Help Fund Flights for Wildlife Protection

Since April, your support for Help Fund Flights for Wildlife Protection has helped us complete approximately 21 monitoring flights and 40 hours in the air averaging around 10 hours of flying each month and keeping us right on target with what we hoped to achieve.

Our primary focus has been rhino monitoring in Dinokeng Game Reserve. From the air, Kevin and the monitoring team can cover a large area efficiently, locating and getting a good visual of nearly all the rhinos being monitored in approximately 2.3 hours of flying.

Each sighting also becomes valuable conservation information. Danelle, a wildlife monitor from Dinokeng, plots the rhino sightings on EarthRanger, a conservation technology platform used to record and bring together wildlife monitoring information. This helps the reserve understand where rhinos have been seen and when they were last located, supporting the team's ongoing monitoring efforts.

One flight brought a particularly special discovery. Kevin and Danelle located a female rhino who did not yet have a tracking implant and beside her was a tiny calf, estimated to be only a day or two old.

Seeing new life in the wild is always an extraordinary privilege and a beautiful reminder of exactly why this work matters.

Although rhinos are the focus, the flights offer glimpses of the wider wild landscape too. Kevin has regularly seen elephants, as well as cheetah, hyena, honey badger and many of the reserve's herbivores. And, despite not actively looking for them, lions have appeared on almost every flight.

As Kevin says, “Must be a sign!” 

The team also watches reserve boundaries and remains alert for anything unusual that may need attention. Occasionally weather conditions mean a flight has to be shortened or aborted, but safety will always come first.

To everyone who has supported this project, thank you.

Your generosity is helping put eyes in the sky, locate and monitor rhinos, gather valuable information and give conservation teams another tool to help protect wildlife.

And somewhere within those 40 hours was a mother rhino standing beside her tiny newborn calf, a precious new life beginning in the wild.

For those of us who share a deep love of wild things, there can be few better reasons to keep going.

Thank you for flying alongside us!