The final hurdle

What does it mean to be a qualified field guide?  People come from all walks of like to attend this course and to enrich their understanding and personal experience of the bush.  I personally have trained people from probably 20 different nations and from age 18 right through to 70!  This is perhaps the greatest gift the bush has to offer: it doesn’t matter what your knowledge levels is, where you are from or how old you are, the bush has something for you.  Whether that be a holistic connection to your ancestors or something as simple as escapism shouldn’t matter.  The bush is the bush and how we interpret it is our own private experience.

The students on the latest FGASA level 1 course came from far and wild.  South Africans, Germans, Belgians, Portugese and even Sri Lankans came together to share their thirst for knowledge and passion for the bush.  The programme was as intense as ever and come the last 2 weeks of tests and the final assessment, stress levels were rising!  I’m not going to lie to any prospective student on such a course, it’s not easy.  It would be impossible for me to explain the sheer amount of knowledge that is expected of you in a relatively short space of time, but the bush gives back what you put in, and the more you learn, the more you begin to appreciate the myriad of subtle intricacies that often go overlooked on a day by day basis.

 The latest group of students worked and played hard.  There is no better classroom than the bush itself and twice daily activities certainly gave them great exposure to their new world.  The bush was being extremely kind this month and lions were seen regularly, 4 leopards, hyaena pups and even 2 aardvark sightings were just some of the highlights laid on for us by Mother Nature!  The students rewarded her generosity but knuckling down when the time came and we are delighted to report that they achieved a 100% pass mark in the FGASA theory exam!  All that remained was one final practical assessment:  a chance to show their assessor that they were able to take all of this new-found knowledge and package into a 3 hour drive designed to entertain and inform guests from all walks of life.

This exercise strikes fear into most but the hard work has been done.  The assessment is about sharing a genuine love of nature with like-minded people and putting your own personal stamp on the proceedings.  Anyone can read a guide book on safari but the true skill of a nature guide is to be able to involve and entertain and host guests, interpret behaviour and signs and most importantly, link every aspect of the natural world with another.  The bush is not made up of hundreds of individual organisms, it is an intricate network of symbiotic relationships honed by millennia of evolution!

Students excelled themselves and enjoyed a host of sightings during assessment week including daily giraffe encounters and a few white rhino along the way.  Markers were set with regard to interactivity on drives such as the tea made fresh from russet bushwillow (Combretum hereroense) seed pods, spinach from the leaves of the buffalo thorn (Ziziphus mucronata) and even a necklace made from impala dung!  Suffice to say that the students performed brilliantly across the board I am delighted to report that their high standards set in the theory aspects were upheld, with all passing their assessments with flying colours!  I can honestly say that the standard was hugely high and as an instructor, it is so satisfying to see a group of strangers coming so far in such a short period of time.  I joined EcoTraining to try and do my part to uphold the standards of the guiding industry and on the evidence of this group, the future of guiding in SA looks bright!  

Article and photos by Ben Coley

THE STORRO STORRO STORY: UPDATE FROM NAMIBIA (14 AUGUST 2012)

You can hardly get it any better than this – watching four male cheetahs for a good period of time, following the ‘brotherhood’ and observing their behaviour in their natural habitat. A great viewing indeed! This fortune befell the group of EcoTraining participants currently on their 28 day FGASA Level One field guide course in the Erindi Game Reserve in Namibia just a couple of days ago. Student Brannigan ‘Animal’ Wise, a manager/builder at the Hoada campsite at Grootberg, shares his diary of experiences so far. In his own words:

I recently came back to my motherland after a short service in "La Legion Etrangere" and some experience as a builder and construction worker in the UK. I fell in love with nature and Namibia all over again! I started working on a project of building a campsite for Journeys Namibia and soon I found out that I was nominated as a scholar for the Amarula Trust Scholarship Program.

I was the first student on duty and took everyone out into the reserve in the game viewer.  We left the camp at 06:00 and I thought I would have to cut my fingers from the steering wheel because of the freezing cold! Luckily it wasn’t long before the sun broke over the horizon and we were greeted by a confusion of bird calls. The morning drive was eventful and we circled the north eastern part of the reserve. 

Hidden (another student) was disappointed because we did not see any rhinos or lions making “storro storro” (mating) but I reasoned with him and assured him that the lions would still be “storro storroing” in the afternoon…

On the afternoon drive we headed for Kudu dam.  We had a lion sighting and it was my first ever, I was so excited! Unfortunately they had two young juveniles already, so we were too late to see “storro storro”.

We had many great sightings – hippos, blue wildebeest, crocodiles, African wildcat, gemsbok, kudu, giraffe, an eland carcass (killed by a male lion the previous day) ground squirrel, waterbuck, impala, springbok, black wildebeest and lots of birds, including a pale chanting goshawk. And don’t forget the lions!

There were also lessons to be learned on the drive (from instructor Ralph Kirsten) – how to identify black rhino signs by looking at its dung and the sexual dimorphism of different antelope.

I am looking forward to the rest of the course and also coming back for my Level 2!

The German's came to town

I joined Will Lawson from EcoTraining and a group of German media participants from South African Tourism on a fact finding tour, on a very unusual Safari this week.

We tried to understand the inter connection of nature with its surroundings and how Biomimicry can be utilised to provide us answers to a myriad of questions.

The more time we spent in the bush, learning about examples nature provided while following the spoor of two male cheetahs that formed a coalition to enhance their menu options. The more I came to realise that we are a lot less advanced and inspired than we should have been. I realised that we had a full research and development team that we haven’t been utilising. We spend years in developing products that nature developed (better I might add) years ago.

This is one of the aspects that Biomimicry is all about, providing answers to structural engineering, Architecture and many more advances in our daily life.

For more information on the scheduled Biomimicry courses, contact enquiries@ecotraining.co.za or visit the website at www.ecotraining.co.za

EcoTraining Kenya - Lewa

Robert Bateman’s extraordinary donation. His painting of a ‘Cheetah at Lewa Downs,’ is to be auctioned by Copley Fine Art Auctions in Plymouth, Massachusetts on July 21st - all the proceeds of which will benefit Lewa. This is such a fabulous painting, both for its size and of course it is superbly atmospheric representation of Lewa, We are sure the canvas will be of interest to many Lewa supporters.


Robert Bateman was born in Toronto in 1930, and is considered one of the premier wildlife painters of the late 20th century. Working as a High School Geography and Art teacher for nearly 20 years, his success as a painter came in the late 1970s. Since that time he has been regularly honoured with awards and other various distinctions. In addition to receiving numerous honorary degrees from respected Universities across North America, his more recent awards include the Amnesty International Human Rights Defender Award; the Simon Combes Award from the Artists for Conservation Foundation, and the Niagara Escarpment Lifetime Achievement Award.

Bateman’s works have been exhibited in numerous one-man shows at museums across North America, including the Tryon Gallery in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. His distinctive paintings are in public and notable private collections across the globe, among them that of HRH Prince Charles and of the late Princess Grace of Monaco. Bateman’s paintings are constantly in demand. Robert cherishes his visits to Lewa, so this canvas of a ‘Cheetah at Lewa’ is particularly evocative and provides an extraordinary opportunity to acquire a Bateman painting of this significance.

For further details relating to the Bateman paintings or information to place a bid at the Copley Fine Art Auction on July 21st, please refer to their website at www.copleyart.com (You will find the painting by selecting the artist’s name Bateman from the dropdown box).

http://www.copleyart.com/sporting-art-auction-item.php?id=Bateman316&search=Robert Bateman (b. 1930)