Techno Tracker

Africa Geographic, June 2003.

Wildlife monitoring has become a whole lot easier, thanks to CyberTracker, a tracking system devised by Capetonian Louis Liebenberg. And funding that he has received, first as a winner of the Rolex Award for Enterprise, then from the European Commission, has meant that CyberTracker is now being used by conservationists in more than 30 countries. Hilary Prendini Toffoli reports on Liebenberg's high-tech push to preserve the planet's creatures - and joins him tracking a small one in the dunes of a Cape Town beach.

Who would ever have thought that grysbok could survive in the sand dunes of Noordhoek beach? The place teems with horse riders, surfers, dogs. Enough barking rises in crescendoes from the nearby houses to send wild animals scuttling in panic into the nature reserve alongside.  But this, as Louis Liebenberg reminds me, is grysbok territory. Three-and-a-half decades ago, when the movie Ryan's Daughter was shot here, the land belonged to the wildlife, and because there are places to hide in the dense, low-lying scrub, a few grysbok have remained. Tangled dead branches provide an almost impenetrable shelter. Succulent groundcover makes a convenient snack.

Liebenherg has been monitoring the dune wildlife since he moved to Noordhoek some years ago. It's not part of any tracking programme. It's automatic, something he has done ever since learning the art of tracking with the San in the Kalahari more than a decade ago. That was when he conceived the idea of showing indigenous, often illiterate trackers how to save their observations of animal behaviour on a hand-held Palm Pilot computer, using pictorial symbols rather than a keyboard of letters.

The San tracker selects an option by touching the appropriate icon on the screen and records what the animal is doing - drinking, running, eating. The Palm Pilot is linked to a G1IS satellite network, so the computer can record the exact position of each sighting. Later the information is downloaded and processed to create detailed maps showing animal migrations or grazing habits. In this huge digital database the trackers' knowledge is made available to others, for managing wildlife and combating poaching.

'CyberTracker allows many trackers to share their observations in a way that was not possible before, both geographically and through time,' says Liebenberg. 'Over the next few decades we'll be able to combine the collective efforts of hundreds of trackers. The more people collecting data, the more comprehensive wildlife assessments will become.'

Here on Noordhoek beach, however, he's not collecting data. He is showing a few of us city-dwellers how to apply the knowledge he's acquired and used on these dunes to track not only animals, but also gangs of muggers for the police. Nothing, we discover, is ever what it seems. We constantly need Liebenberg, bearded and enigmatic, to help us read the unreadable: the wide tracks of a tortoise, the toes of a running dikkop, the shapeless splodges left by leaping frogs and the sharp-nailed blurs of scurrying mice.

But the grysbok hoofmarks we all recognise immediately: two small teardrop shapes. We follow the tracks past the bush where Liebenberg tells us he once surprised the little buck. Then, next to a spreading patch of succulent dune foliage, we see a second, smaller pair of hoofmarks. Mother and child, and they evidently had a feast, judging by all the soft tips they've picked off.

The prints are as clearly defined as Liebenberg's illustrations in his field guide, and on the screen of the CyberTracker. Liebenberg is an artist as well as a scientist. His pen-and-ink drawings are meticulously detailed and extraordinarily graceful. A few are framed on the walls of the cottage where this 43-year-old lives with just a Border collie for company when he's not in the Kalahari, or away on some CyberTracker expedition to monitor gorilla poaching in the Congo, or track wolves re-introduced into America's largest wilderness area. His non-profit organisation, funded by the European Commission, supports several of the more than 100 field projects that now use the technology globally.

While working with the hunters, it struck him that they appeared to compare tracks with images in their brains, as it they were looking, them up in a mental database.

Liebenberg's family is an artistic one. His father built the Garden Route's most beautiful bridges. One brother is an artist, his sister a violinist. But Louis studied physics, maths and the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cape Town. Somewhere along the line he came up with the theory that the origins of science lay in tracking.

'The same intellectual and creative processes are involved,' he says. To test his theory he went to the Kalahari, found a translator and then went from village to village looking for hunters who used bows and arrows and depended on tracking for survival. Since the beginning of time they've been able to enter the mind of the animal when they find its tracks, and gain knowledge of its movements and location.

For the next 18 years Liebenberg tracked with the San for periods of anything from three to nine months, living off his freelance illustrations and work as a tour guide, and writing two books on tracking. While working with the hunters, it struck him that they appeared to compare tracks with images in their brains as if they were looking them up in a mental database. And so the idea of CyberTracker was born. He got a young computer honours student, Lindsay Steventon, to write the software.

'It's out there for free,' says Liebenberg. 'Trackers the world over can download it from www.cybertracker.org.  We're not in this for profit. Our aim is for CyberTracker to become a global environmental tool that will make the world's conservation efforts that much more effective.' The future doesn't look too bright though for the grysbok and her baby. We never do get to see them. Their tracks disappear in the direction of a small clump of dense bush and, since they can certainly do without any more stress in their lives, we leave the little buck in peace.

For more information about CyberTracker, contact Anna Breytenbach at anna@cybertracker.co.za

The Rolex Award for Enterprise, of which Louis Liebenberg is a past laureate, was created to provide visionary men and women worldwide with the financial support and recognition they need to carry out innovative projects. The deadline for entries from Africa for the 11 th Rolex Awards is 31 July 2003. For further information, visit www.rolexawards.com