Elephants and meerkats and squirrels, oh my!

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Published on Thursday, August 11, 2016

Submitted photos. Daniel Heschuk on top of Table Mountain near Cape Town, South Aftica.

By Kira Paterson

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

Daniel Heschuk, of Neepawa, has recently returned from a unique trip to South Africa. Heschuk, 20, who is going into his third year at the University of Manitoba, spent three months on a wildlife reserve called SA Lombard researching the Cape ground squirrel. 

“I met up with a professor last year and she mentioned that every year, she takes an undergraduate student to South Africa on a reserve to do research on ground squirrels,” Heschuk said. “Dr. Jane Waterman from [U of M] has been working at this reserve for about 20 years now, researching these squirrels and basically knows all there is to know about them... So rather than knowing a little bit about a lot of animals, she knows a lot about one animal. It’s really quite interesting.” 

Given the opportunity, Heschuk jumped at the chance to see another part of the world. The flight was all paid for and his accommodations were looked after, so he figured, why not? He has been to Kenya and Ecuador on volunteer trips before, so this wasn’t his first time going overseas. But this trip was for a very different reason than his previous two. 

The research trip was much like a summer job, but an unusual one. “I did a lot of trapping squirrels and basically, when I trapped them, I’d also have to process them. So that would mean taking measurements, taking tissue samples and PIT tagging the squirrels,” he explained. PIT tags are small, pill-shaped transponders that are injected under an animal’s skin, which allows one to keep track of that animal using a tag reader. “So, we would basically bait these traps with peanut butter and then I would take hair samples off of squirrels that we already knew about, I had to check these with a PIT tag reader to see if we already knew who the squirrel was, and from there, if I didn’t know who the squirrel was, I’d have to take a tissue sample as well as inject them with a PIT tag. It gave me a lot of interesting experience handling animals. It wasn’t something that really causes them a lot of pain, they get over it really quickly... I feel bad for them sometimes, though.” 

A baby Cape ground squirrel (Xerus inauris if you want to get technical) in a handling bag at the reserve where Heschuk was doing research on them.

Although a small creature, these squirrels are a large part of South African ecosystems, which is why this research is being done. “One of the things that professors found researching squirrels was that they are major ecosystem engineers. So they’ll be the animals that come in first to disturb this area and allow a lot of different animals to come in,” Heschuk explained. “They would dig burrow systems and when they dug burrows, different plants would start growing around the burrows that we’d notice, which was really interesting. And then other animals would start coming in, like mongooses and meerkats and eventually, we would find warthogs and aardvarks starting burrows there too. So that was really interesting.” 

He continued, “I never really expected I’d become attached to something like ground squirrels. Ground squirrel seems like the weirdest study species ever. But observing them and seeing their whole social structure was actually quite fascinating. They were very social animals.” 

“You should never relate animal behaviour to human behaviour when you’re doing observations, but it was just so hard not to, ‘cause it seemed like they were family oriented. They would do really interesting behaviours, it’s hard to explain. But it was really fun watching them and seeing their behaviours.”

‘Small town Manitoba vibe’

As for South Africa itself, Heschuk noted that from what he saw, it was comparable to Canada. “We were mostly on the nature reserve, but there were [local] workers on the reserve that we got to become really good friends with and people from town that we got to meet. So we got to learn a lot about people, how they live. It’s actually not extremely different from what we have here... The town I was near was Bloemhof and it was kind of almost like a small town Manitoba vibe. And the reserve was kind of like a farm... Like if you take a look at some of my pictures, people commented saying that ‘Oh, you’re in Saskatchewan or Manitoba, I don’t think you’re actually in South Africa.’”  

Daniel took this picture of SA Lombard reserve from on top of a windmill.

At first glance, some of his pictures of the reserve look like a field in the Canadian prairies. Until on closer inspection, a zebra or antelope can be seen, giving away the illusion.  “The reserve I was living on was really neat. I’d go for runs every day and there was all these different animals on the reserve,” Heschuk explained. “There was no dangerous animals, the reserve itself was actually fenced in, so no really dangerous animals would get in but you have springbok, blesbok – a lot of antelope really – and then the black wildebeest, zebra, impala, warthogs, ostrich. So every day I’d go for a run and  I’d see zebras crossing the road in front of me and every once in awhile... I’d see a huge stampede of wildebeest, like hundreds of different animals just stampeding right in front of me.... There was one time where I was going for a run on the reserve where we were and all of a sudden, I’m just running and all of these meerkats just burst out where I’m running and I’m running in a herd of meerkats, it was awesome.” 

Feeling like a tourist

Although most of their time was spent on the reserve doing squirrel research, Heschuk said that they were able to feel like tourists for a bit too. “So there was a couple days at the end of May, we went to, I guess, more of a touristy reserve. It was called Pilanesburg and the main purpose of this would be to see larger, I guess ‘sexier’ megafauna...but they had elephants and rhino and giraffe– as well as all the animals we had on our reserve– lions, it was all basically all the big five, plus we saw a wild dog, which are the rarest carnivore in all of Africa. And it was like the first time the professor has ever seen wild dogs and it was unbelievable,” Heschuk said. “There was a really cool experience, I almost got trampled by an elephant... There was four of us in the vehicle and I took the driving shift, and I was driving up this dirt road up this steeper hill and I’m just turning around a corner and all of a sudden, there’s this huge bull elephant right in front of us.... Not a good thing to be witnessing at that time, especially right in the middle of the road. Anyways, Jane kind of looks and me and is like, ‘Okay, start backing up now.’ I kind of heard her voice like shaking a little bit, but she was surprisingly calm. So all of a sudden, I shifted into reverse and start backing up down this winding road. And I make the mistake of looking up at the elephant and seeing where it is and kind of forget to steer with the road. So I found myself backing kind of off the road and onto the cliff edge, I guess. And the elephant continues walking towards me and just out of luck, it finds a tree to scratch or something and moves off the road and I just throw the vehicle into second gear and basically book her out. It was quite the experience.”

Elephants at a watering hole at Pilanesburg Wildlife Reserve, where Daniel and his group had their dangerous encounter with a bull elephant.

Their tours weren’t all quite as dangerous as that one, though. “Another big touristy thing we did was go to Cape Town... Cape Town is like ‘la crème de la crème,’ as my mom would say. Like, it was just the most beautiful area I’ve ever really been in. You have the ocean and mountains just jutting from the ocean. We got to climb Table Mountain and we went surfing in the Indian Ocean, like a lot of adventure stuff. We looked at tidepools, we would look for these little creatures that got washed [up] and stuck in these little tidepools. We’d find all these little fish and it was just unbelievable. We were living right on the beach, it was just the dream.”

He had a couple of favourite times on the trip, one of them being at Cape Town. “I’d say surfing in the Indian Ocean was just really cool, fun experience. We did a lot of touring and a lot of really cool stuff, but having that whole adrenaline rush was really fun,” he said.  “I’ve only been body surfing [before], not like the stand-up cool stuff, so that was really cool. But other than that, I just really liked to do my runs on the reserve because I never know what I was going to see just running out in front of me and stuff like that.” He added, “It was really cool because it was closed to the public, so we, the workers, were really the only ones on the reserve there. So we had a reserve to ourselves, so any time I wanted to, I could go for a little bike safari. Sometimes I’d just take one of the vehicles out and listen to music as I was just doing my own little tour of the reserve.”

Experience from beyond the classroom

Although ecology doesn’t directly relate to the path Heschuk wants to take in university, this research trip will be useful in his studies. He explained that he is looking at going into genetics, but right now, he’s just doing the general science courses. “When I go back, I still have three weeks with the professor working in the lab where I’m going to be extracting DNA and doing some cool stuff. I’m going to be able to experience a lot of stuff that we’ll be learning in class. So even before I learn about it in class I’ll already have done it.” 

Heschuk said that next year, he hopes to be able to work with a professor again, but hopefully closer to home. “I’m hoping to do another undergrad research thing next summer, but hopefully just in Winnipeg, hopefully working in a lab like a chemistry lab for a genetics prof or something.”

He really enjoyed being in South Africa, but coming home was also a good thing for him. “At the end of the trip, I knew it was time for me to go. And my main motivation was, in front of me there’d be springbok running and – earlier in the trip I’d actually ate a bit of game meat and springbok was one of them – I realized how good springbok tasted. So my motivation shouldn’t be wanting to eat this animal, so I knew it was probably time to go.” Despite being happy to go home, he added, “I’d really like to go back to South Africa and back to the reserve. It was really cool.”