Bozza - Dumisani Zwane
Dumisani Zwane: Game Capture Manager - Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park.
Funding for Dumisani’s character was provided by NEWF. We hope this extends the impact of his work protecting rhinos and the wildife of South Africa. Keen to help us, Be in Touch!
His Work: Even with a fence around them, big-five game reserves are WILD, just imagine sleeping outside in one in the pitch dark, if you don’t think they are. But because of that fence and with populations of different animals increasing and decreasing depending on the seasons and who eats who, they have to be managed. One important part of management is capturing and moving animals from one reserve to another or within a reserve. Dumisani is the officer in charge of game capture at Hluhluwe-iMfolozi, one of the most important reserves in South Africa.
As the game capture unit, Dumi and his team catch and move animals for a variety of reasons, they may need to make sure that animals are not interbreeding too much - mixing genes makes populations more robust, they may have exceeded their carrying capacity (the number of animals that an area can support or carry) and there are just too many animals and not enough food, or certain rare animals could be threatened in particular parts of a reserve, among other reasons.
The animals that they catch and move are big and small and it’s not an easy task. “We catch everything in terms of wild animals” says Dumi, “starting with black and white rhinos. We also catch elephants, antelope species, giraffes, zebras, impala, kudu, waterbuck, wildebeest, and warthogs.” Try as they might, the game capture team is seen as a threat to the animals when they are trying to catch them. “They will try to use their best means to try and evade you”. The team uses helicopters for the large animals, darting them from above with darts filled with tranquilising drugs. The drugs can then cause their own problems. “A black rhino poses a lot of challenges because normally with the white rhino, when the drug starts to take effect, the chopper can still control the animal. But when it comes to a black rhino, even if the drug starts taking effects on an animal, the animal just doesn’t listen to the helicopter anymore. If it decides to go to a donga (a gully), it’ll go to a donga. If it goes to the water where it can drown, it goes to the water. So you always have to be prepared, quite often they end up in the worst possible scenarios.”
Some animals are harder to catch than others. “Animals are very clever, especially the zebra. They’ll see a very tiny thing and then won’t go inside the capture site. The whole day’s work would go down the drain, if the site is not the best, the wind is blowing in the right direction and everything is just right, and that rarely happens. Catching the hippo can also be quite difficult. The water can be very deep, so they might drown or they’ll breathe water into their lungs, causing the lungs to get flooded with water and that could also kill them.”
It’s hard work but at the end of the day, Dumi gets great satisfaction from this work. He knows that his work is helping pass the baton onto the next generation who can appreciate and see the amazing animals that he gets to work with on a daily basis.
His Spark and Career Path: Dumi was was born and grew up in UMthwalume, in the South Coast, South of Durban. His interest in wildlife came from the shock that such animals even existed. “In the late 80s, we didn’t have much TV and there were not a lot of magazines. I walked into my grandma’s house and there was a calendar with a rhino and its calf. I was only used to cattle, goats, sheep and sugarcane. I asked my grandma what it was because it looked so prehistoric. It didn’t look like something that was real. I was still young, 7 or 8, and I’d never heard of something called Isiqiwi (game reserve in IsiZulu). I asked her where do you find these animals? Are they for real? She said they were and they are in our province in the North.” It’s an experience that has stayed with Dumi from that day.
In highschool, he had to think about what he wanted to concentrate on “it was was time to choose careers.” He’d been part of a Scouts group and had learned about nature conservation. “I’ve always loved biology as a subject because it made sense. A lot of things made sense around us where we lived, the ecosystems and interrelationships. I got introduced to 50/50 (an influential South African nature TV show) and I became a huge fan of it in the mid nineties. I started meeting people that worked in Ezemvelo KZN wildlife in the South Coast and they told me that if I’m interested in wildlife, I can study it at Mangosuthu Technikon, in Durban. I started studying nature conservation there in 1999 and I had to do two years for theory and one year in the field.”
Dumi says that he’s been lucky in building his career, but luck favors those that are prepared. “The South African National Parks people came towards the end of second year, they told us they were interviewing for the whole of South African National Parks. My first choice was Kruger National Park, even though I had never been there, I read a lot about it. I got placed in Kruger as a conservation student for two years. That’s where my career took off. I was like a sponge. Every book that I could read, I read, everything that I could do, I did. It was the best year of my life. It was the first time I was in a big 5 game reserve. It was amazing.
One bit of luck, was an iron stomach, “I was fortunate that I was the only student that didn’t throw up when flying in airplanes to do animal counts, and so I got a lot of flying. I was flying a lot compared to other students. We were supposed to do a year of in-service training but by the beginning of September, eight months in, they gave me a contract for guiding.” Five years later Dumi joined Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife as a guide and then joined the game capture unit. He’s been there for 17 years and is now the game capture manager.
His Superpowers: The ability to know and understand animal behaviour - a very important aspect of his job when dealing with rhinos.! The institutional knowledge (all of the knowledge that builds up over time in a company or organisation) that has allowed the game capture team to do the work that they do and their ability to care for the animals that they capture and transport.
His Heroes: “People who work hard, people who are honest, people that have gone through a lot to achieve something in their lives. People with a good story, the legends that have been in the field for a long time, doing work the right way.”
His Top Tip: “People need to understand that there is no substitute for hard work. You need to appreciate people that have been doing the job that you’re doing, learn from them, listen to them and their advice. You need to understand that you don’t know everything and be willing to learn. You can have qualifications but you should always be willing to learn when you get into a new working environment and be respectful. You need to understand the consequence of errors in your operation.”
Characteristic Needed to Succeed (in order): Hard Work, communication, creativity and curiosity.
What Else You Need: “Selflessness. I think selflessness would be the key one because you tend to go through long hours for animals because you have to capture the animals, load them, transport them and take them to the next destination. Especially when it comes to animals like rhinos which need us capture officers and vets so we can care for them along the way. It’s not a normal job where you can just capture and transport them and then go home and forget about it. You always care about how they will get to the next destination and if they are still alive. Often we will drive through the night till the next morning with the animals. It’s just part of the job. You also need to enjoy what you are doing and appreciate the privilege that you have to be doing this job because some people only see and hear about this on TV.”
Why Wildlife Conservation Matters: “There are so many reasons. Firstly it’s our heritage and it’s something we should be proud of. In terms of biodiversity, South Africa has the third largest in the world. Compared to European countries, where there is little wildlife left, we are very fortunate. Game reserves play a huge role in rural development and job creation. If you have a game reserve that is doing well, and you look beyond the people that are employed in the reserves, you’ll find many people in the surrounding towns are linked to the reserve through secondary jobs.
Why Kids Should Care: “It’s important for kids to learn about conservation because they are the future. We are not going to be here in the next 25 to 30 years and we have to look up to them to take over the baton. Life is a relay, everybody runs or his lap and then they need to handover that baton to the next person. And that person, for the team to still win, needs to put in as much effort as the first person. So it will be fruitless for the current generation to put in so much effort into conservation only to find out that when they pass the baton to the next generation of people, they are not prepared or they are lazy or they don’t know what conservation is and don’t know where we come from as a country, how important it is for us to have the biodiversity that we have is. We have to appreciate that as a country and we need to embrace it. We have to be proud of our pioneers for saving the white rhino from the brink of extinction to where we are now.
So kids need to learn, understand and appreciate that and understand the task at hand as well. You can only understand the task at hand when you’re closer to the operation, so they need to be closer to the operation. We are currently facing the scourge of rhino poaching and very few people understand how big rhino poaching is, how many animals we have lost and what happens to the orphans that get left behind. There is even poaching with dogs. It has become a fashion thing, with people having dogs and poaching and that is not good for the wildlife. It’s not good for our country. Kids need to learn that it’s wrong to appreciate a poacher in your village that has a lot of money through poaching and instead teach them to appreciate the power of hard work. They need to be taught that good things don’t come that easy and cheap.”
It will be very beneficial for people to see people like me get into leadership roles because we understand both worlds, where we come from and we still understand that being in conservation does not mean you’re making tons of money. It’s a different career to somebody that is a banker, a chartered accountant or an engineer but you find a lot of solace in it because you understand why you’re doing it and what you’re trying to do. There are a lot of proud moments that you have tried and saved and done something for your country for the animals that cannot talk for themselves.”
On Overcoming Challenges: “There have been a couple of challenges along the way. There were positions where people have come to me and told me that I did well in an interview but I ended up not getting the job. I would get told that I didn’t get the job because of certain reasons and I’ve had to live with those disappointments. I had to learn that when you don’t get what you want, you need to just keep your head high and just keep walking. You will get disappointments in every every sphere life but, you must not be despondent. You must be the first person to pick up your tools and get ready to go to work because sooner or later, the situation will turn and get better, or something else, a better thing will come your way.”