Two months ago, Milan Vinks and two other field biologists flew across the scattered brushland of Zambia’s Luangwa Valley in a pair of battered Land Rovers. It was getting dark, and they had been heading back to camp when they ran into an African wild dog pack watching over seven pups in a dusty riverbed.
Minutes after they stopped to observe the pack, the alphas suddenly bolted. The other dogs followed behind. Intrigued, the biologists turned away from camp and laid on the gas. The pack was too fast for the vehicles, but an hour-and-a-half later the crew finally caught up with the dogs, who were ripping up a fresh antelope carcass in a dried river basin.
The chase was routine for staff at the Zambian Carnivore Programme, a nonprofit conservation trust focused on large carnivores like wild dogs, and it has recently become part of Vinks’ day-to-day, too.
A 2013 graduate of the University of Montana, Vinks spent the last three years working in the Yaak and the Flathead and Whitefish Ranges for both Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Rocky Mountain Research Station. In November 2015, he traded grizzlies and lynx for painted dogs and lions, moving across the Atlantic to Zambia, a landlocked African nation home to some of the continent’s largest and most diverse wildlife populations.
He returned to Montana two weeks ago, and will head back to Zambia in April, when the rainy season lets up enough for the biologists to get into the field and collect data.
Large carnivore populations are in rapid global decline, which poses a severe threat to earth’s ecosystems: lose the apex carnivores, and the food chain topples. But it’s not particularly easy to keep track of carnivores – typically low-density, wide-ranging, elusive, and with a propensity to conflict with humans, it’s time-consuming and laborious to maintain accurate demographic data.
That data, though, is imperative for the nonprofit’s researchers monitoring populations.
Daily, Vinks and the other staff members fan out across the program’s three study sites, which nearly span the whole country, to observe, track, and record extensive amounts of information about predators and their prey. This entails tailing radio-collared animals on hours-long hunts to take tissue, teeth, hair, and rumen samples of their prey after dinner is over. They’ll also capture predators, using a safe drug combination, to take similar samples, which they ship stateside for analysis.
“It’s pretty intensive. We’re out there almost every day, working long hours in primitive areas,” Vinks said. “This field is challenging, [it] keeps me on my toes and teaches me something new every day.”
The information that Vinks collects helps researchers track demographic trends as well as examine population movements, predator-prey relationships, resource competition, and specific impacts predators have on their ecosystems, like the anti-predator responses their prey adapts.
In addition to publishing academic studies, program researchers present all this information to the Zambian Wildlife Authority, which has the power to implement conservation efforts that could protect at-risk carnivores and their habitats.
“Beside being extremely interested in the research side, nerding out on the ecology of all these species, the conservation aspect has also become very important to me,” Vinks said. “This type of work has become very rewarding. Working with endangered and threatened species, attempting to make a difference, if you will.”
Wild dogs, which are listed internationally as endangered, are one of the nonprofit’s primary research subjects, along with lions, cheetahs, and hyenas. And though wild dog data hasn’t resulted in a recent paper, nine scientists affiliated with the nonprofit, including director Matthew S. Baker, published in late 2014 the results of a five-year long study conducted on the declining lion population in South Luangwa.
Using radio collaring, the researchers kept regular tabs on every lion that inhabited the region. Through rigorous statistical analysis and estimation from the gathered data, they found that the population declined 2 percent per year over the course of the study. With just 210 individuals, that means the population loses about four animals a year. They determined that trophy hunting was the major cause of death, counting 46 males harvested before the Zambian government passed a hunting ban in January 2013.
These results will be a cornerstone to future corrective management and conservation methods – in the study, the researchers recommended that officials maintain the hunting ban until at least 2016 to allow for population recovery.
The information Vinks will document when he returns to Zambia in April could inform similar sustainable management decisions for wild dogs. And though authorities likely won’t have to worry about overzealous trophy hunters, what protections the Zambian dog population needs to thrive is something only data yet to be collected can tell us.