Poacher S Moon

When wildlife conservationist Richard Peirce learnt about the targeting of three private game reserves in the Western Cape in 2011 and the butchery of some of their rhinos, he embarked on a crusade to raise public awareness about the horrors of rhino poaching. This is the story of Higgins and Lady, two rhinos from the farm Fairy Glen that defied the odds by surviving a brutal attack. Peirce keeps the reader spellbound as he recounts the series of attacks and their aftermath in chilling detail: the unbearable savagery, suspect police work, shady characters, mysterious happenings and death threats. Reading like a crime thriller, this account of dogged survival, compassion and triumph – along with desperate strategising to outwit the poaching mafia – will have wide appeal. Colour images throughout, taken as the drama unfolded, bring the subject even more vividly to life.

In this explosive debut novel, W. Aaron Vandiver takes readers into the South African Bush, with its stunning landscapes, its dazzling and deadly wildlife, and its dark underbelly of violence. Against this dramatic backdrop, Under a Poacher's Moon tells an unflinching story of two people who fight desperately to save Africa's wildlife, sometimes with tragic unintended consequences, as they search for passion and meaning in a dangerous and unpredictable world. Anna Whitney travels to Mzansi, a remote safari lodge located deep in the wilds of South Africa, hoping to get as far away from home and her troubled life as possible. The perilous beauty of the land captures her imagination, but when she hears the haunting late-night cries of an injured rhino, her escapist fantasies collide with brutal reality. She and Chris, a safari guide wrestling with his own secret demons, find themselves embroiled in a war on Africa's wildlife. They are pulled into a struggle that brings them face-to-face with shocking acts of violence, rogue officials, armed gangs, vicious wild predators, and their own deepest fears. It is a conflict that threatens to destroy them, or lead them toward a new and better life together.

Evy is out with her horses, Rusty and Twilight, when she comes across a dead moose. Things only get worse when she discovers a very young, now orphaned calf standing over his mother’s body. She is determined to save the calf, but before she can, Twilight, her mustang filly, disappears. Evy sets out to rescue her, only to stumble upon even worse danger: illegal hunters who will do anything to keep their poaching a secret. Will Evy be one of their victims?

Billy is one of four teens chosen as the finalists in a competition to spend a long weekend in the Kruger Park. But on their first night in the bushveld, they run into a group of rhino poachers and land in grave danger. Who is the mysterious boy, and the anonymous "Hornblower"? Will they help the four friends expose the villains and save the rhino?

DOWN AT JIKA JIKA TAVERN When student anthropologist, Nonhle Ngubane returns home to Zululand, she is faced with the unimaginable: her father, a game ranger, is arrested for rhino poaching: a crime she knows he'd never commit.However, Nonhle is unaware that a dark plot of revenge, between a conflicted traditional healer and a slippery rhino poaching boss, is unfolding. When the evidence against her father starts to stack up, she takes matters into her own hands, setting in motion a chain of events that finds her fighting not only for her father's innocence but for her life.

MARIO CESARE, after decades as warden of Olifants River Game Reserve, has his feet firmly planted in this magnificent slice of Big Five country to the west of the Kruger Park. Cesare recounts some of the hair-raising, heartbreaking and heartwarming moments: a buffalo calf reunited with its pining mother, injured lions given second chances and rhinos lost, one by one, to poaching. Heart of a Game Ranger is a story of extremes, where spectacular days that end in exhausted satisfaction and achievement are balanced by those that leave behind only despair and frustration. Seen through his eyes and spoken from the heart, Cesare tells a deeply personal story – not only of a life lived wild, but of the joy of Africa's incredible natural world.

Conservationist Grant Fowlds lives to save and protect Africa's rhinos, elephants and other iconic wildlife, to preserve their habitats, to increase their range and bring back the animals where they have been decimated by decades of war, as in Angola, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This vivid account of his work tells of a fellow conservationist tragically killed by the elephants he was seeking to save and a face-off with poachers, impoverished rural people exploited by rapacious local businessmen. Fowlds describes the impact of the Covid pandemic on conservation efforts, the vital wildlife tourism that sustains these and rural communities; and tells of conservationists' efforts to support people through the crisis. Lockdowns may have brought a welcome lull in rhino and other poaching, but also brought precious tourism to a standstill. He shows how the pandemic has highlighted the danger to the world of the illicit trade in endangered wildlife, some of it sold in 'wet markets', where pathogens incubate and spread. He describes a restoration project of apartheid-era, ex-South African soldiers seeking to make reparations in Angola, engulfed for many years in a profoundly damaging civil war, which drew in outside forces, from Cuba, Russia and South Africa, with a catastophic impact on that country's wildlife. Those who fund conservation, whether in the US, Zambia or South Africa itself, are of vital importance to efforts to conserve and rewild: some supposed angel-investors turn out to be not what they had appeared, some are thwarted in their efforts, but others are open-hearted and generous in the extreme, which makes their sudden, unexpected death an even greater tragedy. A passionate desire to conserve nature has also brought conservationists previously active in far-off Venezuela to southern Africa. Fowlds describes fraught meetings to negotiate the coexistence of wildlife and rural communities. There are vivid accounts of the skilled and dangerous work of using helicopters to keep wildebeest, carrying disease, and cattle apart, and to keep elephants from damaging communal land and eating crops such as sugar cane. He tells of a project to restore Africa's previously vast herds of elephants, particularly the famed 'tuskers', with their unusually large tusks, once prized and hunted almost to extinction. The range expansion that this entails is key to enabling Africa's iconic wildlife to survive, to preserving its wilderness and, in turn, helping humankind to survive. There is a heartening look at conservation efforts in Mozambique, a country scarred by years of war, which are starting to bear fruit, though just as a new ISIS insurgency creates havoc in the north of the country. What will humanity's relationship with nature be post-pandemic? Will we have begun to learn that by conserving iconic wildlife and their habitats we help to preserve and restore precious pockets of wilderness, which are so vital not only the survival of wildlife, but to our own survival on our one precious planet.