IONA NP - WILDLIFE COLLARING

Back to Africa director, Dr Joel Alves, travelled to Iona NP in Angola for a large-scale collaring project supported by Wild Wonderful World. Iona NP is a unique and phenomenal landscape recently brought under the management of African Parks. In line with conservation goals and with the idea of better understanding the utilisation of the vast desert landscape by priority species, the focus was to collar springbuck, oryx and Hartmanns mountain zebra. The hope was to locate and collar brown hyena and cheetah opportunistically but unfortunately none were seen during the operation. 

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The flying was carried out by Dirk du Preez (Du Preez Wild) in a Bell 206 and alongside park manager Pedro Monterroso and conservation manager, Dan vd Vyver, the team successfully collared 8 oryx, 8 Hartmanns zebra and 16 springbuck and were also able to immobilise and sample a zonkey (Hartmanns zebra and donkey cross).

As detailed in the pictures, Iona NP is an incredible, untouched wilderness area with enormous potential to become one of Angola’s flagship parks. 

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The Back to Africa team is looking forward to returning in the end of 2024 for further collaring operations and continuing to play our small part in such a spectacular landscape.