Becoming a river: The Breede Expedition

Becoming a river

The Breede Expedition

Becoming a river
The Breede Expedition

Don Pinnock

There are many ways to know a river, but scientists of The Wilderness Project almost become it, tracking it on foot and in canoes from source to mouth using sophisticated equipment and pure grit. They paddle, camp beside it, live on a sparse diet of rice and beans, test for any living thing that’s been in the water, check water quality, identify and count every bird and take a 360° image every minute to build the equivalent of Google Street View of its entire course. They’re doing this for thousands of kilometres of Africa’s rivers. Don Pinnock joined them on a survey of the Breede River in the Western Cape. He survived… just… to tell the tale.

Watch: Paddling the Breede

Don Pinnock went paddling the Breede River with young river scientists “who talk casually about the Zambezi, the Congo and the Nile like old acquaintances”, he says. Here is an account of the experience. (Filming & editing: Don Pinnock)

Becoming a river

I said yes because it sounded heroic. One doesn’t often get invited to paddle the Breede River with young river scientists who talk casually about the Zambezi, the Congo and the Nile like old acquaintances. It felt like an opportunity to briefly “become a river” in the large, mythic sense.

Also, I imagined evenings of beer and repartee while bats stitched the dusk and the tents glowed under the stars. Then I remembered I am in my seventies, that my upper body is a museum of good intentions and that the southeaster is no joke when you’re flailing a paddle. It is a fanatical god with poor social skills.

The panic arrived in a rush, like a fast channel that looks friendly until the hiss turns into a growl. These people had paddled the Kavango, the Nile, the Zambezi, the Congo. I used to paddle a sea kayak years back, but not for many years.

Team leader Matt Dooley and research director Dr Rainer von Brandis of The Wilderness Project stopped by to assure me that this was to be a champagne-and-cocktail cruise. “Six hours of paddling a day, max,” Matt said, as if one could measure doom by the hour. “A few little rapids. Bit of wind maybe. Nothing big.” Their faces were radiantly sincere.

Six hours. I did the mathematics of mortality. What’s that do to a shoulder? Does a spine have spare parts? I tried to imagine drowning in a respectable way and could only see myself upside down out of an upturned canoe, legs waving like waterweed while a fish eagle, who has seen everything, shakes its head.

By then it was too late to pull out and save face, so I did the only thing I could think of to survive: I enrolled in a gym – never before having entered one – for four weeks of intensive upper-body work.

There’s almost no difference between a gym and a medieval dungeon, except that in a dungeon at least the torture is free. In a gym you pay to have a contraption attempt to stretch you out of your shoes then fold you in half like a cheap deckchair.

Never having been in such a place, I was dazzled by the black torture racks: pulleys, pedals, frames and levers designed by someone with a grudge against humanity. I half expected to see a hooded executioner step out from behind the treadmills.

Fear drove me there and into the company of the gentle but vice-like grip of Drake Ssewwato, a trainer who promised to turn me into “a madala who would surprise those river people”. He said this without blinking, which was either optimism or the politeness one extends to the very old and the very doomed.

We began with the rowing machine – naturally. Day one: 100m. Day two: 1,000m. Day three: I considered emigrating. Then came a device that looked like a Bren gun on a rope. Each day Drake casually moved a small pin in the weight stack, and each day my soul left my body a little sooner. I considered witness protection. We repeated this ceremony three times a week until I could lift things with muscles I didn’t know I owned.

“Just two more times, Mr Don,” Drake would say in a soothing voice, as though I was being put down for a nap, not being asked to swivel my torso until my vertebrae squeaked.

“A river doesn’t overcome, it continues.”

It all came together rather satisfyingly the day before I left for the Breede River when a close friend said to me: “You’re looking different. What have you been up to?” By the time I had loaded drybags and hopped into the Land Cruiser for Brandvlei Dam near Worcester I could swear my biceps were marginally enlarged.

At the campsite near the dam I met the rest of the barefoot river people. They were uniformly younger than my favourite shirts and unnervingly competent. I was issued an orange tent that reminded me of a cheerful traffic cone and a self-inflating mattress that inflated very willingly and deflated only under sustained diplomacy. Dinner – rice and beans – was statistically significant: it would be rice and beans again tomorrow. And the day after. Occasionally a carrot appeared, like a minor revelation. It was expedition cuisine, nutritious but as spare as a winter branch.

They were mostly biological scientists, which is to say they noticed things the rest of us didn’t know existed. When two mongooses scooted past on the distant river bank, we had a spontaneous taxonomy seminar. The tails were wrong for river mongoose; the coloration argued against banded.

An owl passed as a ghostly footnote and was debated with the intensity of a doctoral panel. I would discover they were logging the species and count of every bird on the entire river, each call ticked meticulously into a waterproof iPhone.

Sometime during the night I woke to a saw-edged growl and thought: leopard? Here? Then it modulated into what, upon reflection, was Rainer, asleep and contributing to the acoustic ecology.

Breakfast was oats with the nostalgia of powdered milk. We pushed off into the Breede and almost immediately met a weir, a low wall of human hubris where the river changed key.

The fast water pouring over the obstruction shouldered us sideways. I exited inelegantly, the canoe tipped with the slow melodrama of furniture. My drybag – containing cameras, pride, future – bobbed downstream, helpfully demonstrating hydrology.

Retrieved, it proved to be less dry than I had anticipated, and I spent an hour fussing over sensors and lenses while the river looked on, smug. The cameras survived. I resolved to place drybags inside drybags and to tether everything to everything else like a paranoid spider.

The day widened. Reed beds stitched us into a moving corridor of green. The sky presented the sort of blue that makes you suspect it’s been freshly painted.

In the lead canoe, Matt had mounted a long, slim 360-degree camera on a tripod – a periscope for a future map. Every minute it clicked, an insect of memory. We were, he explained, making something like a Google Street View of a river, an atlas of the Breede for anyone who wanted to walk on water with a mouse.

“Science stop!” he would call, and like synchronised beetles we turned into the bank. Water samples were taken with a ceremonious precision. A small drone, like an angry wasp, rose and began compiling the river’s geometry. The bird count continued ceaselessly, but for most of the way it seemed to be owned by Egyptian geese which creaked on takeoff like barn doors that had resisted for a century then decided to cooperate loudly. Spur-wing geese, by contrast, rose in regal silence.

Between the science stops were the rapids, mostly Level 2 in the parlance of people who calibrate these things in degrees of threat. They announce themselves in a whisper that becomes a puffadder-like hiss. The Breede suddenly narrows and accelerates, tightening its belt. Rocks appear like old molars waiting to bite down. You steer, you bounce, you scrape. The hulls began to look like they’d been mauled by lions.

We came to a weir with a central chute – white water folding on itself into a swallowtail of rebuke. Matt, who has the calm of a man who trusts physics, went for it with research analyst Dr Jessica Minaar up front. The canoe nose-dived into the froth, shouldered some clandestine rock and performed a brief airborne inversion. Contents, naturally, expressed an interest in the Indian Ocean.

The rest of us portaged uneventfully, which is to say we carried the boats around the monster. Later Matt would admit that the Breede – far from an amiable backroad compared with the Zambezi – was “one of the most complicated and difficult rivers” he’d run. It’s an excellent quality in a leader to say this after rather than before, because I would otherwise definitely not have been on this river sitting in a canoe.

Matt Dooley, Research Manager and expedition leader.

Dr Rainer von Brandis, Research Director.

Don-Breede River — Chloé Ullrich, Logistics and Procurement.

The river braided into a green maze, a botany exam with moving parts. Channels forked and reforked, Palmiet islands pinballed us into muscular bluegums. We hauled canoes over trunks, dragged them through tannin-varnished shallows, coaxed them across cobbles that clawed at our hull with a snarl.

“You’ll wish for the rapids when the wind arrives on the flats,” Rainer said, smiling in the way that only prophecy can smile. He was right. But first there were hours of a river in its superior mood: bronze light on water, tiny birds punctuating the banks, a sudden corridor of absolute silence in which the only sound was the river’s silence. We paddled along Bontebok National Park and, with the casual unanimity of mobs, thousands of geese lifted at our approach, a cloud of creaking doors ascending towards the sky.

There was also the science of sadness. Rivers are supposed to gain weight as they go, with tributaries feeding in. The Breede does not. Along long reaches, Australian bluegums – invited in a century ago like charming houseguests who now own the living room – lace their roots into the channel and drink the river. Agricultural pumps snore steadily along the banks, moving water uphill towards vines and orchards that glitter beguilingly in export catalogues. The river narrows not only by geology but by thirst.

Fertiliser runs back in secret and grows algae and water hyacinth. Our samples, linked to drones and located with algorithmic rigor, would be able to say: it came from that field, that pivot-irrigation, that polite green rectangle on Google Earth. The river, if it could speak, might say a more complicated thing about all of us.

On the fourth day, in a corridor of rapids, I noticed Rainer whistling. It was a jaunty little melody, with the occasional celebratory whoop when we plunged through a standing wave and arose baptised. My fear was his fun. I found this both reassuring and a profound miscalculation on his part about my buoyancy.

We fetched up at a campsite with lawns so green they seemed upholstered. I showered with the posture of a Roman statue melted slightly in transit and put up the friendly orange tent by memory because my back had resigned from the job. Dinner was rice and beans with a carrot coup de théâtre. One learns to be grateful for predictability as for a well-loved proverb.

The next day the river widened as if exhaling. The west wind arrived and I learnt the first and only rule of headwind: No Stopping. You stroke and stroke and the canoe moves precisely one canoe forward. You pause to ease your weary arms and it instantly reverses, pivots sideways and considers capsizing.

The headwind, leaning into the downriver current, reared the water into a sequence of improbable standing waves. We surfed down them with briefly renewed energy and paid for it with pain-laced shoulders.

Eventually we fetched up on a sandbar and sat there for a long time with thousand-metre blank stares, completely exhausted.

The next day we entered an unprecedented rapid maze. At one point Matt and canoe colleague Jessica appeared between a gap in looming black rocks in a route we hoped to follow. Next moment the canoe reappeared upside down going back upriver with Matt pushing from behind. Not that way!

“I think it was a rock, or maybe a hidden tree trunk,” he muttered as he scouted for a different exit point. “Hard to tell at that speed.” The tip trashed the super-expensive 360-degree camera – but they had another one… science has spares.

Bird logging persisted. “Thirty Spurwing,” someone said calmly, as if ordering tiles. “Two hundred and twenty Egyptian.” The phone recorded; the drone checked; the river sighed.

We camped at Malgas and admired the pont and its noisy engine that chugs cars across the river. Had they forgotten how to build bridges hereabouts?

Pitching the orange tent that night, every muscle filed an itemised bill. Rice and beans paid a portion and promised to settle the rest in the morning with oats.

The Breede’s last transformation is theatrical. The banks run out of definition and the sky begins to colonise the water. The river broadens until “river” feels an inappropriate definition. “Slightly saline,” announced Rainer, licking his dipped finger.

We were in the river’s enormous estuary now, nursery of fish and, famously, bull sharks – a fact that made falling out of the canoe unappealing in a new key. Along the banks were holiday houses, some huge and showy, some cute cottages. We saw no sign of the occupants, but teams of garden-service lawnmowers droned a pastoral in G major.

Finally white buildings appeared on the horizon: Cape Infanta – the mouth to the sea. We beached the canoes in a long silence and then an eruption of whoops and hugs of the nicely undignified kind.

A fisherman studied us like a new species of wader. When he understood the distance – days, rapids, wind, rice – he vanished and returned with beer, cider and crisps as if manifesting a parable.

We claimed him as our official photographer with cameras that were now, through no fault of their own, soon to be stored. He took our picture: sweat on our faces, river in our hair, the water drying on our clothes – the last testament to more than 300km of river.

The river, if it could speak, might say a more complicated thing about all of us.

The Wilderness Project Land Cruisers arrived, the canoes were loaded on top and we headed for the campsite. On the way someone selected Hotel California by the Eagles and someone else said turn up the volume: “You can check out but you can never leave.”

Back at camp, the kitchen handed in its resignation from beans and rice. There were T-bone steaks, pap, chakalaka, a box of red wine and cold beer. Glasses were raised to an extraordinary journey fully accomplished. Everyone was exhausted, however, nursing overworked arms and shoulders. We had indeed become the river, but the little orange tents were calling.

What remains after a river is not only the memory of effort but a rearrangement of metaphors. “Becoming a river” had sounded vaguely mystical to me at the start. I had pictured a calm merging with the natural world, a lowering of pulse, a sense of being carried.

There were moments like that – those hush-corridors where Palmiet muffled the edges of the day, where the boat and the water forgot to be separate things. But becoming a river, as I understand it now, is far stranger and more human.

It is what happens when the habits and rhythms of water begin to colonise your mind and body. A river is a logic that keeps moving. It accommodates obstacles by exploring them, it keeps a ledger of small adjustments, it knows that the shortest line between points is not always the best one. It is as we are: alive.

Before the trip, I had thought of my age as a dam wall: fixed, high and on the wrong side of a canoe. On the Breede I learnt to be more braided: to take the daring left channel when the right sounded more doable but shallow, to regard a rock with less fear, to surf a headwind with resignation and humility. A river doesn’t overcome, it continues.

There’s also the practical theology of simple food, repetitive shelter and collective labour. Beans and rice, mocked by gourmets, become a sacrament after eight or 10 hours of paddling. The cheerful orange tent became a cathedral of repose for painful shoulders.

Science, too, became less a series of tasks than a way of paying attention that felt like courtesy. Logging birds and sampling water didn’t interrupt the river, it completed a conversation the river had been having with us all along.

On our final night I crawled into the little tent with that delicious sense of having become thoroughly finite. Everything hurt, but specifically and not in the worrying way of age. I lay on the self-inflating mattress, now subdued after appropriate negotiations, and listened to the residual conversations of wind and water.

I thought about the weirs where the river changed tone, about the bluegums leaning in with the yearning of immigrants, about pumps humming like locusts, about the 360-degree camera’s eye stitching together a ribbon the world could later unspool on a screen. I thought about the fisherman’s correctly timed beer, about the Eagles’ sly prophecy, about the baffled, kind look on the face of a man who has seen the sea every day and was suddenly asked to take a picture of its reason.

What I took home was not endurance (though Drake deserves a footnote in any book about my shoulders) or courage (I had the junior edition), but a new grammar. Paddling is just a way of saying yes and no with your body, looking closely is a way of saying thank you to the planet. And fear, properly managed, is a direction finder: if the hiss ahead is too high, try the channel that speaks in a lower register.

It would be condescending to say I kept up with the young scientists. I did not. They inhabited rapids as if returning to something they owned in instalments. I visited, clutched the furniture and left small dents. But – and this matters – I belonged. “Becoming a river” is not about disguising your age as vigour, it is about letting your motion find an honest speed. The river took my fear and fussing and returned it to rhythm.

At the gym a week later, trainer Drake asked if I’d “do it again.” I said yes in the bright voice of someone who has not read the weather report. He nodded, like a man who had just moved a small pin in the weight stack. “Just two more,” he said, and for a moment I heard the river in his voice – its economy, its mercy, its refusal to explain. I took the handle, leaned back and let the cable have its say.

For more information: www.thewildernessproject.org

Data mapping the Breede River

At dawn, the Breede River lies still – a silver ribbon uncoiling through vineyards and farmland, its surface broken only by the darting of swallows. It’s a tranquil scene, but beneath the calm current runs a story of strain and resilience – one that expedition leader Matt Dooley and his team from The Wilderness Project are determined to tell.

The Breede, stretching about 330km from its source in the Matroosberg mountains to the sea at Witsand, is one of South Africa’s most economically important rivers – and one of its least understood. Despite sustaining vast swathes of agriculture, feeding towns and drawing recreational crowds to its banks, the river’s health has been taken for granted. Few have stopped to ask: how well is the Breede coping?

That question lies at the heart of The Wilderness Project – a pan-African research organisation that traces and studies freshwater systems across the continent through scientific expeditions. “You can’t predict something you don’t understand,” says Dooley. “Freshwaters are critically understudied and undervalued across Africa and the world. Our work is about building that understanding – setting scientific baselines so that protection becomes possible.”

A continental framework

The team envisions a connected transect of freshwater research running the length of Africa, linking data from rivers, water towers, wetlands and lakes across climatic and cultural zones – a kind of ecological backbone they’re calling the Great Spine of Africa expeditions that tell the story of the continent’s arteries.

Each expedition applies a standardised protocol – measuring everything from water chemistry and sediment quality, to biodiversity, flow rates and human impact. “It’s about consistency,” says Dooley. “You can’t compare rivers if you don’t measure them the same way. We’re trying to create a dataset that anyone – scientists, conservationists, policymakers – can use as a starting point.” The team have already completed 70 expeditions of the 200 they are targeting by 2030.

The Breede expedition in the Western Cape marks a crucial node in that spine. It’s a river that mirrors both the promise and the peril of South Africa’s freshwater future: heavily used, deeply loved, but dangerously overburdened.

“You can’t compare rivers if you don’t measure them the same way. We’re trying to create a dataset that anyone – scientists, conservationists, policymakers – can use as a starting point.”

Barefoot scientists hard at work at the end of a day.

A river under pressure

From the mountains, the Breede descends into the fertile Breede Valley, where orchards and vineyards stretch across the plains. It’s an agricultural powerhouse – but at a cost. “By the time the river reaches the Brandvlei Dam, it’s already under enormous strain,” Dooley explains. “Beyond that, the abstraction for irrigation is so intense that the river actually shrinks as it flows downstream.”

That discovery startled the team. Rivers typically swell as tributaries join them – but in the Breede, the opposite happens. By the lower reaches, what began as a vigorous mountain torrent has dwindled markedly.

It’s one of the few rivers we’ve studied where water volume decreases downstream,” says Dooley. “That’s not just because of agriculture – it’s also because of invasive bluegum trees.”

These thirsty giants, planted decades ago for timber and windbreaks, now form dense forests along long stretches of the river. “They drink incredible amounts of water,” says Dooley. “In some sections, we saw the flow almost halve because of bluegum invasion. That’s water lost to the economy, to biodiversity, to the river itself.”

The team’s data paints a clear picture: the Breede is being squeezed – by human demand, by invasive species, by pollution from agricultural runoff. Yet until now, much of this has gone unquantified. “Water quality monitoring is patchy at best,” Dooley says. “Our goal was to sample from the source to the sea and build a continuous picture – a full longitudinal baseline.”

That baseline includes a rich inventory of life. Along the upper reaches, the team recorded a healthy diversity of aquatic insects – indicators of good water quality. In the midstream sections, biodiversity drops sharply where farming and bluegums dominate. But as the river approaches the sea, it revives.

“The lower Breede, especially through Bontebok National Park and the estuary, is a refuge,” says Dooley. “You see a resurgence of birdlife – spur-wing geese, Egyptian geese, herons, waders. The estuary is this incredible meeting point between freshwater and the ocean – one of the few remaining intact estuarine systems in the region.”

The science of storytelling

Although the team’s work is rigorous – involving water sampling, flow gauging and ecological surveys – it’s also about storytelling. “Science can’t live in a vacuum,” Dooley insists. “If people don’t connect emotionally to these rivers, we’ll lose them quietly.”

That’s why The Wilderness Project expeditions are as much journeys as they are studies. Their teams paddle, hike and camp their way down a river, engaging communities, landowners and conservation agencies along the way. Each stop is a conversation – about how the river is used, remembered and changed.

Dooley recalls farmers who spoke candidly about water scarcity, campers who noticed algae blooms where once there were none and park rangers who have watched invasive trees creep closer each year. “Everyone sees a piece of the puzzle,” he says. “We’re just trying to fit those pieces together.”

In conservation science, a baseline is the reference point – the “before” against which all future change is measured. Without it, restoration is guesswork. “You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” Dooley says. “These baselines are our compass. They tell us where we are – so that in 10 or 20 years, we’ll know whether our rivers are recovering or collapsing.”

The Breede study, he explains, offers a gauge against other river systems across Africa. By using a standardised method, the team can replicate the approach from the Nile to the Niger, from the Okavango to the Limpopo. “It’s a scalable vision – an African freshwater observatory, if you like. Every river tells part of the story.”

A resilient river

For all its sobering findings, the Breede expedition ended on a note of cautious optimism. “We found that despite decades of pressure, the river still has resilience,” Dooley says. “Life finds a way – if we give it space.”

He credits local conservation initiatives in the estuary and national park for safeguarding crucial habitats. “That’s what hope looks like – seeing that when we protect even small sections, the system responds positively. The geese return, the reeds recover, the water clears.”

The team’s work, now being compiled into a public report, will feed into ongoing river management and restoration efforts. But for Dooley, the real legacy of The Wilderness Project lies in changing how people see freshwater. “We tend to think of rivers as scenery or resources – but they’re living systems. They’re the veins of the continent.”

He pauses, then smiles. “If we can get people to value them properly – not just for what they give us, but for what they are – then maybe we’ll finally start managing them wisely.”

As the team packed up their gear on the final day, the Breede widened towards the sea – sluggish but still moving. The estuary stretched before them, a glittering body of water where freshwater met salt and pelicans wheeled overhead. A seagull circled the canoes as they headed to their final destination. It felt, Dooley said later, like standing at the end of a story – and the start of another.

“The Wilderness Project isn’t a single expedition,” he reflected. “It’s a movement – to understand, protect and celebrate the waters that sustain life on this continent. The Breede is just one chapter. But every chapter matters.”

Finding the source

“A river is a vein of the Earth,” says Matt Dooley, leader of The Wilderness Project expedition on the Breede River. “It’s a life force. Water is life – that’s undisputed. When telescopes search space, they look for signs of water, because it’s your indicator of life. And if water is life, then rivers are the veins of the Earth. They’re the vessels of life for this planet.”

It’s a big statement, but then again, so is the Breede River – one of the Western Cape’s longest and most historically important waterways. Dooley and his team set out to trace this river back to its beginnings, to the quiet place in the mountains where its pulse first begins to beat. What they found wasn’t a dramatic waterfall or some hidden lake, but something subtler and more profound: a trickle that grows, a force that gathers.

Many beginnings, one journey

“The funny thing is,” Dooley laughs, “every river has several sources.”

He explains that defining a source isn’t as simple as dropping a pin on a map. “There are culturally significant sources, hydrological sources, the farthest-from-the-sea sources. For the Breede, it was a case of choosing one of several that exist. The Matroosberg Mountains act like a giant water tower – the rain and snow that falls there seeps into the ground, and that’s one of the sources that feeds the river.”

Armed with maps and satellite tools, the team traced multiple tributaries, calculating distances and flow to find the most distant spring. They eventually located the Titus River – born in the rugged Ben-Etive Nature Reserve about 25km from Ceres – as the beginning of their adventure.

“That was our source,” Dooley says simply. “We drove up there, hiked from a dam about 5km below where the water literally comes out of the rocks and followed it upstream. We found a large pool – and that became the symbolic starting point of the expedition.”

“...The Matroosberg Mountains act like a giant water tower – the rain and snow that falls there seeps into the ground, and that’s one of the sources that feeds the river.”

The long walk downstream

From that quiet pool, the team shouldered their packs and began the descent. “We hiked about 50km over two days,” Dooley recalls. “It was long, steep, and incredibly beautiful.”

Those first days were as much about endurance as discovery – scrambling over rocks, weaving through fynbos and willows, crossing icy streams that would later become a broad, lazy river. “There’s something powerful about watching a river grow,” he says. “At first it’s just a thread, a sound between rocks. Then it becomes a song.”

After two days on foot, the explorers inflated their rafts and let the current take over. “The river changes constantly,” Dooley explains. “It goes from a trickle to something shallow and fast, full of rapids. That’s where the rafts come in – they let us move through those white-water stretches without wrecking our canoes.”

The rafts, he says, are “basically big inflatable tubes that you sit between. You just bounce off rocks, through rapids – it’s a lot of fun, actually.”

But fun doesn’t mean easy. “Sometimes the river just disappears into dense thickets of Cape willow and palmiet. You can’t even see where it’s going. We’d have to haul the rafts out, drag them through the bush for 20 or 30 metres, then put them back in again. You can’t always be right, but if you follow the water, it usually takes you down the right path. That’s what it does.”

The rhythm of the river

Each new section revealed a different character – rushing mountain streams gave way to wide pools, narrow gullies opened into fertile valleys. When the water finally calmed and the rapids eased, they swapped rafts for canoes. “That was when we really started to feel the Breede’s personality,” says Dooley. “It became slower, broader, warmer. You could see how it shapes the landscape, carving through farms and wetlands. It’s not just water any more – it’s a corridor of life.”

To spend days travelling in rhythm with a river, he says, is to understand time differently. “It teaches you patience. You can’t rush it. A river always moves at its own pace – sometimes it drags you along, sometimes it barely moves at all. But you’re always going forward.”

For Dooley, reaching the source was not just a cartographic achievement, but a personal one. “To see where this all begins is incredibly humbling,” he reflects. “Every river has such small origins. It’s really just a spring – water coming out of a rock. On its own, it can seem underwhelming. But when you follow it and see what it becomes, that’s where the power lies.”

He describes kneeling beside that first pool, watching water bubble from the mountain and realising that those same molecules would one day flow past Swellendam, past Bontebok, through Robertson’s vineyards and finally into the Indian Ocean.

“It’s extraordinary,” he says. “That energy, that life force, moves all the way down. It connects everything – fish, insects, plants, people. Some of it moves sideways, some upwards, but most of it follows the path of least resistance, always seeking the sea.”

“The source itself is just a moment. The real magic is in following the journey. Watching that little spring become something that sustains farms, towns, and wildlife – it changes the way you see the world.”

More than a map line

In the course of their journey, the team faced sunburn, thorns and sore muscles, but also the thrill of discovery – finding pools alive with tadpoles, spotting the flash of a kingfisher, camping under skies filled with stars. “It’s addictive,” Dooley admits. “There’s always another bend to see what’s beyond.”

By the time the group reached the point where the Breede widened enough for canoes, they had covered nearly 100km – half on foot, half on water. “It wasn’t about being first,” Dooley emphasises. “It was about understanding the river as a living thing. It breathes, it grows, it changes. You can’t really ‘conquer’ a river – you can only travel with it.”

“The source itself is just a moment,” says Dooley. “The real magic is in following the journey. Watching that little spring become something that sustains farms, towns and wildlife – it changes the way you see the world.”

Standing at the foot of the Matroosberg Mountains, watching rainfall become a stream, he felt that truth deeply. “You realise that every drop counts,” he says. “That every tiny rivulet matters. Because together, they become something mighty.”

Researching the river

There’s a quiet conviction beneath everything Dr Rainer von Brandis does. He’d never put it that grandly; he’s understated to a fault, the kind of person you have to coax into admitting just how much ground he’s covered. But paddle with him — as I did on the Breede River — and you begin to feel how his calm attention, kilometre after kilometre, is building one of Africa’s most ambitious records of freshwater life.

Von Brandis is the research director of The Wilderness Project, a sprawling, multi-country effort to establish ecological and hydrological baselines on African rivers that don’t yet have them. The idea is both simple and radical: move from a river’s source to its mouth in a single, continuous transect; observe and measure everything — water quality, biodiversity, human use — and store it in a way that makes repeating the journey comparable a decade from now.

If change is inevitable, then measurement is agency. Baselines make it possible to say what has changed, by how much, and for whom.

Von Brandis frames the stakes in human terms first. Millions of people drink, bathe, farm, fish and play in these rivers. This isn’t a world where every litre from the tap is filtered and chlorinated. For many communities, the river is the tap, the pantry and the playground.

When rivers falter, the costs don’t arrive as abstract ecological deficits — they show up as empty nets, unsafe water, lost protein, collapsing household economies and governments scrambling to provide substitutes.

The method matches that immediacy. The team doesn’t leapfrog by road between “representative sites”. They take the long line — by canoe, mokoro, or on foot — recording the intimate continuity of a river as it actually flows through farms, forests, settlements, mine belts, wetlands and national parks.

Water parameters like pH, dissolved oxygen and turbidity are logged side by side with conversations and observations: women washing clothes, children swimming, pipes drawing irrigation water, fishers mending nets. It’s a portrait of a river as an ecological and social system, not a spreadsheet divorced from shores.

Scale matters — and the project has scale. The Wilderness Project has now covered 70 expeditions of rivers across Africa — parts of the Okavango, Zambezi, Congo and, more recently, the Nile Basin — often with multiple expeditions running at once. The goal is to complete 200 by 2030.

The logistics are hair-raising but frugal: rugged vehicles, a fleet of canoes, containers in strategic towns and teams that eat rice and beans while sleeping under polyester. The big-ticket line items are the specialist instruments, some of which cost as much as a small house — but they unlock data that can’t be guessed or hand-waved.

That data already matter. When a tailings dam broke on Zambia’s Kafue River and heavy metals washed downstream, The Wilderness Project team had completed a full baseline survey months earlier. They were able to go back, repeat sections and compare.

Early analyses showed troubling levels of contamination in some settlements — evidence that can feed into accountability, remediation and health guidance. It’s a reminder that “conservation” isn’t just about charismatic wildlife; it’s a public-health discipline too.

“The logistics are hair-raising but frugal: rugged vehicles, a fleet of canoes, containers in strategic towns and teams that eat rice and beans while sleeping under polyester. ”

Time travel

And yet, what gives the work its spine is not crisis-response but time travel. Von Brandis talks about shifting baseline syndrome — the way each generation accepts the continually degrading environmental conditions as “normal”. Your grandfather remembers catching 10 fish in half an hour at a sandbank; you celebrate one fish as a win; your child sees none and shrugs.

Without a record, the slide hides in plain sight. A comparable, repeatable baseline — methodologically stable even as new techniques are added — lets future teams say, with evidence: this river has improved or declined in its ability to feed, filter, and flourish.

There’s another kind of baseline the project invests in: people. In every country, the team partners with local universities and NGOs, bringing students onto expeditions, mentoring them through master’s or PhD work and seeding long-term capacity where the rivers actually flow.

It’s a refreshing counter to fly-in, fly-out science. The goal isn’t just a dataset; it’s a network of scientists who can repeat, question and extend the work decades from now, independent of the project.

Despite the scope, there’s nothing macho about von Brandis’ manner. He laughs about the slog of dead-straight, burnt-out channels in Zambia; he’s grateful for good coffee; he’s unshowy about risk. When I ask about hippos, he talks not of bravado but etiquette. You wait. You keep still. You let them decide when to move, and you slip past politely.

Crocodiles, he concedes, have a different temperament. He tells the story of a 4.5m brute that rammed a mokoro, forcing the team to the bank until the drone’s whirring finally pushed the animal on. There’s a twitch of a smile at the absurdity of trying to “negotiate” with a dinosaur, but the lesson is practical: understand the river’s other inhabitants, or you’re the one in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If hippos and crocs are hazards, the slower enemies are often dully familiar: unregulated mining, raw sewage, sediment from farmland, silt from deforestation, plastic in every eddy. Von Brandis mentions the orange skies of Zambia’s burn season, when charcoal production and land-clearing set half a province alight and the river becomes a smoky corridor.

It’s not a scene that makes it into glossy tourism brochures, but it’s the sort of cumulative pressure that a baseline, patiently repeated, can track — and that governments and communities can use to argue for different choices.

Adventure

For all the unglamorous graft, there’s still adventure. Since 2017, von Brandis has racked up more than 10,000 kilometres on African rivers and 22 full expeditions. Next year’s docket includes the Luangwa, with arguably the highest hippo densities in Africa.

He rattles off the kit lists, the containers in Maun, Lusaka and now Kenya, the five or six expedition leaders, the 15 or so researchers, the logistics staff who keep four simultaneous expeditions supplied and sane. It’s complicated. It’s also, he insists, surprisingly affordable once you’re afloat.

The humility comes through when I nudge him toward credit. He doesn’t talk about “saving rivers”. He talks about recording them carefully enough that future people — fishers, farmers, health workers, park rangers, policy makers — have leverage.

Funding has flowed from a mix of philanthropic backers and corporate partners — the team was never dependent on fickle government aid. The science has grown more sophisticated over time, but not at the expense of comparability: the rule is to add methods, not swap them out, so 10-year comparisons aren’t apples to oranges.

This is where the theme near the end of our conversation lands its punch. Baselines aren’t just about graphs; they’re about memory and fairness. If we don’t know what a river used to be capable of, we’ll accept too little from it now and demand too little for it in the future. We’ll call scraps a feast.

A baseline says: this is what the river gave and can give again — clean water, protein, livelihoods, resilience in floods and droughts. It anchors our expectations in evidence instead of nostalgia or denial.

On the Breede, late afternoon light slants across the reeds. A kingfisher stitches blue across brown water. It’s beautiful, but Von Brandis resists turning the scene into a sermon. He’s more interested in the unromantic habits that keep beauty possible: careful notes, consistent methods, students who learn to love data as much as dawn, neighbours along a river who wave instead of glower because the water still feeds them.

Call it hopeful pragmatism. He and his teams aren’t pretending to fix everything. They’re building a ledger of living rivers and trusting that, in the right hands, the truth of those pages will do its work.

When we pull our boats onto the bank, he shrugs off the “heroics” and checks a list: instruments stowed, samples labelled, tents to pitch. Tomorrow: another reach, more numbers, more quiet conversations on the water’s edge.

The river flows on. The record does, too. And because of that, a decade from now we’ll be able to answer the most important question honestly: has this river grown sad, or is it still singing?

Canoeing the Breede with a river geneticist

Canoeing with a river geneticist

On a warm, wind-ruffled bend of the Breede River, we beach our canoes beneath a patch of shade. The banks smell of wet reeds and mud. A shoal dimples the surface, and a flash of fin betrays a possible barbel.

Beside me, biologist Kira-Lee Courtaillac unpacks the contents of her plastic boxes – syringes, tiny filters, sterile sachets. This is her field kit for reading a river’s hidden biography.

As she puts it, genetically speaking, a river is flowing life wrapped in water – and today we’re going to catch a little of that life as it passes.

Kira works for The Wilderness Project, a pan-African research organisation building baseline data for African rivers before development, pollution, drought or flood can rewrite their stories. One of the tools is environmental DNA – eDNA – the microscopic traces that fish, insects, plants and mammals shed into the water. Collect a little water, capture those traces on a filter and you can map who’s here without hooking a single fish or casting a single net.

The process looks simple because Kira makes it simple. She pulls on gloves, keeps the kit scrupulously clean, and filters the river water slowly and steadily. The point is to gather a reliable snapshot of this exact spot at this exact time.

Even though the Breede is flowing, much of what turns up in the sample reflects what’s living right here because DNA in water doesn’t last long. The method is quiet and careful – more listening than hunting.

Back at base, the team extracts the DNA from those filters and uses lab tests to find signals of different groups – fish, invertebrates, plants, even tiny organisms you can’t see. What comes back is a species list that reads like a roll call.

Better yet, not every question needs to be asked at once. After one line of testing, the remaining material is frozen and saved. Months later, the same sample can be thawed and asked a new question. It’s like bottling a moment in time for future re-examination.

The route doesn’t stop at park fences or pretty viewpoints; it moves through villages, grazing lands, farms and mining zones. A river is ecological, yes, but it’s also social and the project wants the full picture.

The workflow stretches across borders. Samples are processed in a dedicated lab in Maun, Botswana, with strict clean-room habits and trained local technicians. For now, some of the high-volume sequencing happens abroad, where there’s more capacity.

But the goal is the same wherever the steps occur: clean methods, credible results and open sharing. The team is building a public dashboard and plans to feed records into existing biodiversity databases so managers, researchers and communities can use the data too.

On the river, Kira displays fieldcraft that never makes it into glossy documentaries: choose a quiet site away from the day’s splashing; don’t wade around where you’re sampling; keep your hands off the ends of the filter; track exactly how much water you’ve filtered. Each small habit turns down the noise and turns up the signal. It’s the kind of disciplined care that makes numbers trustworthy.

The Breede, at least today, feels generous – reed-fringed, birdy, alive. But Kira has seen how quickly a river’s character can swing. In another catchment they sample, the presence of people and cattle along the banks changes from season to season, and the river’s communities shift with it. eDNA lets them quantify those changes rather than rely on hunches.

The stories we sense on the surface – muddy water after a storm, a new pump upstream, a dry year – become patterns in the data, something you can point to and say, this changed and here’s how we know.

It would be easy to romanticise all this, and Kira doesn’t hide the wonder of her job: travel, wild places and a method that’s improving every season. But there’s grit, too – heat, wind, canoe wipeouts and the patient repetition of fieldwork. She laughs about how many times she’s pushed a syringe plunger and how much a day on the river teaches you about rhythm and focus.

“My scientific knowledge has expanded exponentially,” she says, “and I really do love rice and beans.”

Before we end I ask for one line to sum it up. She doesn’t hesitate. A river, she says again, is “flowing life wrapped in water”. eDNA helps unwrap it – not by trapping creatures, but by listening for the molecular whispers they leave behind.

Afterwards the filters are tucked away for the long future of questions they’ll answer. I watch the water for a moment and try to picture what’s inside: not just silt and phytoplankton and a passing bass, but a library of life, pages turning with every swirl. The river keeps writing. Thanks to Kira and her team, they’re pages we’re finally learning to read.

The Breede’s tiny creatures

Tiny creatures

Under a darkening evening sky on the Breede River, a group of scientists hunch over shallow trays filled with murky water. The surface ripples faintly as they sift through leaves, sand and bits of algae, searching for something small – almost invisible to the untrained eye.

But to freshwater biologists like Lauren Searle and Nazley Liddle, these tiny river-dwelling creatures tell a story far larger than themselves: a story about the health of our rivers, the pressures of human activity and the delicate balance that sustains life in South Africa’s waterways.

Searle leads the research component of the Breede River expedition, a science-rooted organisation that mounts dozens of expeditions to document and monitor freshwater ecosystems across Africa. For several weeks she and her team have been stopping at regular intervals to collect water samples, record habitat data and identify aquatic macroinvertebrates – the small insects and worms that serve as early-warning indicators of environmental change.

Joining them for a few days is Liddle, a young scientist from the Freshwater Research Centre (FRC) in Kommetjie, Cape Town. It’s her first field trip of this kind, and she’s fascinated by what lies beneath the surface.

“I think it’s human nature to want to classify things – to look at the tiny life in a river and ask what it means,” she says. “Each of these macroinvertebrates tells us something about how the river is functioning, about what’s happening upstream, and about the impacts of people.”

“I think it’s human nature to want to classify things – to look at the tiny life in a river and ask what it means...”

Reading the river’s pulse

Freshwater macroinvertebrates – the larvae of dragonflies and mayflies, snails, worms, beetles, leeches and caddisflies – are collectively known as bioindicators. They respond quickly to changes in water quality and habitat condition, making them ideal for monitoring river health.

Searle crouches over the collecting tray, prodding the mucky water with long tweezers. “We’re looking for freshwater insects and snails,” she explains. “But at this site, the saltwater has come in quite far, so the insects can’t survive. All we’re finding here are saltwater shrimp and worms. That tells us a lot.”

The absence of certain creatures is as telling as their presence. In rivers where the water is clean and oxygen-rich, sensitive species – like mayflies and stoneflies – thrive. When pollution increases, these species disappear, replaced by more tolerant organisms that can survive in degraded conditions.

“Each insect family has its own sensitivity to pollutants,” says Liddle. “When you see fewer species overall, or only the hardy ones, you know there’s a problem.”

The scientists use the South African Scoring System, a standardised method for assessing river health. Each type of invertebrate is assigned a sensitivity score, with higher numbers indicating species that can only survive in clean, well-oxygenated water. As Searle notes: “If you get a lot of high-scoring species, that’s a good sign – it means the river’s habitat quality is strong. But if the scores are low, or diversity is poor, it’s a warning flag.”

“It’s a beautifully simple system,” Searle says. “You can see where a rivers’ quality dips as it passes through farmland or a town, and where it recovers again after flowing through a wetland that helps filter out pollutants.”

For Liddle, whose work at the Freshwater Research Centre revolves around data management and long-term monitoring, this connection between fieldwork and data infrastructure is what excites her most.

At the centre, Liddle works with the Freshwater Biodiversity Information System, a national database that integrates freshwater research across South Africa. The aim is to create a unified platform where different studies – like those conducted by Searle’s team – can “speak” to one another.

“If our datasets can harmonise, we get a much clearer picture of what’s going on,” she explains. “Data really is at the crux of conservation. It informs management decisions, guides interventions and even shapes policy.”

She pauses, glancing at the river – a broad, serene band of tea-brown water winding between reed beds. “Without data, we’re guessing. With it, we can start to make the right choices for the future.”

“You can see where a rivers’ quality dips as it passes through farmland or a town, and where it recovers again after flowing through a wetland that helps filter out pollutants.”

Small creatures, big meaning

The work can be painstaking. Each site requires careful sampling of sediments and vegetation, followed by sorting and storing each creature in a small flask. In the Breede’s upper reaches the team found a variety of insects: dragonfly nymphs, beetles and caddisfly larvae that build tiny cases from sand and twigs – miniature homes that protect them from predators. “They’re like little architects,” laughs Liddle.

Further downstream, however, diversity drops. “Where there’s more human disturbance – campsites, agriculture, effluent – we see fewer species,” she says. “It’s quite a striking pattern. More humans, less variety in life.”

The weight of hope

Asked how she feels about doing science in a world where environmental crises seem to multiply daily, Liddle doesn’t hesitate. “It’s a mix of everything,” she says. “It can be disheartening. But for me, we have to try. I’d rather spend my life trying to make one small change than give up altogether.”

That sentiment resonates through the group as they haul their gear back to the canoes. Fieldwork, after all, is hard: early mornings, long hours in the sun, mud-caked boots and endless note-taking. Yet it’s also deeply rewarding – a way to connect data with place and science with meaning.

“The biggest takeaway for me,” says Liddle, “is just how much hard work goes into conservation. It’s physical, it’s mental, it’s emotional. It’s people coming together for something bigger than themselves.”

Both scientists see their work as part of a broader effort to listen – not metaphorically, but literally – to the signals that nature sends us. “The insects are the river’s voice,” says Searle. “They tell us what’s wrong long before we see it with the naked eye. If we pay attention, we can act before it’s too late.”

Both women acknowledge that science alone isn’t enough. “It has to lead to action,” says Liddle. “We can provide the evidence, but it’s up to society and the government to listen.”

As the team packs up for the night, the Breede flows quietly on. Beneath its surface, larvae cling to rocks, worms burrow in the silt and small crustaceans scuttle between grains of sand. To most of us, it’s just a river. But to those who study it, it’s a living pulse – a mirror of our changing world and a reminder that even the smallest creatures carry big truths.

Recording a river in real time

When The Wilderness Project team set out to follow the Breede River from source to sea, they didn’t just want to travel it – they wanted to capture it in full, living detail. So they brought along a small but revolutionary piece of gear: the Insta360 camera.

Mounted on a tripod in leader Matt Dooley’s canoe, the compact dual-lens device recorded a complete 360-degree view every minute of their journey. “It’s like stop-motion animation,” explained Dooley. “You can imagine it – one photo every minute, the river unfolding frame by frame. It lets us relive the whole expedition, see how the river changes, and share that experience with others.”

He describes the project as creating a kind of Google River View. “You can scroll through it, look behind the canoe, see what the tree canopy looks like, explore every bend,” he says. “It’s like inviting people along for the ride. You can’t really understand a river until you’ve travelled it, but this gets you as close as possible.”

The camera’s power lies in its ability to democratise exploration. Anyone with a screen will be able to pan, tilt and zoom through the Breede’s hidden channels, willow tunnels and shimmering pools – an immersive record of one of South Africa’s great waterways.

“We want to develop software that can analyse the footage, detect invasive species, track how vegetation changes along the banks, or even measure shifts in flow. It becomes a living archive of the river’s health.”

Beyond the adventure, the footage has serious scientific value. “One day we hope to combine it with AI,” Dooley explains. “We want to develop software that can analyse the footage, detect invasive species, track how vegetation changes along the banks, or even measure shifts in flow. It becomes a living archive of the river’s health.”

That archive will help fight what scientists call the shifting baseline syndrome – the tendency to forget what a healthy river once looked like. “Every generation accepts their surrounding environmental conditions as normal,” says Dooley. “We’re building a visual baseline so that future researchers can compare and understand how much has changed.”

Dooley calls their approach “field science on the move”. Instead of collecting samples and interpreting the data later, they bring the lab to the river. “We’re listening to the river in real time,” he says. “When we measure discharge and see the effect of gumtree plantations or erosion right there in front of us, the message becomes powerful and immediate.”

All that data – imagery, measurements, notes – is carefully backed up in the cloud, with duplicate physical drives for safety. The information is open-access, intended for everyone from conservation managers to local communities. “The whole point,” says Dooley, “is to share it – to help people see, understand, and protect these rivers.”

For Dooley, the 360-degree camera is more than a gadget; it’s a bridge. “Rivers connect everything,” he says. “They’re the veins of the Earth. When people can see them – really see them – they start to care.” DM

All images featured here were captured by Don Pinnock.

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Becoming a river

The Breede Expedition