Gordon is out in the Simalaha floodplains when he comes across this herd of plains zebra. It is the most common species of zebra which roams grasslands and woodland of southern Africa in large herds.
After decades without zebra here, in 2014 Peace Parks, funded by the Swedish Postcode Lottery, translocated the first 50 zebra into the Simalaha Community Conservancy. Since then, a total of 114 zebra have been moved in and their numbers have been steadily rising.
The old saying ‘you are what you eat’ seems to ring true with zebra. As herbivores, they spend most of their day eating grass, sometimes leaves, shrubs twigs and bark too. Their teeth are well adapted for grazing, with sharp incisors at the front of their mouth to bite the grass, and large molars at the back for crushing and grinding. And the reason they roam across the landscape is because they are a grazing animal, and therefore need to wander to select forages that are easy to digest.
Known as hind gut fermenters, like horses, most of their food is digested in their hindgut through the process of fermentation with the help of billions of naturally occurring bacteria and microbes. They need to eat a lot, so they often look fat-bellied as the food sits in their stomach during the digestive process. They are not being greedy, but simply working with their own unique digestive system.
In order to digest their food properly, the fermentation process in their stomach requires a large amount of water, so they are constantly on the move, travelling thousands of kilometres in their quest for food and water, migrating with the seasons between foraging grounds. It seems zebra remember the routes to their grazing grounds, rather in the same way we might remember a great restaurant!
Peace Parks Foundation and partners’ work in connecting wild spaces to ensure ancient migration routes are accessible and protected, means that zebra like these will be able to munch and meander their way freely and safely through protected transfrontier areas in the future.
