Pronking (Part I of III)
- pauljacquin7
- 11 minutes ago
- 3 min read
24 springbok, a greener Nama Karoo, and a meaningful step for Löwen River. How we tee it up - Namibian style
The announcement
Our last buzzing post was a clue. The bees were back. The grass was up. The land was ready to make a little more noise. So here it is: 24 springbok arrived at Löwen River Rewilding early July. A breeding herd. New genes. New dynamic.
This had been on our mind from the start of Löwen River and on our 2026 list. It was ambitious. It stretched the budget. It involved rain, planning, fence wire, a truck, a boma and a degree of Namibian optimism that finance departments tend to discourage.
We did it anyway.
Why springbok?
Springbok are among the most recognisable residents of Southern Africa. Elegant, alert, perpetually dressed for a black-tie event, and prone to pronking with the confidence of an animal that knows it has an audience.
Historically, springbok were the most numerous native grazers in the Nama Karoo: a procession of several million heads - a Trekbokke last documented in 1896. We are not proposing a sequel with special effects. But a small breeding herd is a meaningful first step to a much larger restoration story.
Springbok are adapted to dry, open country and are “mixed feeders”: grazing grasses when conditions allow, browsing shrubs and forbs when the menu becomes more selective. A healthy ecosystem is not simply a place with more vegetation. It is a place with movement, disturbance, recovery, competition, nutrient cycling, predators, prey, insects, seed dispersal, and occasional disagreement over the best patch of green.
Springbok are an inherent part of that bigger picture, with effects beyond the animals themselves.
As they move, their hooves break up crusted, sun-baked ground. In a trekbokke, their grazing came in intense pulses — a herd moves through, hammers the vegetation hard, then moves on and doesn't come back for a long while. Compare that to decades of sheep parked in the same paddock, year-round. Same basic activity — eating plants — completely different outcome.
A wider food web
Nobody puts "prey species" on a poster, but leopard, caracal and black-backed jackal don't show up and stay in a landscape that can't feed them. Springbok are the base of that food web.
Get their numbers up, and you're not just restoring one species — you're quietly re-enabling an entire predator guild, which brings its own knock-on effects on rodents, mesopredators, and a general sense that the ecosystem is doing something.
In that cycle of life, breeding groups are normally composed of 1 male (the ram) for 4 females (the ewe). So, we had a selected group of 24 individuals that enriched the gene pool of our local residents. Then, while the herd was still in the boma, we saw the first lamb. New life, before the adventure had even really begun.
A rare sight as the mothers hide newborns in vegetation or bushes for the first few days to protect them from predators. More births have followed in the subsequent weeks, as a few ewes were ‘full’ and gestation is c. 24 weeks.
A nice characteristic of springbok is their growth pattern: a newborn reaches 60-70% of its adult size after only 6 months. So, every day of food, safety and shade is a very good day.
next: the Boma (Part II of III)
a temporary springbok address, a wall of sails and a wind that had opinions
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