The Grassland Guardian - The incredible story of a woman as tough as Nguni hide

The sun is only just lifting the mist off the Karkloof grasslands when Donna Lay rides out on horseback. Ten horses stand in the paddocks behind her, twelve dogs circle at her heels, and a herd of Nguni cattle grazes in the grassland ahead. It looks peaceful now. But this land has seen fire, poachers, and hardship enough to test anyone. Donna meets it all with the same answer - she stays, she fights, she carries on.

“I’ve never lived in a city,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t know how to live in a city.”

Her story begins not far from Dartmoor, on a citrus and horse farm where the Karkloof and Umngeni Rivers flow into Albert Falls dam. She grew up with polo ponies and citrus orchards, where chores came before play and animals were part of the family. After school, she went into dairy farming in Balgowan, running her own herd for ten years. Later she turned to horses, breeding and conservation. When WILDTRUST needed someone to manage Dartmoor, she moved in with her dogs, horses, and the kind of resilience only farming life can build.

At the time, Dartmoor was a “free-for-all” she recalls. Poaching was rampant, trespassers roamed with greyhounds, and snares littered the veld. “Hunting, poaching, people just driving in. They’d been doing it for years.”

Her mandate was simple: protect and restore the land. With a team of environmental monitors, she patrolled the land in every kind of weather. “We caught them when it was snowing, we caught them when it was hot. They tried everything, but every time we were there.” Snaring, once common, all but vanished. The Oribi population rebounded. Reedbuck returned. Dartmoor began to breathe again.

Conservation, though, is not the whole of Donna’s life. She is as well known for her community work as for her anti-poaching patrols. She has spent years driving from house to house with cages in the back of her bakkie, rounding up dogs and cats for spay clinics and rabies campaigns. “You can’t just tell people to bring their dogs. They won’t,” she says. “You’ve got to go to them. It takes weeks, but that’s how you know 90 percent of the animals are done.”

One clinic still makes her shake her head in disbelief. “We spayed and neutered over a hundred animals in two days,” she says. “We turned the community hall into a hospital, with state vets, SPCA staff, and me just driving around collecting animals. It was chaos, but it worked.”

Her efforts extend to horses too, organising gelding clinics to control overbreeding and ease stallion fights. “The mares get covered all the time, just breeding and breeding. So we come in, neuter the stallions, and that helps everyone.”

Then came July 2024.

That winter, a runaway fire swept across the Karkloof, tearing through plantations and grasslands, unstoppable in the wind. Donna spotted the smoke in the morning. By lunchtime, the fire had roared over firebreaks and was bearing down on Dartmoor.

“I thought about phoning my dad and saying cheers,” she admits, “because this one was big. But then I thought, come on, Donna, pull yourself towards yourself. We’ve got to fight fire.”

With a neighbour and a borrowed tractor, she battled for fourteen hours, filling bakkie-sakkies, flanking cattle, and racing to save her home. “My only way out was into the fire. So I said, well, I’m not going. I’m staying. I’m fighting.”

The flames were so fierce that soil itself burned for weeks. Wildlife limped across the land, reedbuck singed, serval displaced, porcupines dug themselves out of ash. Donna set up feeding stations across 4 000 hectares, distributing bales of hay and lucerne donated by farmers from Rosetta, Greytown, and beyond. “Farmers would arrive with a single bale or two, whatever they could spare. That bale meant as much as a truckload, because it all went to keeping the wildlife alive.” Even porcupines, she laughs, “had a potato party in their burrows.”

Through it all, the community rallied. “Wildlands were wonderful,” she says, “they did all the public stuff, put out a plea for help, and the response was overwhelming. TWK turned their yard into a loading zone. Hopewell Supplies, Umngeni Municipality, farmers, everyone came together.”

The fire left Dartmoor scarred, but it was another trial that nearly broke her. Exhausted from firefighting and community relief, and living off cans of condensed milk, Donna collapsed. A blood vessel in her brainstem had ruptured, flooding her brain with blood. Doctors gave her no chance. If she lived, they said, she would never walk again.

But Donna is not the sort to accept forecasts. “They said I’d never ride again. Wrong thing to say to a horse girl,” she grins.

The weeks that followed were brutal. She woke with double vision so severe she joked she looked like “Sid the Sloth.” Doctors told her she would need a brain shunt for life, so she named it “Sheila.” “If I’ve got to live with her forever,” she reasoned, “I may as well give her a name.”

Six months later, Sheila was gone, her eyesight returned and Donna was back on her horse, her body strong enough to heal on its own.

“It’s just who I am,” she says. “You get knocked down, you get back up. And you carry on.”

Now, back on Dartmoor, Donna continues her work. She manages a herd of 120 Nguni cattle, keeps invasive plants at bay, maintains wetlands where cranes have returned to nest, and names the oribi and baboon spiders that live near her house. “One is Duchess, another is Queenie, and then there was Farmer. Unfortunately Farmer was taken by a hadeda. It was very sad” She laughs when asked if she names them all. “I can’t name them all in the veld. I’d run out of names.”

Donna’s story is one of extraordinary resilience, but she tells it without drama, as if it’s simply what needs to be done. That, perhaps, is the key. For her, conservation is not a job. It is presence. It is showing up, every day, for the land, for the animals, and for the people who share this corner of the Karkloof.

In the end, Dartmoor is not just a place of wetlands and grassland. It is a place made resilient by the woman who stands watch over it. In the Karkloof, resilience has a name. It is Donna Lay.