Let’s make our own.

Using a private donation to buy the components, and lots of excellent advice from Rob Appleby at Wild Spy, we spent many late nights designing,redesigning and eventually fabricating our own home built Satellite collars, and we are really happy to report that we recently deployed our first one on an African wild dog in our study population in Botswana! “Darius”, the dominant male in the AP pack, has been wearing the collar for six-weeks now, and so far it is working exactly as it should.

The collar sends three locations a day,allowing us to respond almost immediately to any risky movements they may make into livestock areas. Taronga zoo’s field grants program provides a crucial linkage here: through this program we have been able to employ a local “Community Coexistence Officer”, Olorato Antony. Antony’s role is to liaise directly with local farmers and government and to follow up on the wild dogs and other predators ranging occasionally into livestock areas. Our expanded team can now quickly mobilize and respond to particularly risky excursions, by informing local participating farmers to increase vigilance for predators in their area, and in the end, keeping both safe while reducing conflict, one of the most important drivers of predator species’ declines.

As we develop and continue to deploy these collars over the coming years, hopefully the field team will be able to worry less about where the wild dogs and lions are, and focus more on ways of keeping them alive and well.