When a bushpig, normally a skittish and reclusive creature, came out of the forest with a snare trapped around its face, there was a snowball’s chance in Skukuza that the workers watching it would anticipate what it did next. The injured pig came straight up to the group with a desperate look in its eyes, its mouth shut closed by the wire cutting into its face, almost pleading with the men to set it free.
HEAL ranger Max Ngomane shows us a deadly wire snare. Photo: Dale Hes
This remarkable occurrence is what inspired Philip Owen and a group of landowners in three forested gorges close to Nelspruit to start up a group called HEAL- the Houtbosloop Environment Action Link.
HEAL employs four rangers who patrol the Schoemanskloof, Houtbosloop and Stadsrivier valleys, searching for snares set by poachers and expertly following the subtle traces left by the hunters creeping through the dense undergrowth.
Since it was founded in 2001, HEAL has discovered and removed more than 13 000 snares from these areas, which contain some of the largest patches of indigenous forest in Mpumalanga.
This beautiful region is a veritable fountain of life home to duikers, klipspringers, bushbuck, reedbuck, bushpigs, brown hyenas, serval, porcupine, honey badgers, leopards, baboons, monkeys and the highly threatened oribi antelope.
I joined two of the rangers- Maxwell Ngomane and Lazarus Lekhoane- and two German volunteers on a rough and tough patrol close to Sudwala Caves, through the thickest bush imaginable.
During our two hour trek, which left me and the Germans exhausted and torn up by thorns (I’ll have to throw away my shorts now), Maxwell and Lazarus found three wire loop snares set between trees close to the ground.
“These tighten around the animals’ necks or legs. The harder they try to escape, the tighter the snare becomes,” Maxwell explains as he pulls the deadly cables closed.
The area we patrolled is in close proximity to the Mankele community, many members of which are unemployed and scratch out a living through poaching. They sell carcasses for R20 to R40 each through the bush meat trade, which is peanuts considering that hunters will pay up to R7000 to hunt a klipspringer.
“On a few occasions, we have found dead animals with the bush around them completely clean from struggling to get out of the snares. They die from starvation and dehydration, a horrible way to go,” Maxwell says.
In the early days of HEAL, the rangers used to find minefields containing up to 50 snares. Due to the conflict between HEAL and communities, rangers can be targeted, and Maxwell was assaulted by angry hunters a few years ago.
Philip himself has been at the forefront of battles with forestry giants such as Sappi, who have replaced a vast proportion of natural vegetation in Mpumalanga with massive pine plantations.
“There is so much pressure on the natural land already that we cannot afford for more to be destroyed,” Philip says.
*This article was written by Dale Hes, a TWNA journalist for My Mpumalanga. Follow the link for more: http://mympumalanga.co.za/heal-ing-nature-by-snaring-snares/