# Gathering the Kalahari: Tracking Landscapes in Motion

> What does tracking mean when hunting is banned? Walking for a year with four San Master Trackers in Botswana’s Kalahari, anthropologist Pierre du Plessis found them tracking everything: gemsbok, aardvarks, desert truffles hidden in the sand, termites cutting grass, and a lost pan known only from stories. He argues that tracking is a way of reading whole landscapes in motion, at a time when fences, cattle and gas prospecting are closing a vital wildlife corridor.

Summary by Kersey Lawrence, Original Wisdom. Updated 9 November 2026. Page: https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/2018-du-plessis-gathering-kalahari-tracking-landscapes/

## Citation and access

- **Authors:** Pierre L. du Plessis
- **Year published:** 2018
- **Journal or source:** PhD dissertation in Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz (a parallel PhD with Aarhus University, Denmark)
- **Full citation:** du Plessis, P. L. 2018. Gathering the Kalahari: tracking landscapes in motion. PhD dissertation, Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7b98v9k6
- **Access status:** Hosted (freely available elsewhere)
- **PDF:** https://www.originalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/2018_du-Plessis_gathering-the-kalahari-tracking-landscapes-in-motion.pdf

## Tags

- **Species:** Mammals > Aardvark; Mammals > African wild dog; Mammals > Blue wildebeest; Mammals > Brown hyena; Mammals > Cheetah; Mammals > Eland; Mammals > Gemsbok; Mammals > Hare; Invertebrates > Harvester termite; Mammals > Honey badger; Humans; Mammals > Jackal; Mammals > Lion; Mammals > Porcupine; Mammals > Red hartebeest; Mammals > Springbok; Mammals > Steenbok
- **Region:** Africa > Botswana
- **Tracking:** Burrows; Feeding signs; Individual identification; Paths; Spoor age estimation; Track counts; Tracking; Tracks; Tracks and signs identification
- **Behaviour and ecology:** Behaviour; Feeding; Human disturbance; Movement; Wildlife corridors
- **Methods and technology:** CyberTracker; CyberTracker Tracker Certification; Ethnographic fieldwork; Formozov–Malyshev–Pereleshin (FMP) formula; Global Positioning System (GPS); Indigenous knowledge; Interviews
- **Data type:** New field data
- **Observer qualification:** Certified trackers
- **Discipline:** Anthropology; Awareness; Human dimensions; Indigenous knowledge; Orienteering and navigation; Philosophy of science; Social science; Wildlife tracking
- **Year published:** 2018

## Detailed keywords

- **Species:** Studied: humans (San trackers and gatherers !Nate “Shortie” Brahman, Njoxlau Kashe, Karoha Longwe and /Uasi, and Gustel Heinz and his wife Koaklxoa, with other gatherers named Boitumelo, Brenda, K.B. and Stocks). Also followed closely: Kalahari desert truffle, !xam in !Xo or mahupu in Setswana (Kalaharituber pfeilli, as spelled in the dissertation), and the grass-cutting insects first thought to be ants and later identified as harvester termites (Hodotermes mossambicus). Animals whose tracks and signs are described: gemsbok (Oryx gazella), aardvark, hare, steenbok, jackal, eland, springbok, porcupine, honey badger, lion (a donkey killed by a lion at Gustel’s camp), and at Haly pan wildebeest, hartebeest, brown hyena, cheetah and African wild dogs; antelope tooth marks on calcrete; horse tracks of likely hunters. Bat-eared fox mentioned as eating harvester termites. Plants: truffle grass (Stipagrostis uniplumis), Kalahari sour grass (Schmidtia kalahariensis, spelled “Kalahariensis schmidtia” and “S. kalahareinsis” in the text), brandy bush or morethlwa (Grewia flava), silver terminalia (Terminalia sericea, spelled “Termnalia sercea”), purple witchweed (Striga gesneroides), Kalahari cucumber (Cucumis metuliferus), motlopi tree (Boscia albatrunca). Livestock: cattle, goats, donkeys.
- **Location and habitat:** Kalahari Desert, Botswana: the Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) of the wildlife corridor between the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP). Main base: the settlement of Bere and its WMA, GH11, Ghanzi District, including Gustel Heinz’s new cattle post plot (6 by 6 km, unfenced), research base for eleven months. Also Kgacae and the former Lone Tree settlement; Zutshwa settlement and the pan-rich WMA KD2 with open grasslands, Kgalagadi District (Towe pan and dune, Zonye pan); Hukuntsi; the storied pan Haly, less than 6 km from planned cattle ranches. Shrub bush, grassland, sand dunes, pans and calcrete; settlements denuded of grass (“sacrifice zones”); cutlines made by prospectors in the 1980s.
- **Topics:** tracking as a way of knowing landscapes, not only animals; tracking after the 2014 hunting ban; everyday tracking while walking; hand signals for species, direction and age of tracks; aging tracks after rain; recognising individual animals from their tracks; reading the wind; re-enacting an animal’s movements; Liebenberg’s simple, systematic and speculative tracking; tracking as science and the “non-scientific” aspects of tracking; trackers sensing lions through tingling armpits; tracking surveys and population estimates; tracker testing; trackers’ employment and livelihoods; truffle tracks and gathering; witchweed tracks confused with truffle tracks; harvester termites cutting dead grass; a fenced grass experiment that missed the termites’ movement; rangelands, cattle and fences; navigating by dunes and pans; finding the storied pan Haly; gas prospecting and water use at Zutshwa; drought; San land rights and sedentarisation; multispecies ethnography.
- **Statistics or models:** None
- **Data type:** New field data: participant observation, walking, tracking and gathering with the trackers, and interviews. Master’s research 2009 to 2010 (including Western Kgalagadi Conservation Corridor tracking surveys), pre-dissertation research in 2012 and 2013, 12 months of dissertation fieldwork from April 2015 to April 2016, and a short return visit in January 2017. Inconsistency: the fieldwork is given as April 2015 to April 2016, but the text also says it began in early May 2015 and ended in March 2016. The number of Master trackers is given in one footnote as “only 7 or 8 living certified Master trackers in the world” and in another as “among less than 10 certified in Southern Africa”.

## Synopsis

### 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.

### 8. Implications for tracking (Original Wisdom's observations)

_These are Original Wisdom's observations, not the authors'._

- The vignettes show skills that trackers practise every day but that surveys rarely record: aging tracks after rain, recognising individual animals, reading the wind, and predicting an animal’s route rather than following it.

- The fenced plot story is a useful lesson for anyone designing field studies: the trackers saw straight away that the termites had moved on, and the experiment missed what it set out to measure. Asking experienced trackers before setting up a study may save effort.

- The witchweed that mimics truffle tracks is a reminder that look-alike signs exist beyond animals.

## Cite this summary

Lawrence, K. 2026. Summary of: Gathering the Kalahari: Tracking Landscapes in Motion (du Plessis, 2018). Original Wisdom, Tracking Literature. https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/2018-du-plessis-gathering-kalahari-tracking-landscapes/