Our young team loves their weekly conservation lessons at the Gate of Hluhluwe Park. We share fun and knowledge of How to protect Vultures that venture outside protected areas. The young ambassadors are also taught how to spread information about other wildlife that is at risk, to their peers, family, and school. Various lessons help them better understand the importance of saving rare animals and birds. We also help encourage awareness of humane care for their domestic animals and encourage them to report any injured animal that may need our help.

Please help prevent the suffering of ill, injured or orphaned wild animals by contributing to emergency veterinary treatment. We provide habitat & home for a vast diversity of wildlife including more than 80 indigenous animal species in the Rural Environs of Isimangaliso World Natural Heritage Site South Africa. Your support will also help to build urgently needed recovery stables and a warm nursery where orphaned wild babies can be nurtured till they are released again.

Over a period of 32 years, we have provided an important safe extended sand forest habitat for leopards and other rare species. We continue restoring, expanding and protecting the biodiversity in the Buffer Zone of False Bay Park.  

Nightcam photo

The problem leopards face in our area is serious. Adjacent to our Nature Reserve, False Bay Park, provides only a narrow area of protection – a strip of 500 – 1.5 km wide on the western shores of the lake edge. Outside the UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site, that we border, many properties are farmland or rural habitation. This provides little safety for leopard and other species that need a larger range that they have in False Bay Park.

They often move out of the Park to seek food, and new mates, to keep cubs away from other males, and for the mother to move cubs away from her once they mature. So where do they go? They move into extended ranges out of the Park and then they get poached, hunted, baited and tracked down at times, even with dogs. For this reason, leopards in particular are hugely impacted and are recorded in the Red Data assessment as being vulnerable, which means without protection they could become extinct.

Community involvement is also important and we reach out through our Young Environmental Ambassador Zulu Dancers to encourage leopard protection in the rural area.  

How exciting! Check out the latest news on our Young Environmental Ambassadors Zulu Dancers! Their story is worth the follow!

Our practice sessions with the wonderful group of Young Environmental Ambassador Zulu dancers are going well. They are preparing to represent KZN in the National Talent Africa contest in Sasolburg on 6 October. (They won High Gold in the TA regional contest in KZN where they qualified for Nationals)

3 out of 5 children in rural areas in South Arica face lives of poverty. Young underprivileged children between the ages of 6 and 14 years of age walk miles from their rural homes, to reach the area where they spend their day training in Zulu dance to perform outside Hluhluwe Wildlife Park. Often, they have no lunch, or shelter from rain. Our project will provide meals, and studio shelter for arts, dance, and conservation, to empower them to be leaders while expanding their talent nationally.

Keeping alien plants out of our reserve to protect the indigenous biodiversity is a regular task, especially after the rain. Here the common guava (Psidium guajava )is being removed by cutting it and then applying herbicide to the stump. It has a delicious fruit but the wildlife feast on it and spread the seeds extensively, so it has to be managed. Other than this we never use poisons in our Reserve and we prefer to remove invasive alien vegetation manually.