My two-week stint as a wildlife conservation volunteer in South Africa nearly came to a premature, sanguinary end when a 4,500-pound rhinoceros charged toward our pickup truck on the Manyoni Private Game Reserve. Our driver, who had barely escaped a similar threat the previous week, stopped the truck and slowly began backing up. After a few harrowing seconds, the male white rhino seemed to lose interest in our vehicle, which was carrying me in the passenger seat and four other volunteers on benches in the cargo bed. Seemingly pacified, the rhino slowed down, halted and then wandered into the field.

That was one of many memorable moments I experienced as a volunteer with Wildlife ACT (https://www.wildlifeact.com), a nonprofit organization that tracks and monitors endangered animals in the Zululand area of South Africa. I also helped feed an impala carcass to a pack of six wild dogs, lured lions by playing the squealing sound of a dying warthog over a loudspeaker, saw a male cheetah trying to mate with his mother, spotted a rare leopard hiding in a bush, and visited three local schools where poor, rural students usually get their only meal of the day.

I lived in a ramshackle farmhouse with four other volunteers and two supervisors, who organized all our activities and drove us around the reserve twice a day for a total of about 10 hours. Some of the animals wore collars that allowed us to find them with a GPS system. Other times we followed tracks in the dirt or relied on reports from local safari guides. This often involved riding over deeply rutted roads that kept us bouncing in our seats like we were flying through extreme turbulence. (The bumpy rides aggravated my chronically aching back, requiring me to cut short my planned one-month stay.)

The Manyoni Private Game Reserve is located in Zululand, a section of northeastern South Africa that borders the country of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. The 89-square mile reserve was formed in 2004 when 17 landowners tore down their fences and combined their properties, making a protected home for dozens of native animals, including Africa’s Big Five (lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and buffalos.)

My group concentrated on tracking and monitoring lions, cheetahs, elephants and wild dogs. The information we gathered on the location, condition and behavior of the wildlife was sent to Wildlife ACT officials and park managers, who use the data to determine the best way to manage the animals and prevent poaching. (Rhinos in the reserve get their horns trimmed to dissuade poachers from cutting them off for sale to the lucrative Chinese market.)

Getting to Zululand from my home in New Jersey was quite a trek. It included a 15-hour plane ride from Newark to Johannesburg, a 90-minute plane ride from Johannesburg to Richards Bay (a small town on the east coast) and a three-hour van ride to Manyoni.

Following a lengthy orientation the next day, we began our daily routine: leaving the house at 4:30 a.m. for our morning session, returning for lunch and a quick nap, then starting our afternoon ride around 3:30 p.m. before returning home for a late dinner. (Our supervisors, known as monitors, bought food during weekly trips to a local supermarket, but the volunteers were responsible for cooking group meals and cleaning up. Since I’m a lousy cook, I became the designated dishwasher.)

I was the only man in our five-person volunteer group so, unlike the four females, I didn’t have to share a room. My room had two single beds, a rickety wooden shelving unit for my clothes and a small nightstand. There were several communal bathrooms at the end of the hall, a large kitchen, a couple of sitting rooms and a patio in the back with a fire pit, broken plastic chairs and crumbling wooden benches. Not exactly the Ritz, but volunteers don’t come to Africa for the creature comforts. As they like to say at Wildlife ACT, “This is Zululand, not Disneyland.”

Two of the female volunteers came from France, one from the U.S. and the other from Eswatini. Three of us were senior citizens and the other two were in their 20s, but the generation gap didn’t seem to matter because we all shared a passion for the animals. The only downside was that three of the volunteers were heavy smokers and cigarette smoke makes me sick, so I spent most of my free time with the two young monitors from South Africa, Jabu and Corrie.

Our biggest challenge wasn’t dealing with wild animals; it was coping with chronic power outages. Because of a nationwide power shortage (ironic because South Africa is a major coal exporter) and an antiquated infrastructure, the country uses a “load-shedding’’ system that results in daily, regularly scheduled shutdowns. For us, that meant no lights, no running water, no refrigeration and no cooking for much of the day. So we had to carefully time activities like taking a shower and preparing dinner to make sure they took place when power was available.

One of our first tasks was to prepare a boma (an African term for an enclosed area for animals) for the arrival of six new wild dogs. A previous pack of wild dogs at Manyoni kept escaping onto adjacent properties, so they were removed. Now a new group was being sent to the preserve, but before they could be released into the wild they would have to spend two months getting acclimated in the boma.

The grass and shrubs in the boma hadn’t been cut for a long time, so we spent several hours hacking away with machete-like tools called slashers and pangas. My back-and-forth golf swing technique was very effective, though my ailing back paid the price the following day when I could barely get out of bed.

The purpose of the boma cutting was twofold — to give the dogs a place to rest under the bushes and to give us a clear view of them when we visited. We fed the dogs twice a week by dragging an impala carcass into the field. The dogs stayed clear of us until we left the boma, but then they quickly and ferociously demolished their meal. (Unlike big cats, who usually suffocate their prey before eating, wild dogs tear their victims apart while they’re still alive. It’s not a pretty sight.)

We also fortified the electric fencing around the boma with large rocks to prevent the dogs from digging under the fence and escaping. Though the dogs would get a shock by touching the fence, they’re clever animals who’ve been known to dig their way out anyway. Corrie, Jabu and a bunch of Manyoni workers who jokingly referred to themselves as “bush mechanics’’ also jerry-rigged a water trough and wading pool for the dogs.

We started each morning by driving to the top of a local hill and using an antenna-like device to determine the general location of the collared animals. The device would make a clicking sound when it detected a collar; the louder the click the closer the animal. This method was anything but foolproof, though. With the tall summer grass providing plenty of hiding space, we often spent an entire day futilely looking for particular animals.

No lions were collared, so we used paw prints and reports from safari guides in the preserve to find them. (There are about a dozen safari lodges in Manyoni, including some fancy ones that cost almost $300 a night.) Our most frustrating search was for four sibling lions — three brothers and a sister —who eluded us until our final full day at Manyoni. We needed to locate the three males because they were scheduled to be transferred to another preserve to prevent them from mating with their sister. (Inbreeding is a big problem with lions and cheetahs.)

To find the lions, we used a method known as a call-up. It involves trying to lure them to a carcass by playing the sound of a dying impala or warthog, which are the staples of their diet at Manyoni. The call-up is designed to condition the lions to respond when called, so when it’s time for them to be transferred, they will come to a certain spot where they can be tranquilized.

Unfortunately, the call-up didn’t work until that final day, after we spotted the four lions walking on a road just in front of our pickup. We then dropped an impala carcass under a nearby tree, played the awful sound of the wounded warthog and waited for the lions to come. Which they eventually did, approaching the dead impala cautiously before devouring it. (We didn’t witness any hanky-panky between brother and sister.) Sometimes video cameras were placed at call-up sites to record activity when we weren’t there, but they often malfunctioned or didn’t clearly show any feeding.

Leopards are solitary, easily camouflaged creatures that are notoriously hard to spot in the wild. But one day, while Corrie was leading us on a search for those four lions, we caught a glimpse of one hiding in dense foliage. We could only see the face, dotted with those distinctive rosettes, peering out at us. Jabu and Corrie had been working at Manyoni for eight months, and neither had seen a leopard during that time.

By contrast, impalas were as plentiful as fat people at a buffet. Because of the black, M-shaped mark on their rear ends and their status as a favorite fast food for lions, the slender antelopes are often referred to as the “McDonald’s of Africa.’’ To prevent overgrazing that could harm the overall ecosystem, male impalas are regularly culled (a polite term for killing) and some of the carcasses are stored in freezers for later use in call-ups or feeding animals in the boma.

One day, while riding on the main “district road,’’ a herd of elephants crossed in front of us and blocked the road for several minutes. Although elephants are an endangered species, there are actually a surplus of them at Manyoni, which can create problems in a fenced-in preserve with limited space. So the pachyderms are sometimes injected with a contraceptive vaccine that is a humane alternative to culling. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has no say in this matter.

Midway through my stay at Manyoni, I visited three local schools along with Jabu, a rhino monitor, three members of an anti-poaching squad and two representatives from the Zululand Conservation Trust. They were invited to talk to students about wildlife conservation in the area and brought along a slide presentation, which was only used at the first school because of a power shutdown later in the day.

The kids, ranging in age from 2-13, came from impoverished families and attended schools with scarce supplies and limited water. Though Zulu was their primary and often only language, many of their textbooks were in English, which made little sense to me. They’re taught English, but few really learn to speak it because they never hear it spoken at home or in their communities.

Many of the children get their only full meal of the day at school, but a teacher at one of the primary schools told me that no meals had been served for two weeks because of a food shortage. One of the tragedies of modern-day South Africa is that many black people aren’t much better off economically than they were under the former apartheid regime. This is mostly due to rampant political corruption and the lingering effects of the old racist system, where a white minority controlled almost all of the country’s wealth.

On a bright note, I got to participate in the last day of a fundraising walk led by Lucy Chimes, a 25-year-old Wildlife ACT intern from England. Chimes walked 259 kilometers (161 miles) over six months to raise awareness of the plight of endangered animals, particularly rhinos. She chose the distance to honor the 259 rhinos that were poached in South Africa during the first six months of 2022.

Chimes, who is planning to get a PhD in animal conservation by studying the effects of dehorning rhinos, organized segments of the walk with local communities and conservation activists. She ended the fundraiser at our Manyoni volunteer house on March 3, World Wildlife Day, by walking the final kilometer with us around the fenced-in property.

“This is my passion,’’ she told me as we sat on the patio. “I love what I’m doing here.’’

At the time we spoke, Lucy had raised 200,000 rand ($10,869) of her goal of 259,000 rand ($14,075). If you’d like to contribute to this worthwhile cause, click here: https://www.givengain.com/ap/lucy-chimes-raising-funds-for-wildlife-act-fund/#donations.

That night, Corrie cooked a braai for all the participants in the walk. A braai is a South African speciality, a barbecue on steroids where all kinds of meat is grilled on an outdoor fire. Though I’m not a big meat eater, it was the best meal of the week — and a reminder that when it comes to diet humans aren’t that much different than the carnivorous lions we’d been tracking all week.