Camdeboo…what a lovely name. This national park which surrounds the town of Graaff-Reinet is the second smallest in the country (after Bontebok National Park), but I think it has the most evocative name off all the nature reserves in the country. Park manager Peter Burdett tells me that the name "Camdeboo" comes from a Khoi word meaning “green valley”, and at first this term may seem incongruous with the usually dry, mauve landscape of the Karoo.
But if you look closely at the slopes on the
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The Karoo National Park is more than 88 000 hectares big…with a predator-proof fence around its boundary which is about 175kms long. Every day, the fence is patrolled by the field rangers, who inspect it for weak points and holes. The lions in the park haven’t once ventured out onto neighbouring sheep farms. Senior section ranger Johan de Klerk believes the big cats are more than happy with the amount of prey within the park’s borders.
On
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After their re-introduction into the Karoo National Park a year ago, the lions are doing well, according to senior section ranger Johan de Klerk, who gave me some of his photos for my blog, as we haven’t seen them yet. (Although we have seen remains of two zebra – one on the spectacular Pienaar’s Pass, a tough 4x4 route which I can highly recommend.)
If the natural vegetation is conserved, the Karoo can support a healthy population of wild
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The Karoo…ever heard of it? Ha ha…if you live in South Africa, it’s almost unavoidable. This semi-arid landscape covers the largest part of the country, and is the nation’s biggest ecosystem.
But surprisingly, for a long time, hardly any of it was formally conserved. Most of it is still used by sheep farmers, but because the Karoo is semi-arid and rainfall is unreliable, a lot of the veld has been overgrazed. A lot of the so-called sweet veld, which the thousands of Springbok used to graze
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