Life as a Female Ranger

When I was about 13 or 14 years old, I went on a game drive with my parents and from the moment I climbed onto the game viewer I was already thinking I want to do this when I'm older.  I told my parents this and of course at that age a child changes their mind constantly as to what they want to do, so they didn't take me too seriously.

But as the years went by, I was still in love with the thought of living in the bush and being surrounded by animals.  As the time came and I needed to decide on to what to study, I knew I needed to be in the tourism industry.  Game ranging did cross my mind but I thought it wasn't a career and especially for a female.

I looked at various options but nothing grabbed me, and just by chance I heard that there was an open day at Damelin College, I went to it and saw the course for Game ranging and lodge management where I spoke to the lecturer, Simon Allen, and I was sold!  I knew that's what I was going to study.

So after 2 years of hard studying, in a class of 15 with only myself and 1 other girl, I knew it was going to be a challenge for me as it is definitely a male dominated industry.  I had to constantly prove to the men in my class that I was good enough to be there and could do everything they did, and better. Sometimes the lecturer would be harder on myself and the other girl in my class.  He would push us to prove to ourselves that we could do it.  Once we believed in ourselves, beating the boys came much easier, much to the sadness of the boys we did most things better than them.

My first guiding job was at a small game reserve 1 and half hours outside Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape.  As I was the new ranger there I got all dirty work to do.  There were 5 game viewers which I had to wash on my own nearly everyday.  I was also the only female ranger but don't think I got any sympathy from the guys.

I wasn't there for long but I learnt so much.  As they say practical experience is a much better teacher than sitting in a classroom reading books. As my lecturer taught us, "Animals do not read books."

During my time at my first reserve, I got the opportunity to look after 2 day old lion cubs, very messy and smelly job I might add, I looked after a semi tame Serval who we named Guinevere, I was able to touch a full grown tiger that was sedated so we could insert a chip on her neck just below the skin, I helped feed the lions in the breeding center who started recognizing me when I came into the area where they lived.  It was amazing hearing them great me as if I was apart of their family.  Soft, low moans.  Of course I had to respond to them and make the same noises so they knew I wanted to be there with them. The tigers took a little longer to great me but eventually they too started making their welcoming noises.  All of them allowed me to get close to them and take photos.  Except for one male lion, his name was Zulu, he was quite an angry lion when I met him, he charged the fence and would hide behind the tree in his enclosure.  I tried to spend as much time as I could with him, just sitting next to his enclosure, speaking to him, reassuring him that I was a friend, not foe.  Eventually he stayed where he was when I approached and became more friendly, although he never made any greeting sounds, but he loved to pose for the camera with a quizzical look on his face.

Zulu the Lion

Feeding time for the large predators was not a clean job.  There was a huge refrigerator that stood in one of the sheds where we kept all the meat for the lions, tigers, wild dogs and cheetahs.  But before it would fit into there we had to chop it all up.  Sometimes we would get a call from a local farmer saying that one of his cows had died from old age and we could have it for the predators.  So off we went to collect the animal and brought it back to chop it up into smaller pieces.  Sometimes it looked like a massacre had happened in the shed.

My time there came to an end and i moved onto a much larger reserve 2 hours away from home in P.E.  It was in the small Karroo and hadn't opened up yet.  So I arrived there a  month before it was due to open to the public.  This gave myself and the other 2 rangers (both male, again) time to learn the reserve and the animals.  It had all the "Big 5" and cheetahs.  The predators were all free roaming and had to feed themselves.  So no chopping for us!
I gained a lot of experience there.  The animals were good teachers and it was truly a magnificent reserve.  You will never see a sky like you do in the Karroo.  We were literally in the middle of no where.  There was  not any light pollution, no highway sounds, no telephone lines to break the skyline.  It was peaceful and our own little world that was 15 000 hectares.
Our elephants were something else, there had not been elephants in that area for about 150 years so it was great that our reserve had brought them back.  The herd was a little volatile.  The matriarch, for some reason, hated people.

 She would often mock charge the vehicles or she would simply take the herd back into the bush when she saw us and they would disappear. We had one big bull, in the beginning he had a bad habit of chasing the vehicles, any vehicle he saw he would chase down the road, then stop, put his head in a bush, and when the vehicle started coming back again to try get past, he would jump out the bush, as if to say boo! And chase them all over again.  His own little toys for him to play with.  I'm sure at the end of each day he would go back to the family herd and tell them he managed to chase 5 cars down the road!
So us, as the rangers, had to get him out of this bad habit and stand our ground every time he came towards the vehicle.  We won in the end and he learnt to stop bullying everyone.  The herd also settled down after a long time, but the matriarch still didn't trust us 100%.  I was there for 2 years and i loved watching our animal herds grow, seeing the first elephant born on the reserve.  It was a magical place.

I am now currently working at a family run lodge 45 minutes outside of Grahamstown.  I have been here for 15 months now.  The reserve is about 7000 hectares and I see amazing animal sightings.  Luckily I am not the only female ranger here, there are 4 of us out of +- 10 rangers.  So us girls are slowly getting in there!  But we still have to prove ourselves on a daily basis.  One of my favorite things is to wake up for work in the morning and hear the roaring of one of our lions.  Its a special sound and makes me love being a ranger even more.
While I am writing this I'm having a cup of coffee, sitting on the stoep, listening to birds singing and somewhere not too far away, I can hear one of our male lions vocalizing.

So life as a female ranger has its perks! :-)