At 7pm every night a light on top of a short post in the Tikki Hywood Trust's aardwolf enclosure flicks on. It stands on a small raised platform, painted white to reflect the glow into the Zimbabwean night and thus attract as many tasty insects as possible. This is an aardwolf feeder, devised by the Trust's founder, Lisa Barnard, to supplement the diet of dog food, milk and cereal that she gives them daily. "The aardwolves harvest the insects with their long tongues. I also give them termites, their staple food in the wild. Here, it's their equivalent of candy!" she laughs.

Since October 1999 Lisa has successfully looked after four aardwolves in a purpose-built enclosure containing natural bush and specially constructed burrows. She is one of the few people to recognise the plight of this endangered species, a situation she's desperately trying to redress with Zimbabwe's first aardwolf captive breeding programme. This is set in fertile farmland some 30km north of Harare in the Mazowe Valley.

A little-known member of the hyaena family, aardwolves look distinctively canine - hence their name. Around half a metre high, with large ears, sloping shoulders and a shaggy coat of black and tan stripes, it's easy to see why they're often mistaken for juvenile hyaena. But unlike the hyaena, one of nature's champion scavengers, they are one of her most specialised feeders, and they have to cope with being widely misunderstood.

Like their hyaenid cousins, aardwolves are surrounded by a web of myth and suspicion. The hyaena's scavenging and vicious group predatory habits have cast it as a villain associated with witchcraft. Because they so resemble diminutive hyaena, the largely nocturnal aardwolves suffer this reputation too, and have even been known as werewolves, an unfair moniker for an essentially benign creature.

This negative PR harms more than the aardwolf's image: it threatens its very survival. Although there is only one species of aardwolf, Africa supports two entirely separate populations, both dangerously small. The southern one spans most of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia; the northern one stretches from central Tanzania to southeastern Egypt. Although the southern population is the more stable, the aardwolf is still listed as protected or rare in the south.

The aardwolves' image problem has resulted in a chronic lack of awareness of their plight. "Even to the conservation-minded, they lie pretty far down the list of favourite causes, behind more 'glamorous' candidates such as rhino and cheetah," says Lisa. Yet they are timid, dedicated parents and spouses, and forage for their own food without attacking any other mammals.

Desperate to start the Tikki Hywood Trust's breeding programme, Lisa was delighted when she heard on the grapevine that two pairs of aardwolf had been brought into a sanctuary in the Namibian town of Karibib, probably by a farmer. She spent six months arranging the necessary documentation to import them rather than capturing a fresh pair in Zimbabwe. "I want to build on the current population in Zimbabwe, not risk unnecessary stress-induced mortalities," she says. "And aardwolf are said to mate for life. It would have been almost impossible to have captured a pair."

The aardwolves' plight is not due to threatened habitat, as is the case with so many other endangered species. They thrive on grassy plains, including farmland used for livestock. The problem lies with their food source. Like the hyaena, aardwolves feed at night, but, in contrast to their cousins, they are solitary feeders and fussy eaters, living almost exclusively off harvester termites, supplemented by other insects, a diet for which they are specially adapted.

Instead of the hyaena's powerful jaws, used for crushing bones and tearing flesh, the aardwolf has a weak bite, with small peg-like teeth (apart from the canines, which are well-developed for use in territorial disputes and defence against jackals). Its main feeding tool is its long, broad tongue. This is adapted perfectly for licking termites off the soil surface and separating them from grains of earth, using sponge-like suckers much like those on an octopus's tentacles. It's an undeniably efficient system that enables an aardwolf to lick up to 250,000 termites a night.

So adapted is the aardwolf to its diet, that it can even resist the chemical warfare of the termites as they try to defend themselves. For protection they squirt silky threads of noxious terpenes at any animal that threatens them. Thanks to the dubious eating habits of their hyaenid relatives, who are able to eat extremely decayed carrion, the aardwolf has inherited the ability to tolerate these terpenes without discomfort.

Unsurprisingly, one species whose poisons they're not resistant to is mankind. As aardwolves thrive in farming areas, it's the use of pesticides, rather than threats to their natural habitat, that have rendered them vulnerable to secondary poisoning from eating sprayed termites and thereby increasingly endangered. On one northern Cape farm more than half the aardwolves died after a termite spraying. The population took six years to recover.

This is tragic for any species, but especially so for one so family-orientated. Aardwolves are largely monogamous and are thought to mate for life (though males have been known to stray to their neighbour's partner). They have a remarkably contemporary concept of sharing the domestic workload. Females help defend the territory (a 1-4km2 area, marked by "pasting" a secretion from the anal glands onto grass stalks) and males appear at the burrow promptly at dusk every day to guard the cubs while the female goes foraging. Two to four cubs are born in early summer. They remain at the den for their first three months and forage with their parents for the fourth, before gaining their independence.

Lisa hopes that within the coming months, her two pairs will breed and wean cubs that she can then release into the wild. "I'm not breeding them for money," she emphasises. "I will release any progeny back into the areas within Zimbabwe where they occur naturally, such as Hwange National Park. Then we'll monitor them, using microchips. Hopefully they'll thrive and I can leave them alone, but any that struggle will be looked after rather than left to die."

If there are no births by next year, she plans to use artificial insemination to help remove aardwolves from conservation's critical list.

"The mothers will suckle the young for the first few weeks, as in the wild. I believe it's important that, behaviourally, they pick up as much as possible from their parents. They can learn more from them than they ever will from me." When the cubs have stopped suckling, she'll remove them to a "reintroduction" pen containing a giant aardwolf feeder so that she can slowly encourage them to feed themselves on insects before release.

Crucial to her success, Lisa believes, will be how happy her aardwolf breeding pairs are. "I try to imagine what it's like for them," she says. "If humans were shoved into uncomfortable and unnatural living areas, we wouldn't want to breed, so I believe the aardwolves' habitat is crucial in making them relaxed enough to reproduce." She's constantly monitoring them, watching to learn from their behaviour, adjusting features of the enclosures accordingly. One thing her commitment has already bred is hope for one of Africa's most misunderstood mammals.

Stephanie Debere has written for several magazines and newspapers, including Red, The Times and The Telegraph.

The Tikki Hywood Trust

"When Zimbabwe's rhino population hit 250, the world sat up and panicked," says Lisa Hywood Barnard. "Millions of US dollars were raised and pumped into a successful conservation programme. But when the Lichtenstein's Hartebeest population was reduced to 46 in this country, no-one batted an eyelid." Thanks to Lisa's breeding programme at the Tikki Hywood Trust, there are now over 120 Lichtenstein's Hartebeest in Zimbabwe.

The Trust, founded in 1994, was named after her late father, whose concern for conservation inspired Lisa's passion for protecting more obscure endangered species. The Trust's main objective is to focus on what Lisa has nicknamed the "Baby Five": pangolin, aardwolf, Southern African hedgehog, Lichtenstein's hartebeest and black-footed cat. They may lack the glamour of the safari world's "Big Five" (elephant, buffalo, rhino, lion and leopard) but their survival is just as important.

"My main priority remains breeding and making sure that enough of the Baby Five animals remain in existence," Lisa says. She has worked with Zimbabwean schools and National Geographic TV, but Baby Five awareness is still a fraction of that enjoyed by other animals.

"Unless these harmless mammals are protected, they face extinction," says Lisa. "Due to human encroachment and poaching, many small mammals' lives and natural habitats are being destroyed. The indiscriminate use of insecticides has also had a negative impact on certain species."

Lisa founded the Trust having worked on several animal relocation operations. "We raised money for each, completed the project and that was that. By establishing a trust, I can work on a continual basis and help animals according to their plight rather than their image."

She relies on private donations and corporate sponsorship of a particular animal. For example, CCAfrica currently sponsor her pangolin breeding programme. Although a negligible percentage of the Hywood Trust's money is spent on administration, Lisa's had more luck sourcing a pair of black-footed cats than finding a sponsor for them.

"People thought the Lichtenstein's hartebeest was ugly, so they nearly let it die out. There's still so far to go before the survival of many animals is no longer a case of image. What is the future for smaller species if we don't start thinking about their survival now?"

Published in Travel Africa Edition Twelve: Summer 2000 Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)