Lapalala Wilderness is a 43,300ha Big Five conservation and wildlife reserve close to the Tropic of Capricorn within South Africa’s Limpopo province. The reserve is about a two-and-a-half hours’ drive north of Johannesburg and located in the heart of UNESCO’s Waterberg Biosphere. Lapalala is a renowned, well-managed wildlife reserve and conservation legacy.
Its two main river systems – the Palala and the Blocklands – rise in the Waterberg ranges nearby and flow north through Lapalala for 63km and from there into what Rudyard Kipling described as the ‘great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo’ that forms the border with Botswana, some 80km to the north.
The region and the reserve have a fascinating human history, which has seen the landscape shared by humans and animals, including carnivores such as lions, for thousands of years. The large sandstone formations retain groundwater year round; this, together with cliff overhangs offering natural shelters, made it a suitable environment for primitive humans. The discovery of the fossil remains of Australopithecus africanus at Makapansgat, only 40km away, attests to the fact that early hominids walked these plains as far back as three million years ago.
The San people entered the Waterberg around 2,000 years ago and left behind a number of well-known rock-art sites within Lapalala and its surrounds depicting rhinoceros, numerous antelope and feline forms. The first European settlers were present in the area in the 1850s and, by the end of the Anglo–Boer War in 1902, all of the lion, elephant, rhinoceros and the remaining big game had been shot out.
Eugène Marais, one of the country’s greatest naturalists, moved to the Waterberg in 1906 and discovered that the once great wildlife herds were merely memories in the minds of old men. He wrote:
“The Waterberg was the ideal theatre of manly venture, of great endeavours and the possibility of princely wealth. Ivory was then what gold and diamonds became afterwards, and stories were told of bold lucky hunters killing 20 tuskers in one morning, the value of a principality of land in a few hours.”
Richard Wadley, a Waterberg resident, geologist and author of Waterberg Echoes, wrote:
“For at least the last century, there seem to have been no lion resident on the Waterberg plateau; however, there have been occasional accounts of vagrant lion passing through the area. For example, about eight years ago, two lions were seen a few times to the west of Lapalala. Inevitably, this being the backwoods of South Africa, they were tracked and pursued. It’s rumoured that one was shot and that the other escaped, perhaps towards the Limpopo River. Certainly, the area north of Lapalala, past the small town of Marken, was still quite well populated with wildlife even into the 1930s when it was a popular winter hunting destination. So, it’s possible that lion were still resident, or frequent visitors there.”
Lapalala’s rewilding started when Eric Rundgren, from a seasoned hunting family in Kenya, bought the core area of 4,450ha in the 1960s. In 1981, this nucleus piece of land was bought by Dale ‘Rapula’ Parker, a conservation-minded businessman from the Western Cape, along with renowned wildlife artist and conservationist Clive Walker. They set out with a passion for protecting biodiversity and to create a vibrant, impactful environmental education centre for children. The Lapalala Wilderness School was established shortly thereafter – and continues its work to this day.
It was recognised early on that the next step for Lapalala in order to enhance and protect the pristine wildness of this special place was to increase the size of the reserve to include the river and catchment systems of the Palala and Blocklands rivers. Over time, large tracts of ecologically valuable land and irreplaceable biomes were added, step by step, to reach the 43,300ha of today.
The reserve became a sanctuary for rhinos in the early 1980s, when the first critically endangered black rhinos were relocated there. This was a first for a private-sector conservation initiative, setting a new course for what is a UNESCO-declared biosphere.
All the species that occurred here historically have been returned, including threatened species like roan and sable antelope and disease-free buffalo that have been bred up and released into the reserve. All of the large and small carnivores that existed historically, including jackal, spotted hyena, brown hyena, leopard, cheetah and lion, are now present in Lapalala, which is a fully functioning Big Five game reserve and an important wildlife sanctuary in South Africa.
Lapalala’s lion reintroduction programme started in December 2018 with the reintroduction of a four-year-old male and three-year-old lionesses. Another four females and one male from Khamab Kalahari were brought onto the reserve in July 2019 to help strengthen the gene pool. The last two male lions came from the Selati Game Reserve near Kruger National Park and were released onto the reserve in November 2022.
Lapalala has had 23 cubs born on the reserve to date. In a bid to control the burgeoning lion population, Lapalala has implemented a range of contraceptive procedures. Dr Annemieke Müller, who heads up the veterinary services at Lapalala, explains the need for interventions:
“Even though Lapalala is over 40,500ha, it has finite boundaries and thus a finite lion-carrying capacity. There is insufficient range for continually establishing new lion prides, even within a large game reserve like Lapalala. A key aspect of managing lions in finite reserves involves switching male coalitions and females between other reserves on an irregular basis to minimise inbreeding with relatives and to maintain typical territorial tenure lengths.
“With a gestation period of 90 days, combined with a high number of cubs per litter, there’s a need to practise contraception to keep the lion population within the Lapalala reserve in balance. The process involves the removal of one uterus horn to decrease the space for implantation of fertilised eggs. Lapalala’s lionesses will still have cubs, but the litter sizes are smaller with one or two cubs as opposed to between four and five in a litter. One of Lapalala’s females has also received a contraceptive deslorelin implant – a reversible treatment that prevents pregnancy much like birth control pills do. Furthermore, to help keep its lion population in balance and to help prevent in-breeding, five lions were darted and moved to the Meletse Game Reserve in August 2022.”
Lapalala has had 48 veterinary interventions, ranging from surgery procedures such as hemi-hysterectomies to radio tracking collars being fitted, relocations implemented and tuberculin inoculations. The collars that have been fitted to some of the lions have been an important tool to aid the research projects that were initiated through the University of Pretoria and the Nelson Mandela University.
It has been key for the reserve’s managers to understand prey species since reintroduction, as well as the age classes of the prey, the areas in which the lions are hunting, the dynamics of their movements around the reserve and competition and contact with other lions as well as other predators. The planned extensions of the reserve into more ecologically valuable habitat will ensure that the requirements to manage the lion populations may be reduced.
Lions are the apex predator in any African wildlife national park or game reserve and Lapalala is no exception: they’re an important indicator species as to the health of the reserve. A healthy lion population can be associated with the generation of sustainable landscapes, which provide a wide range of benefits to other species in the ecosystem, especially antelope and other ungulates.
Lions remove the sick and weak animals and can prevent the transmission of diseases in herbivore populations. They play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy balance of wildlife numbers in any reserve. An absence of lions can most certainly lead to a dysfunctional landscape, where smaller carnivores are not capable of regulating larger herbivore populations.
From an evolutionary viewpoint, the use of fences to create large-scale game reserves for conservation – as has happened around southern Africa – has not affected the natural behaviour of lions as they still conform to expectations derived in unfenced reserves. Prey abundance is the key factor in determining the use of space by lions and is similar in both fenced and unfenced reserves.
South Africa’s Biodiversity Management Plan for African Lion was published in 2015 in terms of the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act (NEMBA) by the Minister of Environmental Affairs. Lions in South Africa will provide key opportunities for biodiversity conservation, economic development and social benefits through the existence of stable, viable and ecologically functional populations consisting of wild and managed wild lions.
In terms of South Africa’s lion management plan, Lapalala’s lion population is classified as ‘managed’ wild lions as they occur within a closed (i.e. fenced) reserve and are managed to limit unsustainable population growth and maintain genetic diversity. This means Lapalala’s management team have to actively manage lion demographics.
Lions eat a wide range of mammals, tending to favour medium to large ungulates with an average body mass of 190–550kg and are known to scavenge whenever possible. Lions respond to behavioural and physiological changes in prey in terms of what species, sex and age of prey they select. Typically, in an area like Lapalala, some five ungulate species make up the bulk of the lions’ prey. This pattern occurs in both large open systems and in smaller fenced reserves.
Pride ranges respond to changes in food abundance on an annual rather than a seasonal timescale. Thus, female home-range size is driven by the size of the pride and by prey abundance. Lions hunt most successfully in areas of thick cover and long grass and especially when there’s no moon. Additionally, when lions are within two kilometres of a waterhole, they move more slowly, cover shorter distances at night, and follow a more tortuous path than when they are further from a waterhole.
Rapula Parker, the man of rain, passed on the management of Lapalala – an enormous responsibility – to his son Duncan, who was joined in 2013 by Gianni Ravazzotti. They have set Lapalala on course for the next stage to being an exceptional role-model conservation legacy and to ensure Lapalala is a world leader in wildlife protection and conservation.
To help make the reserve sustainable, a small number of high-end, low-volume and low-impact lodges have been opened to attract and host discerning wildlife enthusiasts. The Lapalala Wilderness School has expanded its reach into the adjacent communities as well as schools further afield and has hosted over 150,000 schoolchildren since inception. Lapalala has been the birthplace of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), the Rhino and Elephant Foundation (REF), the Field Guides Association of Southern Africa (FGASA) and many research and conservation initiatives.
It is clear that lions and primitive humans have shared this landscape for tens of thousands of years with seemingly minimal impact on lion populations. In the last 200 years, however, lions have been annihilated by humans, with local extinction occurring around 120 years ago. Despite this, wild, free-roaming lions have continued to find ways into this large area, aided by rewilding in the last 60 years. Lions are now permanently entrenched once again.
With lions now found on less than 8% of their original range across Africa, Lapalala’s rewilding model is there to inspire and encourage protected areas of all sizes to look to adding new land or joining with other protected areas and increasing the range for these tawny cats. The importance of lions and the role they play in balancing ecosystems cannot be overstated.
– Peter Anderson
Lions are the stuff of legends. Revered and feared in equal measure, both majestic and terrifying, they once reigned supreme over an extensive domain. But this once-dominant beast’s original range has contracted by some 85%, and the world population is thought to have dropped to just over 20,000 individuals. The IUCN Red Data List now classifies lions as Vulnerable, and the West African subpopulation as Critically Endangered. Not only are lion numbers crashing, but the remaining populations cling to their existence on ever smaller, more fragmented pockets of land. Feared and despised by farmers trying to eke out a living on marginal land, lions are increasingly being exterminated or repurposed for commercial gain. Trophy hunters pay extortionate sums to bag specimens in their prime, and lion bones are being sold for the roaring Eastern trade in ‘tiger wine’.
