I read this article by Rod East on the Hunt Network and found it very interesting considering the quality of game coming out of Mozambique recently. We have a new camp in Niassa that will open soon. Roads have been cut into the area and if all goes well, I'll be there this Sept/Oct. I'd like to be there soon when the camp opens, but the wife wants to see Alaska via a cruise ship. Not my cup of tea: no trap shooting off the deck anymore, and the decks are too high to troll from
LDK

By Rod East

In 1992, Mozambique emerged from almost three decades of civil war with a ruined economy, towns and cities battered and isolated, and large stretches of land depopulated. Most of the game had been shot out in protected areas such as Gorongoza National Park. Few would have predicted that within the next 10 to 12 years the country would have Africa’s largest known single population of the sable antelope.

But the remote Niassa Game Reserve area in the far north, which had been largely depopulated during the war when local communities fled to neighbouring countries, had retained significant wildlife populations. In the mid-1990s, the Mozambican company Madal, owned by a Norwegian businessman Halvor Astrup, commenced a privately funded conservation initiative in this area.

In1998 this developed into management of the reserve under a public/private sector partnership. The government retains ownership of the land and its wildlife resources but has granted a long-term lease to Sociedade de Gestao e Desenvolvimento da Reserva do Niassa (SRN) to manage and develop the Niassa reserve. In 1999, the reserve was almost doubled in size to 23,040 sq km and a 19,239 sq km buffer zone established on its western, southern and eastern boundaries (the northern boundary is the Rovuma River, which forms the international border with Tanzania), making a total protected area of 42,279 sq km. The buffer zone is divided into blocks that are contracted out to private sector operators for management, mainly for safari hunting. Each investor is required to establish and train an anti-poaching unit.

The area comprises a gently undulating plateau covered with miombo woodland, which is taller and denser in the west where rainfall is higher. This is excellent habitat for woodland antelopes such as sable. As altitude and rainfall decrease towards the east and in the major river valleys, drier woodland types such as Acacia/Combretum are more common. Approximately 12,000 people live within the reserve’s boundaries.

Major long-term threats to the protected area include illegal subsistence hunting (widespread in the mid-1990s when it was probably having a significant impact on wildlife populations), commercial poaching (locally intensive in the mid-late 1990s in the north-east of the buffer zone close to the Tanzania border, mainly through snaring), indiscriminate burning, and unplanned and uncontrolled expansion of settlement. The Niassa Conservation and Development Programme which is being implemented by SRN has three main components: biodiversity conservation, promotion and implementation of wildlife-based tourism, and community development based on sustainable use of natural resources. The reserve has high potential for tourism, with much of it comprising a pristine wilderness with spectacular scenery and wildlife; but development of eco-tourism is constrained by the area’s remoteness, difficult access, and lack of infrastructure. Safari hunting, which opened between 1996 and 2002 in the various blocks of the buffer zone, is therefore seen as the main development activity.

Regular aerial surveys of wildlife populations have monitored the success of SRN and its contractors in protecting and developing the Niassa reserve and buffer zone. Between 1998 and 2004, there was an overall increase of 90% in the area’s wildlife populations, with almost all species showing significant increases. The most numerous species are sable antelope (estimated population 13,200 in 2004) and elephant (12,500). Other species such as buffalo, eland, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest, kudu, waterbuck and zebra number in the thousands.

The sable population is particularly notable and is the largest of this splendid antelope in any protected area in Africa. Its closest rivals are the Hwange-Matetsi-Ngamo-Botswana border area of north-western Zimbabwe and the Selous ecosystem in south-eastern Tanzania, each of which supports an estimated 5,000-10,000 sable.

This is yet another illustration of how quickly things can change in Africa, sometimes for the better. The wide range of species on licence in the Niassa hunting blocks is enhanced by trophy quality in some cases, e.g., elephant bulls with ivory in the 60-80 pound class have been taken by tourist hunters in the last 18 months. And a 100-pounder shot by game scouts in southern Tanzania in 2005 had apparently wandered in from the Niassa area of Mozambique.

I enjoyed that writeup, I'll be hunting the Niassa area for pretty much the entire month of October this year. I have a gorgeous Sable in my trophy room, so I'll not be looking for another, but I am hoping for a nice hippo, a croc, a leopard and various plains game -- all with a handgun as usual.

I've not hunted Mozambique before, so I'm looking very much forward to this trip.

Man that sounds like a great place to hunt! True adventure for sure. My a$$ puckered up sideways just paying the price for a Sable in Zim!

Nice Sable