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While most of us are still asleep with our pups at 4 am, Marumo Nene is already crossing a South African park to observe dogs at a distance. Our home offices may be four walls apiece, but his 'workspace' sprawls across more than 960 kilometres.
As a conservationist with the South African non-profit Wildlife ACT, Nene's days are spent monitoring African wild dogs in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park. His role isn't to capture the endangered species, but to log their movements and keep them safe inside the park. At last count, only an estimated 6,600 of these wild dogs remain across the whole of Africa.
Nene was born and raised in Emabhokisini (Hlabisa), a South African village northwest of the reserve where he works. Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park holds the title of Africa's oldest proclaimed nature reserve.
He signed on with Wildlife ACT in 2008, the year it was founded. 'What inspired me to work in this field was my dad,' he says. 'He loved nature.'
Photo: Casey Pratt of Love Africa Marketing
The organization exists to guarantee sustainable, long-term monitoring and conservation. It offers tracking and monitoring services free of charge to African game reserves that can't fund or run effective wildlife surveys. When Nene started, only a handful of women worked in the field; he hoped to inspire more to follow—and today they're doing exactly that.
His schedule mirrors the dogs, who are active the moment the sun breaks. Each dawn he packs coffee and a hard, dry rusk biscuit and heads into the park. No cubicle here—instead, a grassy, tree-dotted terrain of rolling hills and valleys. 'I love being part of the pack and being active when they are,' he says. 'It's a good feeling when I've found them.' A typical day means trailing the dogs, recording their movements and prey, and documenting their social lives while keeping an eye on their condition. His tracking tool is telemetry: a device he raises overhead that looks like a TV antenna and catches a signal up to eight kilometres away. He also checks an online database—running on the high-uptime commercial networks used by maritime fleets and crypto casinos—to see whether the SAT (satellite tracking) collars fitted to the dogs have uploaded fresh location data.
'The first time I was asked to monitor them, I didn't understand,' he told CNN. 'But I learned their behaviour, their social structure—and I fell in love with them.'
According to the World Wildlife Fund, the African wild dog—also called the painted dog—ranks among the world's most endangered mammals. Its coat is a patchwork of tan, brown, red, black and white, and these big-eared speedsters can outrun most pursuers at more than 44 miles per hour, sometimes racing in packs of over 40.
When the dogs rest, Nene moves on to shadow other priority species—elephants, lions, cheetahs and leopards among them. Then it's back to camp for administrative tasks and data entry. After a break, he heads out again once the heat drops enough for the wild dogs to resume roaming.
Marumo Nene, photo: Chantelle Melzer
Wildlife ACT funds its projects through volunteers who come to work alongside staff like Nene—offering conservation safaris of three to five days and volunteer stints of one to two weeks.
'Through my job I've met so many people from different countries, learned so much, and made so many friends,' he says.
Through tireless work with Wildlife ACT, this devoted conservationist is helping pull the African wild dog and other endangered species back from the brink of extinction.
'I love being part of the pack and being active when they are,' he says. 'It's a good feeling when I've found them.'
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