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Wild dogs in Moremi
The painted dog on its home ground — how a pack lives here, where, and in which months.
A rare animal, on its strongest ground.
Fewer than seven thousand wild dogs are left in Africa, and the largest population of them runs across northern Botswana. Moremi's eastern side and the Khwai country beside it sit inside that stronghold, and researchers have followed the packs here, year in and year out, since 1989. Few predators anywhere are as well understood on the very ground where you watch them: what they are like in the flesh, where they range, and what the months change.
They are never a promised sighting — nothing that covers seven hundred square kilometres is. But this is ground where a pack is a reasonable hope rather than a lifetime's luck, and in the winter denning months rather more than that.
A pack is one animal.
Watch the pack, not the dog. Everything a wild dog does it does as part of a unit: one breeding pair, their grown offspring as helpers, and pups that eat first at a kill while the adults stand guard. The coats say these are individuals — no two alike, which is how one dog is told from another in the field — but the behaviour is collective to a degree no cat manages.
Before a hunt the pack wakes, greets and rallies, and work done on these very packs found that the sneezes in that rally act as votes: enough, and they go. Then comes the run — long, loose and relentless — usually at first or last light and, here, under a bright moon as well.
No fixed address — a home range.
There is no wild dog corner of Moremi. A pack's territory here averages some seven hundred square kilometres, and neighbouring territories overlap. Dogs turn up from the Khwai floodplains to the mopane woodland deep inside the reserve, and they cross the reserve's boundary into the community and private land beside it without noticing it. The Khwai side is the ground most associated with them; it has no monopoly.
Which area to base yourself in is a bigger question than one animal — water or dry land, fly-in or drive-in, what a night costs. The areas are compared side by side, and every camp is listed with its activities and its rates.
Here all year. Findable in winter.
The dogs are resident; what changes is whether anyone can find them. From the rains through autumn a pack works its whole range, and meeting one is luck helped by a good guide. Around June the dominant female dens — on this ground typically in mopane woodland — and for some three months the pack hunts out from one place and returns to it, its range drawn in to about a quarter. Sightings become regular, and pups show at the den from three or four weeks old.
No camp, month or guide can promise a den: the dogs choose the site afresh each year, and a den is not always visited at all — guides hold back where a vehicle would disturb the pups. Winter is also Moremi's high season for other reasons — the flood, the dry-land game — and the rates follow.
Of surveyed guest stays here, 42% reported wild dog sightings — from 950 stays surveyed across the reserve.
From our guest surveys — how we gather evidence
Thirty years of notes on the same packs.
What is unusual about Moremi's dogs is how much is known about them. Researchers based on this side of the delta have followed some sixty packs since 1989, and a good deal of what is understood about how wild dogs live was learned here: how a pack votes to hunt; that dens go where lions tend not to; that lions nonetheless account for close to half of adult wild dog deaths in the reserve.
The long record has caught something slower, too. Over three decades the pups have come to be born about three weeks later in the year, tracking the warming winters — and fewer survive the hotter denning months.
From the pack — to the plan.
From the pack to the itinerary.
Browse the camps on wild dog ground, or a journey already built through it — or tell us your month and how much the dogs matter, and we take it from there.