Four African wild dogs were recently spotted in Kasungu National Park in Malawi, making it the first confirmation of the endangered species in the park in more than a decade. The wild dogs appear to have travelled hundreds of kilometers from a park in eastern Zambia to reach Kasungu. Matthew Becker, chief executive of the Zambian Carnivore Programme, told Mongabay his team recognized the four African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) from a database of known wild dogs collected in South Luangwa National Park and the Luangwa River valley as part of a long-term study. South Luangwa is located around 300 kilometers (186 miles) to the west of Kasungu. The four dogs had been recorded in May near a school in Mfuwe village, just outside South Luangwa, Becker said. The wild dogs may have traversed parts of the Malawi-Zambia Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA), Becker added. The TFCA connects Malawi’s Kasungu to Zambia’s Lukusuzi National Park adjoining the Luangwa Valley, through a long narrow region of densely packed villages, farms and homesteads, “I suspect they would have used the areas that were least impacted by development and (with the) least amount of threats, but one never knows with dogs,” Becker said. He added that “it’s very promising” the wild dogs were able to move from South Luangwa all the way into Malawi. “I think hopefully this signals more dogs in the future exchanging between the countries through dispersal,” he said, adding that the journey of the four dogs to Kasungu shows that…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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