cage – still not shut. Kate got out and went to see if she couldn’t scare the cub into the cage, but was once again denied as the cub just ran past the cage. Finally, we decided to leave the cage and stay at the farm (the farmer had generously allowed us to stay in a flat on his farm) until the next morning.
We were up at sunrise and prepared to go back to the farm, hoping once again that the jackals hadn’t found the cub before we could trap her. As we drove up, we stopped several hundred metres away and stared through the bino’s – the doors were shut! We drove quickly up to the cage, and there she was – hissing, spitting and glaring at us, but safe. We re-united all the siblings in the box and tied it on the back of the bakkie to transport them back to CCF.
In retrospect, we couldn’t have wished for a better outcome. Against all odds, all four cubs had survived several days without their mother (we estimated that their mother was caught in the fence six days before we trapped the last cub). They are now orphans, and will spend the rest of their lives in captivity. This fact saddens me every time I look at them, but at least they’re alive and they’re going to live a very comfortable life!
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