Gathering the Kalahari: Tracking Landscapes in Motion

1. What they did

This anthropology dissertation asks what tracking and gathering can teach us about landscapes. Instead of studying trackers from the outside, the author learned to track and gather alongside San trackers in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, and used tracking and gathering as his own research methods. He argues that landscapes are not a still background but are always in motion, made by the movements of people, animals, plants, fungi, water, wind and sand.

His main teachers were four expert trackers, !Nate, Njoxlau, Karoha and /Uasi, together with Gustel Heinz and his wife Koaklxoa. He first met three of them on a wildlife tracking survey in 2009, and did 12 months of fieldwork with them in 2015 and 2016, based mostly at Gustel’s new cattle post near the settlement of Bere. Hunting had been banned across Botswana in 2014, so the trackers no longer hunted, but they kept tracking every day.

The dissertation moves outward step by step:

• Tracking (Chapter 1). A day of walking with the trackers, what tracking is, levels of tracking skill, tracking surveys for conservation, and tracking as a way of noticing whole landscapes.
• Truffles (Chapter 2). Finding Kalahari desert truffles by their tracks, the cracks they make in the sand, and what truffles need to appear.
• Grass and termites (Chapter 3). Following truffle grass to the insects that cut it, a fenced grass experiment, and the politics of cattle and rangelands.
• Pans (Chapter 4). A year-long search for Haly, a small pan known only from stories, and how people navigate by dunes and pans.

The dissertation runs to about 330 pages. This entry was written from the front matter, the introduction, all of Chapter 1, the openings and key sections of Chapters 2 to 4, and the conclusion.

2. What they found

Everyday tracking

• The trackers were always tracking as they walked, even when looking for honey or medicine roots. They noticed tracks, plants, weather and wind together.
• They used silent hand signals to show the species, direction of travel and age of a track, so as not to startle animals.
• They aged gemsbok tracks after rain: raindrop marks on the edges but smooth insides showed the animals had passed after the rain, while crumbling sand showed some time had passed.
• From the tracks, Karoha guessed where two gemsbok were heading and steered the group to meet them, without following the trail. The trackers said they were the same two animals, and they can recognise individuals from details such as a chip in the hoof, size and gait.
• Walking into the wind was the rule for seeing animals (“If the wind is going in front of you, you will see nothing”), except when looking for bees to follow to honey.
• At an aardvark den, !Nate re-enacted what the aardvark had done and laughed that a hare had moved into the den.
• The trackers often talked to animals at dens, answered birds, and warned off predators. Several times they sensed lions through tingling and sweating around their armpits, without tracks or sound. The scientists they work with do not count this as data, though some take the warnings seriously.

Tracking surveys

• On the conservation surveys, trackers walked transects and entered track counts into handheld CyberTracker devices with Global Positioning System (GPS). The author describes this as “simple” tracking: identifying and counting tracks, not following them.
• Researcher Derek Keeping told the author that detection by tracks is “nearly perfect”: testing trackers on the same transects, he found they missed only about 5%. He argues track surveys find more species, including small and shy ones, than aerial surveys, camera traps or collars.

Truffles, grass and termites

• Truffles make “tracks”: the sand swells and cracks above them. They appear only after well-timed late rains, with the right host plants and sand, and can be stamped out by trampling and overgrazing. In the drought year of 2015, few were found (only eight on one day).
• A purple witchweed made cracks like truffle tracks and fooled the author.
• The trackers showed him patches of grass cut cleanly 3 to 6 cm above the sand at night. They said the insects help stop fires by removing dead grass. The author called them ants for months; they were harvester termites.
• He and a rangeland ecologist fenced plots to measure the insects’ cutting, but the trackers saw at once that the insects had already moved on about 100 m. “You can see a lot when you look at a track, but you see nothing if you only look at the track.” Later tiller counts supported the trackers: the cut stems were overwhelmingly dead.

Finding Haly

• After a year of searching, the group found Haly in the last week of fieldwork: a small pan with hard calcrete licked and gnawed by animals, a waterhole, and tracks of wildebeest, hartebeest, gemsbok, brown hyena, cheetah and wild dogs. It lies less than 6 km from planned cattle ranches.

Pressures on the land and people

• Cattle posts, fences, the Trans-Kalahari Highway, settlements and gas and mineral prospecting are closing the wildlife corridor. A gas prospecting team drew water from Zutshwa’s only tank, and by the time they left in March 2016 the settlement’s water supply was exhausted; it still had none in January 2017.
• Tracking jobs are few and short, and younger people have shown little interest in learning to track, although research jobs are beginning to renew interest. !Nate died of lung cancer in January 2016; his son has since begun learning to track with /Uasi, Karoha and Njoxlau.

3. What they concluded

• Tracking is much more than following an animal to hunt it. It is an everyday way of noticing and relating to whole landscapes and their movements: animals, plants, fungi, insects, sand, water and weather.
• Gathering, in its two senses of collecting and coming together, works the same way: truffles, grass and termites are mobile and lively, not fixed resources.
• Tracking surveys are important for showing that the wildlife corridor is not a “deadzone”, but they use only part of tracking. Treating tracking only as a source of counts leaves out much of what trackers know.
• When people stop tracking, landscapes are easily treated as still, empty spaces to be fenced, divided and exploited.
• The author ends by urging that “we must keep tracking”, as a way of noticing and caring for landscapes in a time of fast environmental change.

4. How tracking was or was not used

Tracking is both the subject and the method. The author walked with the trackers for months, learning tracks and signs identification (footprints, freshness of tracks, individual gemsbok, aardvark and porcupine dens, termite-cut grass and nests, gnaw marks on calcrete, cattle trails and old cutlines). Truffles were found by their own “tracks” in the sand. The trackers mostly did not follow trails, but used tracks to predict where animals were going. He also joined tracking surveys in which trackers counted tracks on transects (2009 to 2010, and with Derek Keeping in 2015), and he discusses Liebenberg’s levels of simple, systematic and speculative tracking.

5. Tracker or observer certification

!Nate, Njoxlau, Karoha and /Uasi all received Master Tracker certification, the highest level of Louis Liebenberg’s CyberTracker certification system, on a trip with Liebenberg shortly after the 2009 to 2010 survey. The author writes that they were then the only four certified in Botswana. All trackers on the Western Kgalagadi Conservation Corridor survey were assessed by Liebenberg. Gustel Heinz is described as highly skilled but “still learning”; no certification is given for him, Koaklxoa or the other gatherers. The author describes himself as “not yet an expert tracker”.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• CyberTracker software on handheld GPS devices, used by trackers to record tracks on surveys. Karoha was a main pilot tester of CyberTracker.
• The Formozov–Malyshev–Pereleshin (FMP) formula, a Russian method from the 1920s, used by Derek Keeping to estimate population sizes from track counts, and his quick method for testing trackers’ identification and counting accuracy.
• A fenced plot experiment (four 5 by 5 m plots, two fenced), pitfall traps and grass tiller counts with a rangeland ecologist.
• Navigation by climbing trees and dunes to see the dunes that mark distant pans.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• The corridor between the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is far from a “deadzone”: track surveys and places like Haly show it is still busy with wildlife, but it is being closed off by cattle, fences, roads and prospecting.
• Rezoning for cattle ranches and the sale of gas prospecting rights treat the area as empty and underused. One prospecting drill alone used up a settlement’s water.
• Overgrazing and trampling can stop truffles from appearing, and harvester termites may help grasslands by removing dead grass and reducing fire.
• Conservation projects that end too soon, before showing results, leave communities disillusioned. The hunting ban removed tracking jobs, and research jobs for trackers are one way to keep tracking knowledge alive.