The idea was first kicked off by Noah.  He saved the animals and put them gently back where they belonged.  (Pity he included the mosquitoes.)  Nowadays, any effort to re-introduce wild animals to where they were before is usually called a Noah project.

The Addo Elephant National Park has just completed a Noah project – bringing more than 100 buffalo into the park. This is not as simple as it sounds.  South Africa’s buffalo are under high threat – bovine TB has cut swathes through buffalo populations all over the country and it is illegal to move or introduce the animals into a new area until they have undergone months – if not years – of tests for the disease.  These new buffalo are in the pink, and not only will populate the new areas of the park but will create new populations of disease-free animals to counter the losses in other parks.

Keeping the buffalo company are 80 red hartebeest, 40 Burchell’s zebra and more than 20 eland – the largest antelope in the world.  The eland, of course, was a sacred animal to the Bushmen, and it is easy to see why.  With their stately bearing and abundance of meat, they are Christmas-on-the-hoof for the hunter-gatherer. 

The new area of the park has also been treated to 17km of roads so that visitors can have better access. The newly constructed roads are named after people who were instrumental in the development of the park:  Vukani loop is named after Steve Trollope, the park’s first manager nicknamed ‘Vukani’ (which means op-en-wakker in Afrikaans), while the Harvey loop is named after the Harvey family who protected the last 16 elephants on their farm before the park was proclaimed and the ellies were allowed some peace.  Congratulations to the park management for commemorating people who had input into the park, instead of trying to ingratiate themselves with some flavour-of-the-month politician.

Another Noah project is destined for Beaufort West, that little hiccup on the N1 highway between Johannesburg and Cape Town.  Beaufort West had its glories in the past – it used to be known as the Oasis of the Karoo, because in all the dry Karoo it was one town with a reliable supply of water – the snowmelt from the nearby Nuweveld mountains. 

As a result of the relatively unusual phenomenon of reliable water, Beaufort West attracted nomads and farmers since time immemorial.  The main influx of European settlers began in the second half of the 18th Century, and a whole crop of newcomers arrived when the plotters behind the ill-fated Slagtersnek Rebellion were banished to the Karoo.  One of the characteristics of living in the Karoo is the ‘flash flood’, where a sudden downpour dumps huge quantities of water in short order on a very dry countryside, and the run-off sweeps everything before it.  The first landros, a certain J Baird, countered this by digging deep water furrows on either side of the streets.  These furrows, empty for most of the year but brimming with water when the weather became lively, were adopted by other Karoo towns and are now a feature of the region.  Mr Baird also planted avenues of pear trees that still exist today. Beaufort West was the first municipality in the Cape, with the first Town Hall.  But the area changed irrecoverably in 1849, when the worst drought ever known killed off millions of plains game. A letter written at the time described how, for three days, vast herds of animals maddened with thirst milled through the town, eating and drinking everything in sight. People shot venison in their front gardens and once the herds had passed the town looked as if it had been ravaged by fire.  It was a tragic end to the great migrations of the Karoo.  The plains game never recovered and were replaced by Merino sheep, which became the principal economic activity of the area.

The town is built on the banks of the Gamka (lion) river, which indicates that there were lions here in the olden days.  And now there are going to be lions again. 
The Karoo National Park, which begins just over the road from Beaufort West on the northern side of the N1, was established in 1979 to protect the unique flora and fauna of the Karoo.  This means that this year the park turned 30, and to celebrate its birthday SANParks decided to re-introduce the Cape lion.  
  Bringing in lions is no small matter.  First of all, you have to make sure that they have enough to eat.  It’s a bit galling to spend R50 000 on a magnificent antelope at a game auction and introduce it to a park with a huge flourish, to find a few weeks later that you have merely provided a memorable take-away for Leo and his mates.  So lions can only come in once the non-predator animals in the park have established themselves (and this takes between 10 and 15 years at least).

Secondly, lions tend not to like people very much (the camera straps get caught in their teeth), but management still has to make sure that a wandering tourist is not seen as a bit of sport for a bored pride.  There are far too many incidents of unworldly visitors strolling over to pet the lions, so the park officials have to make sure that there are no impromptu meetings between the two. 

 But the good news is that this is yet another signal that South Africa’s parks are growing in viability, that they are increasing their attractions, that their animal populations are well managed. Noah would be so pleased.