By Benjamin Wickham
WINDHOEK, March 14 — Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism and the nonprofit Desert Lion Conservation Trust (DLCT) have created an invisible fence using geofencing technology to track lions approaching a popular fishing and camping area near Torra Bay in Skeleton Coast National Park.
The geofence records GPS coordinates each time a lion wearing a satellite collar crosses it, sending automatic alerts to DLCT’s lion rangers and managers of the local campsite, who then close the area to visitors. The early warning system is a response to a number of potentially dangerous incidents between lions and people in the area, including one last year when a lioness charged a party of recreational anglers on a beach near Torra Bay.
Namibia’s desert lions, which have a history of feeding on marine species, were wiped out by local farmers in the 1980s. When lions returned to the Skeleton Coast in 2002, they no longer hunted marine prey, leading lion ecologist Philip Stander, who founded DLCT, to worry that the population had lost the knowledge. However, in the last eight years, three orphaned lionesses have led a coastal hunting revival on the beaches around Torra Bay, targeting marine birds, mainly cormorants, flamingos, and red-billed teals. In 2018, the lionesses were also spotted hunting fur seals, some of the first lions to do so in four decades. In an 18-month diet study, Stander observed that marine foods accounted for 86 percent of the lionesses’ diet.
Félix Vallat, the DLCT’s project coordinator, says that it is fascinating to follow the lions’ coastal revival from a biologist’s point of view. He notes that it is the knowledge that has been lost and is now slowly coming back. Naude Dreyer, who runs kayaking safaris in Walvis Bay, had longed to see a desert lion since he was five years old. In January 2022, after a three-decade wait, he spotted two of the lionesses separately on the beach near Torra Bay and photographed one as she fed on a fur seal against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean.
As tourists crowding the beaches during peak seasons, such as southern Africa’s recent December-January holidays, could disrupt the lions’ hunting activity or push the animals inland toward conflict with farmers, the geofence is in place to keep visitors safe. While the geofence isn’t perfect, evidence from elsewhere suggests that it should work. Matthew Wijers, a postdoctoral lion researcher from the University of Oxford in England, who is not part of the desert lion project, says that geofencing technology, coupled with educational programs that highlight the ecological importance of desert lions as well as the potential dangers to the public, should help reduce the risks of conflict between lions and anglers along the Skeleton Coast.
Whether the lionesses will continue to hang around Torra Bay is an open question. With Namibia’s drought appearing to have finally broken, the lion population is expected to rebound within a year or two, and hopefully, the land-based prey and lion numbers will rebound as well. In the meantime, Vallat hopes that the geofence will keep everyone safe.
– Namibia Daily News
