Good bye to Moholoholo

     Well, my two weeks at Moholoholo went by amazingly quickly, and before I knew it, I was running around madly taking photos so that I would remember everything about it.  Some of these photos were of signs that tell Moholoholo's story better than I could, so I will just publish the photos.  

 

 Kate was planning to go "into town" for some errands anyway, so she agreed to take me to my next stop.  We had lunch together in downtown Hoedspruit and then she drove me to Otter's Den.  So, as for me, that was the rather abrupt end of my stay at Moholoholo.

Miscellaneous unrelated photos and stories

      Now that I've been home awhile, I've had lots of time to look over my photos from Moholoholo and I have found several that didn't fit in with my narrative.  I'm going to add them just in case any of you might be interested.

This unattractive little creature is a baby warthog who goes by the name "Mrs. Pig."  One thing that IS glamorous about her is her eyelashes, though.  She was smart and responsive, but--- I don't know---even the most dedicated animal lover doesn't seem to take a warthog seriously.

Here is Athena the honey badger.  I heard she was tame; Charlie in particular really liked her and spent a lot of time keeping her company.  I was leery of her though, having seen the YouTube video "Honey Badger Don't Give a Shit" several times.  How could I forget how incredibly tough and tenacious honey badgers are?  I REALLY didn't want to cross Athena, despite Charlie's assurances that she was very sweet.  And if you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the link to the YouTube video in question, which, incidentally, has been viewed 59 and 1/2 MILLION times (almost as frequently as Elephant Pith):
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg  
[CAUTION: this YouTube video is NOT appropriate for tender ears!]

  

I sometimes forget to even remember, much less mention, how beautiful Moholoholo is.  These are the Drakenburg mountains in the background.  They were surprisingly close and very picturesque.  I had an opportunity to see more of them later (and you will too!)  

Holy cow!  Porcupines in Africa aren't the somnolent slow-moving creatures we're accustomed to here in Wisconsin.  They are BIG!, and ACTIVE!  Run around like  proverbial monkeys, rattling their quills all the while.  This guy was bottle-raised at Moholoholo and then released.  He liked to come to Forest Camp, the gorgeous lodge where we ate most of our meals, for handouts.  One evening he fell asleep under the dining room table.  It was kind of odd to stretch your legs and run into a moving mass of porcupine quills!  I understand some of the guests at Forest Camp didn't really take to this guy.  Can't imagine why not!

There was this fabulous HUGE tree on the grounds of the wildlife center.  I believe it was called a sycamore fig.  Its trunk was amazingly huge and gnarled.  And speaking of huge and gnarled, here's Einstein the Malabar stork enjoying a spot of late afternoon sunshine in front of the tree.

And take a look at this moth I found on the grounds of the wildlife rehab center.  It looked a lot like a white version of the giant silkworm moths we have at home.  Cecropias, for example.  Hey!  I thought:  maybe they ARE a silkworm moth!  I had seen signs for silk farms in the vicinity, but when I asked around, I was told, no, this is not what silkworm moths look like.  But you gotta admit, it's a great bug!

Drawings

     Well, Moholoholo provided an awful lot of opportunities for this rank amateur artist,  I can tell you!  Everywhere I looked, there was something begging to be drawn.  I vowed I would take a lot of photos and catch up when I got home, but that never feels as right as drawing the animals live and up close and personal.  
     I've been showing you stuff all along that I did, but here's a couple more.

 Kate, who is an employee at Moholoholo, loves all primates.  In fact, she is sorry that in general, Moholoholo does not keep any primates at the Center, but rather sends them off to specialized primate centers if one should come in.
      Bush babies ARE tiny primates.  To my eye, they look far more like an over-sized flying squirrel, and they're hardly bigger than that.  But they are an incredibly cute-looking little primate.  They're cuter to look at than anything else, though.  Since they are nocturnal, they're not much company for us daylight lovers.  Kate asked me to draw a bush baby for her, and here it is.  I left the original drawing with her.

Jamie requested that I do a drawing of her Ollie.  It turns out that rhinos are as easy to draw as elephants, all planes and shadows.  Here he is, vaguely contemplating a charge, just for fun.

When I got home, a friend gave me a book on how to use colored pencils, and I found out that you're actually supposed to use WATER when you're drawing with pencils.  It softens the lines and gives your stuff more of a watercolor look.  I liked the way it worked with this drawing of Bullet the Cheetah.

 

Though, of course, I had a special fondness for Bullet himself, having had so many memories of 

great meals of killer elephant meat with him.    Now, if I can just keep up with my drawings now that I'm actually home!

 

The heart and soul of Moholoholo

       The founder and manager of the Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Center is a former Kruger

 National Park ranger named Brian Jones.  He interviews every new volunteer the morning of the first day they are there.  Part of it is to check out the volunteers, I think, but the biggest part is to convey to them Brian's message about wildlife in Africa.

       I found it to be quite a mixed message.  He began by railing against the "bunny huggers" who are opposed to shooting excess elephants in South Africa and who dictate South African game management from overseas by threatening boycotts and other economic sanctions, while not having a clue as to what elephant over-population means to the African environment.  
       I had already heard the praises of big game hunters sung.  Apparently they are seen as bringing huge revenues into the area while culling superfluous animals--a perfect win-win situation.  They say.
       I pointed out to Brian that I was a bunny-hugger from way back, and he laughed and said, "Well, so are we all."  I liked him better after that!  And I could NEVER doubt that Brian sincerely loved the animals at Moholoholo.  One thing I especially admired was that ALL animals were welcomed and nurtured there.  It didn't matter whether they were common everyday canaries or a rare black rhino or million-Rand sables--they were all treated with scrupulous care.  And I mean scrupulous.  I have never seen such attention given to sanitation and proper feeding and care.  It bordered on fanatical.
        Brian is convinced that soon there will be no wildlife at all in Africa, that the overpowering human presence is quickly destroying any vestiges of "wild-ness" from even this most wild of locations.  He refers even to the huge and hugely-respected Kruger National Park as a "zoo," meaning that is so controlled and managed that it is misleading to even think of the animals there as "wild."
        I understand that most conservationists in Africa believe that "nature should take its course," and that Brian's policy of intervention for the benefit of individual animals is unwise and sentimental.  I'm pretty sure Brian would say there is no nature to take its course, that man has interfered with nature to its detriment to such an extent that it is necessary for man to interfere with nature even more for its benefit.  And I for one agree with him wholeheartedly about that, having seen that theory played out to a much more advanced state here in Wisconsin.
      When I got home, I found that Brian has a world-wide reputation and has been featured in the National Geographic television series and in such reputable publications as the Christian Science Monitor.  He has also received recognition from some very interesting sources.  Check this stuff out!


http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Wildlife/2008/0806/meet-south-africa-s-dr-dolittle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD3TZD9H8Pk

The Dedicated

       Some of the volunteers and some of the "employees" at the Center were students of veterinary nursing.  I was not aware that veterinary nursing actually is a college granted degree.  Maybe it's not in the U.S.  But it is in South Africa.

       Jeanette already is a veterinary nurse, and she has actually been employed at Moholoholo for a short time.  She had thought about opening her own practice in rescuing needy animals and came to Moholoholo to learn best practices.  She wound up getting hired, and she absolutely loves the job.  What animal lover WOULDN'T love the job?   

       Shortly after Jeantte started, a brand new baby lioness broke her rib somehow and the mother couldn't deal with it.  She abandoned both her cubs, and they were found and brought to the Rehab Center.  You know them as "baby LI-ons!!!!"  They are Jeanette's first baby lions, and I think one look at this photograph will tell you how she feels about THAT!

 

This, incidentally is the drawing I'm working on, obviously based partly on the above photo.  Man!  People are SO much harder to draw than animals!  I'm still trying to figure out a way to make Jeanette look less ghoulish.

Here is Cass, who is a part time employee and part time volunteer.  Her training is in some sort of  management, but she is a huge animal fan.  Especially cheetahs.  Though not so much as the guy who used to volunteer at Moholoholo.  I'm told he wanted to dye his hair with cheetah spots.  It was thought he had some cheetah "issues."

And this is Cindy, another young woman who hopes to become a veterinary assistant, with the eagle you've already met, Chicken.  Cindy would be perfect for such a position.  She is soft-spoken, kind, smart,and conscientious to a fault.   She thinks that her experience at Moholoholo will improve her chances of getting into a veterinary nursing program, and I hope she's right.

There were so many other amazing animal lovers at Moholoholo.  I didn't get pictures of them all, so won't try to introduce you to a wordy description.  I, however, was very fortunate to have met them.

And then there are PEOPLE at Moholoholo

       I've spent a lot of time introducing you to the animals of Moholoholo, and a lot of time going on and on about ME at Moholoholo, but you may have gotten the impression that the animals and I were on our own.  You HAVE met Jan our supervisor, and Jamie the "mom" to Ollie the Rhino and Melmin the giraffe, and you've seen Charlie and his sables, but that's about it.  With this blog, I intend to rectify that situation and begin to introduce you to some of the other people there.
       There were many black people employed at Moholoholo.  I never was so much as introduced to any of them except Oskar, whom I will introduce later.  I feel very strange about this fact.  I may have told some of you that one of the reasons I was eager to go to South Africa was that language was an incredible barrier in Cambodia.  I could not even say the most basic things to the local people there because the language was so completely different from any language I'd ever spoken.  I could not read it at all.  It was totally bewildering.  I knew that most people in South Africa speak at least some English, so I thought my chances of getting to communicate with local people would be much greater.  I was wrong.
       Of course, language is not the only barrier among different groups of people.  At Moholoholo, we all worked--very hard, I might add-- side by side.  BUT, we might as well have been on different planets.  Blacks seldom even made eye contact with whites and never spoke more than the briefest of greetings.  And vice versa.
       There was a very unpleasant event while I was there.  One of the non-South African volunteers--a young woman--went out of her way to be cheerful and pleasant to all the black workers there.  One of the workers--a young man--concluded that she must be interested in him and began some rather aggressive flirtation.  On one occasion, he stood in front of a doorway she was attempting to pass through and told her she couldn't go through unless she gave him her telephone number.  That scared her, and she mentioned it to her supervisor.  The next day the guy was fired, and I saw him being escorted off the premises, sitting forlornly in the back of a bokke (truck).  She felt terribly guilty, and I'm sure he was sorry to have his lost his job.
       What can one say about such an event?  Should she not have been friendly?  Shouldn't he have "known better"?  I find myself completely confused over the matter, and after that happened, I made it a point to be friendly but very formal with the staff.  And I felt like a completely hypocritical jerk doing it.  But even so, I still don't know what the "right" answer is.
       Well, for some reason, this guy Oskar overcame all that racial stuff, and he was apparently well-respected and well-liked by everybody.  He was included in our occasional nights out and seemed to feel comfortable mingling with us all.  I would be interested to know why that was, but I was being too polite and formal to ask!  He was clearly well educated, very articulate and bright, and funny and personable.  He was employed as a tour guide and showed tourists around the Rehabilitation Center, but also helped with some of the animal tending that required expertise. 
       Here is Oskar

 


Besides Oskar, all the rest of the many black employees at the Center were referred to as "the green men," in reference to the green coveralls they all wore.  They were electricians, carpenters, groundskeepers--an unbelievable amount of work goes into maintaining a place like Moholoholo.  They also processed the enormous amount of meat that goes through the place  [In this photo, they are working on some of the killer elephant meat that would eventually find its way to Bullet and others' bellies], and I'm sure many had responsibilities I wasn't even vaguely aware of.  I wish I had made more of an effort to find out.

CHEETAHS! and then some

By far the most numerous of the cats at Moholoholo is the cheetah.  It seems not only are there are a lot of them around, but also they get into trouble a lot.  So a lot of kittens have arrived at the Rehab

Center over the years, though, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, none so far this year.

Here's an old lady who has lived at the Center for about 8 years.  She was raised by bottle and now enjoys a compound, all to herself, that must be at least a couple of acres in size.  She is far too tame to be released, but she is what is called here an "ambassador" animal, in that she will amicably pose for photos with people and hopefully help to educate them about cheetahs.  She seemed to enjoy that a group of us came to visit her one afternoon, and we sat with her on a little hill and felt most companionable.

And, in fact, here she is, amicably posing with some tourist.






And here I am, together with another volunteer who came from Madagascar, with the yearling cheetah cubs.  They were mostly very nice, but when the two smaller volunteers from Madagascar (aged 10 and 12 years old) were near, they suddenly took on the "predator" look rather than the "kitty cat" look.  I heard that big cats are notorious for having a predatory attitude toward children; that's very eerie.

 
And this is my favorite cheetah, Bullet, who lived very near my little house.  One evening--after all that elephant meat came in--I saw Bullet's supper, and it had to be at LEAST 10 pounds of meat.
This is Bullet the next morning contemplating and discussing the meal of the night before with me.

Please turn your volume up high so you can hear what he has to say!

And here, for no good reason, except they're really pretty birds, and there's room for them here, are:

A rare Bateleur eagle named Chicken who also has lived at Moholoholo for years and who loves to have his neck scratched. And he's got the prettiest pinky-orange beak and feet imagineable.

 

And this guy--a ground hornbill, also rare--spends his day making an odd hollow gulping noise in an apparently futile attempt to attract female company.