My life had been in a state of limbo since my adventure on a Botswana mobile tented safari with my new friends Philimon, BK and Joe. How does one top that experience in Botswana, when your definition of travel is the journey itself, and being as far away as possible from the iPhone and iPad-toting hordes of tourists, and the luxury lodges that all look the same and offer the same experience?
After doing my research, I was getting depressed because the kind of exclusivity I crave as a photographer is a must if you want to take those amazing shots that you will savour for the rest of your life. Getting those shots requires your own vehicle and guide, access to areas not teeming with other tourists, and spending hours with your subject matter.
And if you are serious about wildlife photography, a couple of days in Africa is not nearly good enough; you need a minimum of a week. Let’s face it, the likely cost of all of this exclusivity can be staggering…
And so, after weeks of fruitless searching, I reverted to the travel team at Africa Geographic, who had arranged my Botswana safari. A few hours later there was a reply in my mailbox:
‘Hi! We think that we have something right up your ally, something new! We have teamed up with a professional photographer in the Maasai Mara! He’s got his own camp right there, with easy access in and out of the Mara’.
Hmm, I have been to the Maasai Mara seven times before, and although it is a fantastic place, the crowds can be a bit off-putting for an experienced traveller seeking exclusivity. But okay, you have my attention. Tell me more.
‘He’s got this specially rebuilt 4×4 vehicle, and permits to go offroad – where most tourists cannot go. And the best thing is that they can close down the camp just for you – you will be the only guest’.
At this stage, I wondered if I would have to sell both kidneys and mortgage my home to afford what sounded like heaven. But no, the price was amazing, considering the level of exclusivity. I paid in a rush to stake my claim.
Soon after I found myself flying into Kenya and was winging my way from Nairobi to the Maasai Mara on a Safarilink flight, instead of my usual long and bumpy minibus option.
On touchdown in the Maasai Mara, I was greeted by guide and camp manager John Siololo (also known as Big John). I looked around in suspicion, nope – I was the only passenger going with him in his vehicle. And yes, the vehicle was modified for photography – with the back doors removed and an extended floor on both sides. Brilliant!
Before long, we encountered our first giraffes and wildebeests, and I breathed in deeply. I was home…
The following ten days would take me to a new level of photography, thanks to Big John’s deep understanding of animal behaviour, and the ability to get us in the right position time after time. I was falling in love with the Maasai Mara, again.
Our daily routine was pretty standard while on safari. We would leave camp at 05h45 and be well inside the Maasai Mara and enjoying our first sightings by 06h00, and the ‘golden hour’ of early morning light soon after. Then we would head back to camp around 11h00, lunch by 13h00, downtime and then back out at 16h00 until sunset at about 18h30. Then back to camp, download the images, dinner at 20h00, shower, etc. and hit the pillow by 22h00!
And speaking about the camp, I found that it was perfectly suited for all my needs: a huge tent all to myself, a flushing toilet, a shower with hot and cold water, and a solar energy battery charger.
How was it then, to be back in the Maasai Mara? Amazing, magnificent, relaxing, fun and all the other superlatives. You never know what’s going to happen next, or what is around the corner – a giant prehistoric-looking crocodile calmly basking in the sun, or perhaps a pride of lions feasting on a zebra carcass. Rather than attempt to explain all in writing, I hope that my photos tell the story.
My favourite moment? On one occasion we were cruising along when Big John suddenly hits the brakes, turns the wheel and we come to a halt. I look around expectantly. Nothing.
“Why are we here?” I ask.
“Wait, wait and get ready,” he responds.
Without another word I crawl onto the floor, lie prone and direct my camera into the green unknown and wait… and then suddenly movement… and there she is!
A leopardess known as ‘Fig’ appears through the dense vegetation carrying her kill, and she has a cub with her – I cannot believe my luck! Next thing they settle down right in front of us – just me and Big John. Nobody else in the entire world is having this moment. The cub is all over his mom as they play, and my camera is getting red hot as I fire off image after image – hundreds and hundreds of images.
Soon we are joined by other vehicles, but nobody else shares my front-row view. On my right is the BBC, with the famous Canon Ambassador Jonathan Scott! He looks at me, smiles and gives the thumbs up! I have the best seat in the house, and I am in heaven, on top of the world.
Then Fig is done playing with her cub, so she gets up and starts walking towards me with her cub in tow. I’m about 75cm off the ground, and this exquisite killing machine is walking directly towards me, those molten eyes looking straight through the lens and into my brain. Clackety-clack goes my camera. She is now so close that I could, if I had a death wish, reach out and scratch her behind the ears!
My camera is now useless, as she is beyond the focusing limit – just a blur. She walks under me and the vehicle and disappears from view. But the awesomeness of this moment of exclusivity is not over yet. Her cub has decided that he’s going to follow his mom! Repeat performance. Clackity-clackity-clack, then blur, and he’s gone. I’m no longer on top of the world; I’m on top of the universe.
Classic safari moment? On one morning, we were headed south to locate the Five Musketeers, a famous coalition of five cheetah brothers from two different mothers. It was an early start, so we stopped for breakfast under a tree. Suddenly a snake falls out of the tree and hits the ground just next to Big John, before slithering into the vehicle!
Big John radioed for help – the snake had disappeared, and we were not sure whether it was harmless, or dangerous – like a black mamba. Before long, three other vehicles packed with tourists of various nationalities pitched up to help. The advice came from all directions, even from some non-English speaking French people, and some of the advice was pretty exotic. But nobody wanted to search for the snake! After a while we extracted ourselves from the impromptu gathering of snake experts and drove away, me joining Big John at the front and leaving the rest of the vehicle to the snake. We never found the snake. But we did find the Five Musketeers. And plenty more, as my photos will show you.
My final observation is that the more time you spend out there on the plains, the ‘luckier’ you will be. The great location of Oltepesi Tented Safari Camp helps of course, as does having an expert guide and good equipment. But also, patience is the key ingredient to good wildlife photography. And passion.
I was born in New York, grew up in Sweden, and am currently living in the Balkans, using it as the base for my travels around the globe.
While growing up, I became fascinated by the glamour magazines of the 70s and 80s, which ignited my passion for photography, paired with great love and respect for wildlife. After spending time in the army, I returned to my passion for photography, moving to Kenya on a work assignment.
Today, I work as a professional photographer and business consultant with a speciality in strategy and tactics in eastern Europe, which I can pair with my photography business.
The highlight in my photographic career was when I was nominated by the editors of National Geographic for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards in 2017.
It has long been recognised that older female elephants are pivotal to elephant ecology and herd survival (McComb et al. 2011; Foley et al. 2008; Moss et al. 2011), but what of older males? Longevity in males is associated with size (the older the bull, the taller he is), dominance, prolonged musth periods and reproductive success (Hollister-Smith et al. 2007). Until recently, the social life of bulls has drawn less interest from researchers and tourists alike, being viewed as solitary when not having random associations with other bulls or joining female herds for mating opportunities.
The realisation of the importance of the social ecology of male elephants and the role of older males in their society came at a considerable cost when wildlife areas in South Africa, that had introduced young Kruger cull orphans without the social structure of older individuals, lost an incredible amount of rhino due to male adolescent elephant attacks. These young males were hitting puberty and immediately going into musth (a condition not generally experienced until a male elephant is in this mid to late twenties) as there were no older bulls to suppress it.
Coming into premature musth, they sought out reproduction opportunities, and when the young female elephants showed no interest they turned their attention to rhinos; these unusual interactions turned aggressive which often resulted in the death of the rhino. The introduction of older bulls into these areas soon put a stop to most of this ‘delinquent’ behaviour (Slotow et al. 2000; Slotow & van Dyk 2001).
This period of adolescence is one of enormous change for young males, hitting puberty at the average age of 14 years (Short, Mann & Hay 1967; Lee 1986) and becoming independent of their herd by their early twenties (Poole 1989). It is a time of transition for bulls from leaving their herd to joining bull society.
Not only are they leaving their natal herd, but they are also leaving their natal area (Moss 1988), and so the knowledge of where to go for food and water – which they will have learned during their time with their herd – will be of limited use to them as they explore new areas.
How best do you learn where resources are in these new areas? Perhaps the easiest way to learn is from those that have thrived there – the larger, and therefore older, bulls that show by their physical presence that they know where good resources are.
Image source: Dr Kate Evans, Elephants for Africa
Our studies on male elephants in the Okavango Delta and subsequently the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park in Botswana has shown that male elephants are selective of who they spend time with, choosing to be in groups with males of a similar age (Evans & Harris 2008) which, when you are trying to assert yourself in your new social network, would be the best place to be as these are the individuals with whom you want to establish the social hierarchy.
Not only do they choose which age groups to hang out with they are also selective of the individual they spend time with, forming bonds with particular individuals (Pitfield 2017). However, when we looked at who their nearest neighbours were when in all-male groups, we found that males of all ages prefer to be closest to those in the older age classification (>36 years of age) – those that are often referred to as past their reproductive prime and surplus to the biological needs of the population.
Our research in the Okavango Delta was focused in a bull area, with the majority of sightings being of males and a healthy population of older individuals. However, this changed over time with the western Delta becoming wetter from 2008 onwards, with more permanent water resources becoming available and an increase in females. We then started seeing less of the older males and wondered where they were going.
Males are often referred to as higher risk-takers and more exploratory, and thus it is no surprise that it is the males that are leading the way of the expansion of the Botswana elephants into historical rangelands.
At the same time, we noticed the large bulls were frequenting our study area in the western Delta less, and reports were coming to us about large aggregations of males in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, south of the Delta.
In 2012 we moved to this area to retain our focus on bull elephant ecology in a bull area – to further our understanding of bull social ecology and the role of bull areas and to address the increasing issue of human-elephant competition in the area.
In 2009, the Boteti River started to flow again after a hiatus of some 18 years, this vital resource of water drew in elephants and other wildlife, alongside the human population. While an obvious valuable physical resource for elephants, it soon became apparent that it serves as an important social resource, with male elephants spending a lot of time here interacting with other males (not just drinking and bathing), with aggregations of 100 males not an uncommon sighting.
Here the majority of our sightings are of male elephants (98% of all sightings), and again we are seeing that the older bulls are playing an essential role in bull society. It may well be that these large numbers at the river allow them to select who to hang out with. Given the close proximity to community lands, and the predominance of older bulls raiding the crops (Stevens 2018), it may also be that younger bulls are learning the value of human habitation to their dietary requirements by spending time with these older males.
The management and conservation of elephants is always a hot topic of debate, from the effects of large offtake due to poaching and or management strategies, which individuals to hunt and who to translocate. Historically these decisions have been based purely on numbers with herd integrity being taken into account in later years.
As we learn more about the social requirements of male elephants, we must consider these in the management and conservation decisions we make; the importance of the older individual to ‘normal’ society and the importance of bonds in the stability of populations.
Referenes
• Evans, K. & Harris, S. (2008). Adolescence in male African elephants, Loxodonta africana, and the importance of sociality. 76, 779-787
• Foley, C., Pettorelli, N, & Foley, L. (2008) Severe drought and calf survival in elephants. Biology Letters 4(5) 541-544
• Hollister-Smith, J., Poole, J.H., Archie, E.A., Vance, E.A., Georgiadis, N.J., Moss, C.J. & Alberts, S.C. (2007). Age, musth and paternity success in wild male elephants, Loxodonta africana. Animal Behaviour, 74, 287-296
• Lee, P.C. (1986) Early social development among African elephant calves. National Geographic Research, 2, 388-401.
• McComb, K., Moss, C., Durant, S.M., Baker, L. & Sayialel, S. (2001) Matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge in African elephants. Science,292, 491-494.
• Moss, C. (1988) Elephant Memories. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA.
• Moss, C. J., Harvey C., & Lee, P.C. eds. (2011) The Amboseli elephants: a long-term perspective on a long-lived mammal. University of Chicago Press
• Pitfield, A.R. (2017) The social and environmental factors affecting the life of bull African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in a ‘bull area’ – a social network analysis. MSc Thesis. University of Bristol. pp87
• Poole, J.H. (1989) Announcing intent: the aggressive state of musth in African elephants. Animal Behaviour, 37, 140-152.
• Short, R.V., Mann, T. & Hay, M.F. (1967) Male reproductive organs of the African elephant. Journal of Reproductive Fertility, 13, 517-536.
• Slotow, R. & Van Dyk, G. (2001) Role of delinquent young “orphan” male elephants in high mortality of white rhinoceros in Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa. Koedoe,44, 85-94.
• Slotow, R., Balfour, D. & Howison, O. (2001) Killing of black and white rhinoceroses by African elephants in Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park, South Africa. Pachyderm, 31, 14-20.
• Stevens, J. (2018) Understanding human-elephant interactions in and around Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, Botswana. PhD Thesis, University of Bristol. pp243
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 competition is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are four galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other three galleries for this week’s selection, click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 2, Weekly Selection Gallery 3 and Weekly Selection Gallery 4.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 competition is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are four galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other three galleries for this week’s selection click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 1, Weekly Selection Gallery 2 and Weekly Selection Gallery 4.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are four galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other three galleries for this week’s selection click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 1, Weekly Selection Gallery 3 and Weekly Selection Gallery 4.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are four galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other three galleries for this week’s selection click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 1, Weekly Selection Gallery 2 and Weekly Selection Gallery 3.
Animal campaigners in South Africa were in court on Tuesday fighting to save the life of a collared bull elephant called Riff Raff who faces being shot for being considered a “nuisance”. Riff Raff’s habit of trampling fences to gain access to land that has been in his territory for more than half his life, led neighbours to his reserve to apply to have him killed, despite the fact that campaigners from Humane Society International/Africa and Global Supplies had already found him a new home approximately 450 km away.
However, when permission to relocate Riff Raff was turned down by the Limpopo government, the destruction order would likely have gone ahead, but at the last-minute Acting Deputy Judge President Mr Justice M.G. Phatudi intervened and granted Riff Raff a temporary stay of execution. The decision by the Limpopo Department of Economic Development, Environment and Tourism to reject the plan to relocate the elephant must now be reviewed by the court.
HSI/Africa and its partners have been trying to save Riff Raff for two years, including relocating him to a new reserve last year when neighbouring landowners threatened to apply for his destruction. Despite successfully transporting Riff Raff to the new reserve, he turned around and walked the 40-mile journey back to his original territory, and back in the line of fire.
Audrey Delsink, Wildlife Director of HSI/Africa, and an elephant behaviourist who has studied Riff Raff and elephants for more than 20 years, said: “Riff Raff is a magnificent bull elephant who symbolises the growing problem here in South Africa of lethal solutions being sought to solve human-elephant conflict. These are extremely tense times for all of us fighting to save Riff Raff, so we welcome Acting Deputy Judge President Mr Phatudi’s interdict and look forward to the review process.
“Many elephants who are labelled a ‘problem’ are simply bull elephants following what they are biologically hard-wired to do – leave their herd to find their own new range with unrelated females so that they can move up in the bull hierarchy and sire offspring. With crops and human settlements common in and around elephant protection areas, they often encounter fences, and then all too often land-owners seek to solve fence-breaking behaviour with a rifle. In Riff Raff’s case, a fence was erected in the middle of his home range during one of the region’s worst droughts, cutting him off from a water source and land that he had used unhindered for 13 years.
“We very much hope that the review process will assess the exceptional circumstances of Riff Raff’s case, address the ill-judged historical decisions that have led to this conflict, and set an important precedent by overturning Limpopo’s refusal to let us relocate Riff Raff again.”
An independent study facilitated through the Elephant Specialist Advisory Group revealed that up to 50 destruction permits were issued between 2016-2017 to kill so-called problem elephants. Conservationists in South Africa are concerned that destruction orders are being used by landowners as a quick fix to get rid of elephants rather than be inconvenienced by having to implement elephant-friendly management plans for their land.
HSI/Africa’s Delsink added: “If the decision is upheld and Riff Raff is killed through a destruction permit, it will be a tragedy not only for this amazing animal but for all so-called ‘problem’ elephants across South Africa who face a similar fate. While we have no guarantee that Riff Raff’s relocation to the new reserve would be successful, as caretakers of the natural world, all stakeholders have a moral obligation to find non-lethal solutions to these human-wildlife conflict challenges. We share this land with these magnificent giants, it should be utterly unthinkable to kill them simply because it’s easier than managing the land in a way that considers their biological drivers. The travesty is compounded by the fact that the body mandated to protect these animals is the same one issuing these destruction permits.”
HSI/Africa is extremely grateful to have been represented in court by Hogan Lovells.
Marrakech is beautifully chaotic with a rich history dating back over 1,000 years to the days when mighty sultans ruled over the walled city. Today it is home to an incredibly pulsating energy that invites you to wander aimlessly in search of stunning architecture, a cup of sweet mint tea and maybe a spicy Tagine.
The best way to experience it is to get lost in the claustrophobic labyrinth of streets that comprises the medina – the old historic part of town with high stone walls.
It was night by the time we arrived in the city. We grabbed our bags and shouldered our way through the Saturday evening crowds in search our riad (a type of traditional Moroccan house). Over the next two days we headed out to explore all that Marrakech had to offer. Some of the experiences that stuck out were:
Jemaa El Fnaa
There is no missing this famous square which represents the beating heart of the city. Littered with stalls trying to sell you everything from a fresh fruit juice to a mouthwatering traditional dish. By night the square really comes to life and it makes for brilliant people watching from above as the muezzins call the faithful to prayer.
Constructed in the 12th Century the Koutoubia Mosque with its imposing minaret is the most iconic feature in the city. In fact, it is said it can be seen from 30 km away. Local laws prevent any new building projects from exceeding the height of the minaret.
It is a striking piece of architecture and though only Muslims are permitted to enter it is a breathtaking place to sit and enjoy the warm sunshine on your back.
The mighty gate of Bab Agnaou is one of 19 gates that are found in the Medina. Constructed in the 12th Century by the Almohad Dynasty, this giant horse-shoe shaped archway points south towards sub-saharan Africa. Today the gate is falling into a somewhat poor state of disrepair because of the poor building materials used during its construction but it is definitely worth a peek.
Take a deep breath, then plunge into the exotic maze of streets and passages lined with souks. It’s an explosion of sound, colour and smell. From carpets to spices to antiques – it’s a complete sensory overload.
You will inevitably get lost but don’t panic, you will come out one side or the other, probably with a purchase or two wondering what made you buy them in the first place.
A graveyard of dynasties past that reigned over the golden age of Marrakech. It is an unashamedly opulent tribute to the rule of Sultan Ahmed el Mansour whose life was defined by war, murder and profit.
His rule shaped the city. It became a place forgotten after his death in 1603 only to be rediscovered in 1917 and gradually restored. Today it’s extremely popular with visitors hoping to catch of glimpse into history.
Moroccan leather is famous across the world and there is so much on offer for purchase in the souks. Yet the finished product is a far cry from how it is produced, a process that involves huge amount of pigeon droppings. The only way to find out is to visit one of the traditional tanneries.
Marrakech is a pulsating city. Its busy and chaotic, sometimes charming, sometimes a bit rough around the edges. It is a city like no other, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time spent exploring this vibrant medieval city.
Become an ‘Eco-warrior’ and help the Southern African Conservation Trust (SACT) to educate the less privileged children of Africa by making a small donation towards our Educational Conservation Comics.
The Southern African Conservation Trust has produced various educational comics for rural primary schools located adjacent to national parks or other wildlife protected areas in Southern Africa. The primary function of our conservation comics is to educate our young children on the value of their natural heritage in the area and the value of creating awareness around the species of animals and birds under threat.
The contents of the comics have been carefully researched to provide the children with a range of valuable resources, including:
• cultural value of the individual species of animal for future generations;
A donation of US$1.00 / R10.00 buys one comic book and includes printing and delivery expenses. As an ‘Eco-warrior’ you are helping us to educate the conservationists of tomorrow! All comics are delivered free of charge to the schools within Southern Africa by our business partners DHL EXPRESS.
We value and are grateful for whatever donation you can afford!
Please support our conservation and education program by donating here, and for more information on this project please contact mela@sactrust.org.
What matters to local communities in the Greater Kruger?
In preparing the 10-year management plan for the Kruger National Park last year, SANParks conducted 54 stakeholder engagement workshops, involving over 5,700 participants, with communities neighbouring the reserve and other stakeholders across the country. It is notable that the primary concern of the community members neighbouring Kruger Park was firstly jobs, followed by damage-causing animals.Human-wildlife conflict around the reserve is a concern and involves impacts from species such as elephants and hippos damaging crops and infrastructure, lions and other predators killing livestock, the transmission of diseases like foot-and-mouth disease by buffalo, and threats to human life associated with all of these species.
It is also notable that the stakeholder engagement workshops held in Johannesburg (21 people), Durban (24 people) and Cape Town (11 people) were poorly attended. In contrast, following the hunting of a lion in Umbabat, which is part of the Associated Private Nature Reserves (APNR) and is open to the Kruger Park, last year, there was a huge uproar akin to the controversy that followed the hunting of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe several years ago. This led to a major meeting held in Johannesburg, attended by SANParks, provincial conservation officials and a significant number of members of the public.
Some questions this raises are: where were these predominantly privileged, middle class people when the management plan workshops were being held? Why is the hunting of a single animal so disproportionately more important than the conservation management of the entire reserve?
The evolving story of hunting and sustainable use in the Greater Kruger
Hunting has emerged as an increasingly contentious issue in the APNR, which is open to the Kruger National Park. This against the backdrop of some severe missteps in the wildlife industry, such as some unethical hunting practices and the recent financial bubble associated with the intensive breeding of rare and colour variant species. Such incidents have tarnished the reputation of South Africa’s wildlife industry and have exposed the extreme profit-driven motives of some.
Nevertheless, it is important that we make a clear distinction between responsible and sustainable hunting practices that are properly regulated and policed; and hunting practices that are irresponsible and unsustainable.
Responsible hunting should be considered in its proper perspective and many of the conservation gains made in recent decades in South Africa should not be jeopardised by its exclusion due to the malpractice of some. Sustainable utilisation is central to the philosophy of conservation in South Africa and southern Africa and is a primary driver of its success. It is the reason that 30% of the planet’s white rhino exist on private property in South Africa and it was central to hugely successful initiatives such as the CAMPFIRE programme in Zimbabwe and the massive gains that have been made in recent years in the conservation sector in Namibia through its Community-based Natural Resource Management Programmes.
All of these initiatives enable landowners and communities to gain economic and financial value from their wildlife through sustainable utilisation, which includes all forms of hunting. This contrasts with the recent hunting ban imposed by the Botswana government. In a study undertaken by Mbaiwa (2017) published in the South African Geographical Journal, it was found that following the hunting ban, there was a reduction of benefits to local communities such as “income, employment opportunities, social services, scholarships and income required to make provision of housing for the needy and elderly”. The study also found that the hunting ban “led to the development of negative attitudes by rural residents towards wildlife conservation and the increase of incidents of poaching in Northern Botswana”.
The newly elected Masisi government in Botswana is considering reversing this hunting ban and it is noteworthy that this is being considered in light of restoring accountable democracy and respect for human rights. The inability of rural communities in Botswana to benefit from wildlife and the daily risks they face to their survival and livelihoods from wildlife impacts have been acknowledged, together with an acknowledgement that the provision of rights to rural communities in this regard is to the benefit of wildlife conservation.
In an analysis of this by Madzwamuse and Rihoy (2019), they highlighted that “Addressing the conservation problems in Botswana must start by building understanding and common ground between stakeholders with varying perspectives. At the heart of this must lie recognition of the rights of rural people and from this, alignment can be reached between rural communities, governments and the global conservation community. Recognising these rights would ensure that the benefits and the risks of protecting wildlife are collectively shared, reversing the current situation, which places the burden on marginalised communities and provides benefits to a small elite”.
Recent incidents and the APNR Hunting Protocol
Following several hunting-related incidents in the APNR in 2018, questions have been put to SANParks about hunting in what is perceived as the Kruger National Park. This issue came to a head in a colloquium in parliament, earlier this year, in which SANParks was heavily criticised for hunting in the open system of the Greater Kruger Area and the legitimacy of the cooperative agreement for the Greater Kruger Area, that had been signed at the end of 2018, was questioned.
The incidents highlighted relate to the hunting of the lion in Umbabat and two incidents related to the hunting of elephant in Balule. In the first incident, an elephant bull was shot and was subsequently found to have a tracking collar on. In addition, the APNR Hunting Protocol was breached when it was found that the elephant had been shot in the Mpumalanga section of Balule when the permit had been issued by the Limpopo authorities, meaning that the elephant should have been shot in the Limpopo section of the reserve. Subsequent to this event, the Mpumalanga authorities prosecuted the reserve representative, he pled guilty, and was fined an amount of R100,000 of which R40,000 was paid to Elephants Alive – the research organisation that had collared the elephant, to compensate for the costs of having to replace the collar.
In the second incident, a group of hunters were charged by an elephant, in close proximity to a tourist lodge, and shot and killed the elephant. The incident, which occurred about 800 metres from the lodge was witnessed by visitors at the lodge and was particularly traumatic, as multiple shots were fired at the charging elephant. In this case, although the incident was unfortunate, the hunting party had complied with the APNR Hunting Protocol and were in possession of the correct permits. The incident arose because the hunters felt that the elephant had made a life-threatening charge and they were compelled to shoot it. Following this incident, it was agreed that the hunting protocol needed to be reviewed to avoid a repeat of such incidents in the future.
It must be noted that the reserve management and authorities responded to these incidents by either prosecuting offenders or updating protocols, which underpins efforts to ensure responsible hunting and continual improvement in hunting practices in the APNR.
The APNR as part of the Greater Kruger Area
It is important to put the APNR into context. Although open to the Kruger Park, it encompasses Balule, Thornybush, Timbavati, Umbabat and Klaserie Private Nature Reserves, which collectively make up an area of approximately 250,000 hectares. The APNR is thus equivalent in size to Addo Elephant National Park and Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park combined.
Claims that the animals being hunted in the APNR are Kruger Park animals are thus disingenuous. The size of the APNR means that it is perfectly capable of maintaining large viable populations of species typical to the Lowveld region, including the Big 5. The APNR adds considerably to the area of the open system of the Greater Kruger and contributes significantly to a large landscape-scale conservation initiative that can justifiably be considered among South Africa’s most significant conservation success stories.
In December 2018 a cooperative agreement, under the auspices of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park Treaty, was signed between all protected areas that make up the open system of the Greater Kruger Area, adding another 360,000 hectares to be consistently managed. The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park encompasses protected areas in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa and is one of the most important conservation initiatives in southern Africa.
The cooperative agreement is ground-breaking as it establishes a framework for cooperative management and collaboration between state, privately-owned and communally-owned protected areas. This massively exciting initiative will enable landscape-scale ecosystem management issues to be undertaken in an integrated fashion and it will enable the huge socio-economic value of the Greater Kruger Area to be unlocked.
Importantly, in terms of hunting, the existing APNR hunting protocol will form the basis for a Greater Kruger Area hunting protocol, which will ensure that any hunting that takes place outside of the Kruger Park but in the open system of the Greater Kruger Area, is based on scientifically-determined offtakes, that consider demographics and avoid a focus on large-gene animals (big tuskers for example).
The APNR protocol sets stringent ethical standards for hunting (including sanctions against transgressors) and requires transparency in the expenditure of funds and the flows of income from hunting in the APNR. This sets an industry benchmark for good practice that will have to be followed by all reserves that are open to the Kruger National Park in which hunting may be undertaken.
How can we deliver of the promises of the wildlife economy?
South Africa has set hugely ambitious targets for the development of a national biodiversity and wildlife economy. At a six-week Phakisa known as the Biodiversity Economy Lab, hosted by the Department of Environmental Affairs and the Department of Tourism, the following targets for 2030 emerged: the transfer of 10 million hectares of land to previously disadvantaged individuals, the creation of 60,000 jobs across the value chain, and the development of 4,000 SMMEs (small businesses), owned and operated by previously disadvantaged individuals.
Although the targets are perhaps optimistic, it is commendable that South Africa has acknowledged the role that the wildlife industry can play in the national economy. The wildlife economy has the potential to re-shape our thinking and approach to rural development and land reform in South Africa and it is important to understand how central the Greater Kruger Area already is and will be to this process in the future. Tourism, including hunting, in South Africa, is one of the few economic success stories over the last decade in the face of national and global recessions, and the most iconic tourism destinations in the country are Table Mountain and the Kruger National Park. Kruger Park’s new management plan and the cooperative agreement provide the basis to expand the protected area footprint and drive the wildlife economy in a strategic, integrated and responsible fashion. It must be understood that hunting is an important component of this framework.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN – the international umbrella organisation that represents almost all conservation authorities and NGOs worldwide) supports hunting, stating in its Guiding Principles of Trophy Hunting, “IUCN has long recognised that the wise and sustainable use of wildlife can be consistent with and contribute to conservation, because the social and economic benefits derived from use of species can provide incentives for people to conserve them and their habitats”.
Properly managed, responsible, ethical and sustainable hunting is supported by many conservation NGOs and conservation professionals in South Africa. Opposition to hunting in the APNR does not seem to be considering the broad conservation sector and the rural communities living in the Greater Kruger Area. Because many of the groups opposing hunting are well funded and have strong voices, particularly in social media, their opinions in this debate appear to be disproportionately represented.
This has real consequences for the communities that are affected each day by the impacts of wildlife and it has real consequences for South Africa’s wildlife economy programme and others related to community-based natural resource management. This must be viewed within the context of the major challenges that conservation in South Africa, and Africa generally, face. Most government conservation authorities are massively under-funded but the costs of conservation continue to escalate, particularly associated with priority issues such as rhino security.
The real threats to conservation: habitat loss and fragmentation
Conservation needs to effectively harness every resource that it can to be viable, whether this is ecotourism, hunting, the live sale of wildlife or the production of game meat. We need to understand that hunting is not a threat to conservation, it is one of the solutions, as it provides much needed revenue and the ability to compensate those whose lives and livelihoods are at threat from the presence of large and dangerous wildlife.
The real threats are habitat destruction and fragmentation, ecological degradation from inappropriate land-use practices, invasive alien plant species, climate change and a myriad of other issues. An integrated approach to conservation that incorporates hunting is required to tackle these challenges and secure South Africa’s biodiversity, its species and the ecosystem functions and processes that underpin all life on earth, including our own.
The potential that the hunting controversy around the APNR has to derail the further development of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park and the implementation of its associated cooperative agreement is significant.We cannot afford the fracturing and fragmentation of the open system of the Greater Kruger Area that may result from this. It will set conservation in South Africa back 30 years and may irreparably damage the biodiversity and wildlife economy. Sustainable utilisation is enshrined in South Africa’s Constitution and Protected Areas Act and is central to our conservation philosophy. It is a vital component of our wildlife industry and must be defended if we are to properly unlock its benefits.
In preparation for the 18th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties taking place in May in Sri Lanka (CoP18), an analysis by IUCN and TRAFFIC for each of the proposed amendments to the CITES Appendices has been made available.
The CITES CoP meetings occur roughly every three years and changes to trade rules, through amendments to the Convention’s Appendices, can have profound conservation implications for affected species.
The listing of a species in Appendix I includes species threatened with extinction that are or may be affected by trade, and effectively prevents all commercial international trade.
Species listed in Appendix II are not necessarily threatened with extinction but may become so unless trade in specimens of such species is subject to strict regulation in order to avoid utilisation incompatible with their survival. They can be traded under special permit conditions.
Appendix III is for species which any Party identifies as being subject to regulation within its jurisdiction for the purpose of preventing or restricting exploitation, and as needing the co-operation of other Parties in the control of trade.
Below is the list of proposals that affect species occurring in Africa and along the continent’s coastal waters.
MAMMALS
Wild populations of giraffe have declined by up to 40% in the last 30 years due to habitat loss and poaching
Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis)
• Countries: Central African Republic, Chad, Kenya, Mali, Niger, and Senegal
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
The proposal seeks to place all seven species and subspecies of giraffes (currently unprotected) under the protection of Appendix II. Wild populations of giraffes have declined by up to 40% in the last 30 years due to habitat loss, poaching, and use in trade. While exploitation for trade may not be the primary cause of decline in wild giraffe populations, it nevertheless has an additive effect when combined with the main causes of habitat loss, civil unrest, and poaching for bushmeat.
Listing giraffes under Appendix II will not prohibit trade in the species, but it will require exporting countries to prove that giraffe specimens were legally obtained and that the export is not detrimental to the survival of the species. Additionally, the listing would provide researchers and governments with important data to track the trade in giraffes throughout the world.
If left unprotected and no regulations on trade remains, then the giraffe population will continue to plummet due to over utilisation of their use in the wildlife trade.
Namibia has proposed to transfer its population of white rhino from Appendix I to II, and Eswatini has proposed a measure that would allow international trade in rhino horns for commercial purposes.
Southern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum)
• Country: Eswatini (Swaziland)
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Remove the existing annotation for the population of Eswatini
Eswatini has proposed the removal of the existing annotation on the Appendix II listing of its white rhino population, which would allow international trade in rhinos and their products – including horn and derivatives.
The proposal seeks to allow Eswatini to sell rhino horn from existing stock to licensed retailers in the Far East, plus up to 20 kg per annum, including harvested horn, to those retailers. There is no trophy hunting of white rhino in Eswatini as the rhinos live in Big Game Parks reserves where sport and trophy hunting is not permitted. In addition, Eswatini does not not believe in burning or otherwise destroying valuable resources including rhino horn.
Proceeds from the sale of horn will be utilised by Eswatini’s rhino parks in order to protect the country’s rhino populations against criminal poaching syndicates, as well as provide remuneration of park employees, fund much-needed additional infrastructure and equipment, and provide for sustainable long-term developments. (For further information read here)
Southern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum)
• Country: Namibia
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Transfer the population of Namibia from Appendix I to Appendix II
Namibia has proposed to change the CITES status of their white rhino population from Appendix I to Appendix II , which would allow international trade in live animals and in trophy hunting trophies.
The proposal notes the following rationale behind the request to change to Appendix II:
1) Namibia has an increasing population of white rhinos. The population is secure, with a steady growth rate of 6.7% per annum noted between 2002-2018 (including imports from South Africa). There has been no impact to the growth rate with the current low levels of exports of hunting trophies and live animals. As such, the population does not meet the criteria for inclusion in Appendix I.
2) The transfer will, according to the proposal, not threaten the survival of the species as there are already the necessary control and enforcement measures in place, which have shown to be relatively successful in curbing illegal killing and illegal trade. Trade in live animals will only take place to appropriate and acceptable destinations, therefore allowing Namibia to verify the destination. With the transfer to Appendix II, Namibia will be able to export live animals and hunting trophies to more countries and will increase revenue through sustainable use, and therefore generate much-needed funding for rhino conservation and protection.
With the rhinos currently under Appendix I, Namibia’s ability to generate revenues for conservation has been severely limited. Transferring the population to Appendix II will create access to a far larger market for the animals. (For further information read here)
The elephant has come under the spotlight by a number of African countries in the latest CITES proposals
African elephant (Loxodonta africana)
• Country: Zambia
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Transfer the population of Zambia from Appendix I to Appendix II
Zambia has proposed to transfer the population of African elephants from Appendix I to Appendix II so that it will be allowed to trade in registered, government-owned raw ivory (tusks and pieces) for commercial purposes only to CITES approved trading partners who will not re-export; trade in hunting trophies for non-commercial purposes; and trade in hides and leather goods.
According to TRAFFIC’s assessment, the elephant population in Zambia is not small, does not have a restricted distribution, and appears to have been relatively stable in the last decade. Therefore the population appears not to meet the biological criteria for inclusion in Appendix I. However, they do say that there is a lack of clarity over the intention of the proposal with regard to trade in ivory. Little detail is given on proposed management to ensure that Article IV requirements would be met or of any appropriate enforcement controls in place.
This would be the third time that Zambia has submitted this proposal, after being rejected at CoP12 in 2002 and at CoP15 in 2010.
African elephant (Loxodonta africana)
• Countries: Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Amend annotation 2 for the populations of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe
Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, whose populations of elephants are already on Appendix II, want to weaken existing restrictions on their ability, and that of South Africa whose elephant population is also on Appendix II, to export registered raw ivory to consumer countries.
This raw ivory will be obtained from government-owned stocks excluding seized ivory and ivory of unknown origin.
The proposal to amend annotation 2 also includes allowing the trade in elephant hides, hair and trade in leather goods for commercial or non-commercial purposes for Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and for non-commercial purposes for Zimbabwe.
If accepted, the proposal’s main effect would be to allow exports of registered raw ivory, but without the oversight by the Standing Committee and the Conference of the Parties. Parties would need to be satisfied that Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe are implementing the requirements of the Convention, particularly Article IV, and that the appropriate enforcement controls and compliance with the requirements of the Convention are in place.
CITES has rejected past proposals by Zimbabwe and Namibia to allow ivory trade with looser controls.
African elephant (Loxodonta africana)
• Countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Kenya, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, and Togo
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Transfer the populations of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe from Appendix II to Appendix I
In what could be considered in opposition to the two proposals submitted by Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in regards to relaxing restrictions on the international trade in raw ivory, this proposal looks for tighter controls in order to offer maximum protection under CITES.
However, TRAFFIC has pointed out that the elephant population of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe is not small, nor does it have a restricted range and it is not undergoing a marked decline. Therefore, the elephant population does not meet the biological criteria for inclusion in Appendix I.
If the proposal is accepted, then this would make any future ‘one-off’ ivory sales by the Southern Africa nations extremely difficult.
• Countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Transfer from Appendix II to Appendix I
Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal are proposing to transfer the black-crowned crane from Appendix II to I, to prohibit international trade in the species. The black-crowned crane has been on Appendix II since 1985, but severe declines in certain populations due to live trappings for local domestication and international trade has raised the concerns for future populations.
There is an estimated population of 43,000–70,000 individuals. In 2010, the population was estimated to have declined by 30–49% over three generations (45 years).
Black-crowned cranes are legally protected in Africa but some countries lack resources to control illegal hunters.
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
Grandidier’s Madagascar ground gecko is one of 21 species of Malagasy ground geckos in the genus Paroedura, and is endemic to southern Madagascar. This species is listed as ‘Vulnerable’ and deforestation has caused fragmentation of its habitat. It is widely sought after in the international pet trade, with Madagascar reporting exports of more than 6,000 individuals (wild) between 2013 and 2017. The gecko is protected as a category III species under Madagascar Law 2006-400, which allows for hunting and capture with a license during the hunting season and subsequent export.
The proposal seeks to list the gecko under Appendix II in order to have more control over its trade.
There is no quantitative information on its population size, so it is not possible to determine how the international trade is affecting the current population. TRAFFIC states that with the lack of information available, it cannot say if the species meets the requirements of Appendix II criteria.
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Transfer from Appendix II to Appendix I
Found in the rocky outcrops in Kenya, Tanzania and northern Zambia, the pancake tortoise comes in high demand in the international pet trade – the largest markets being Asia and the USA. The population size in 2001/2002 was estimated at between 4,000–32,000. According to TRAFFIC, recent assessment accepted for publication in the March 2019 Red List update categorises the species as ‘Critically Endangered’ due to observed, estimated and projected population reductions of about 80% over three generations (45 years in total) that will be reached in the next 15 years.
The decline in population is mainly due to the overexploitation in the international pet trade, but also habitation degradation and loss from farming.
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
Both species of Mako sharks (Isurus oxyrinchus and I. paucus) are widely distributed, occurring in tropical ocean waters. Their primary threat is directed and incidental catch in multi-specific fisheries. Their meat and fins are highly valued on both national and international markets. It is hard to identify between the species in the form in which they are traded (ie, meat), so while it is believed that the majority of meat comes from the Isurus oxyrinchus, both species are listed under the CITES proposal.
Research suggests that there is a concern for the decrease in population, based off historical and recent population data. By including the sharks under Appendix II, their regulation of trade will ensure that the harvest of specimens from the wild is not reducing the wild population to a level at which its survival might be threatened by continued harvesting.
• Countries: Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, European Union, Gabon, Gambia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Monaco, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Palau, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Syrian Arab Republic, Togo, and Ukraine
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
The guitarfish species are shark-like batoid species occurring in the coastal waters of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Global population sizes are unknown, but all six species in the family have recently been assessed by IUCN as ‘Critically Endangered’ (to be published July 2019) with estimated declines of greater than 80% over the last three generations having occurred mainly due to over-harvesting.
Their primary threat is unmanaged and unregulated fishing practices. Their meat is mainly utilised locally, however fins from the species have been observed in international trade.
Placing the species under Appendix II will mean a regulation of trade that will ensure that harvest from the wild is not reducing population levels to a point where the species is under threat from continued harvesting.
• Countries: Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, European Union, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, India, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Maldives, Mali, Mexico, Monaco, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Palau, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Togo, and Ukraine
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
The wedgefish species inhabit shallow, inshore continental waters of the east Atlantic, Indian and western Pacific Oceans, often occurring in muddy enclosed bays, in estuaries and on coral reefs. Like the guitarfish species, the wedgefish species are facing similar threats to their population in the form of unsustainable and unregulated fishing throughout their range. Their meat is mainly utilised locally, however fins from the species have been observed in international trade.
Their population size is unknown, but eight out of the ten species were recently assessed by the IUCN as ‘Critically Endangered’ (declines of greater than 80% over the last three generations), with one additional species assessed as ‘Critically Endangered’ (Possibly Extinct) and one as ‘Near Threatened’ (with declines of 20–30% over the last three generations).
Placing the species under Appendix II will mean a regulation of trade that will ensure that harvest from the wild is not reducing population levels to a point where the species is under threat from continued harvesting.
• Countries: European Union, Kenya, Senegal, Seychelles, and United States of America
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
In general, sea cucumbers (of which there are 1,743 species) are targeted by fisheries for international trade, mainly to the Asian markets. Their traded form is known as beche-de-mer, a delicacy prepared from the dried body wall thought to have supposed medicinal properties. The three species listed in the proposal are the Holothuria fuscogilva, H. nobilis and H. whitmaei – commonly referred to as teatfish due to their lateral protrusions. The presence of teats differentiate this group from other sea cucumbers, even in dried form.
Sea cucumber fisheries are not regulated in several countries, although some have employed various measures. Population declines in these three species have been observed from studies in limited areas of their ranges, however fishing pressure is likely over much of their range. According to TRAFFIC, the IUCN Red List assessments have estimated the overall declines as: H. fuscogilva 30–50% since the 1960s, H. nobilis 60–70% in at least 80% of its range, and H. whitmaei 60–90% in the majority of its range.
Regulation of trade is required to ensure that harvest from the wild is not reducing population to a level where survival might be threatened by continued harvest or other influences, hence the proposal to place the species in Appendix II.
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
Malawi has proposed that its national tree, the Mulanje cedar, be listed under Appendix II. The species faces numerous threats, the most serious of which are changing fire regimes, fuelwood collection, illegal logging, invasive tree species and conifer aphids. The IUCN has classified it as ‘Critically Endangered’ on the basis that these threats will cause a decline of more than 80% by 2030.
According to TRAFFIC, this species is considered commercially extinct and there are no mature trees remaining in their natural habitat – the last of them felled by 2018. Seedlings have been planted, but will not mature for many years, which means that trade will not be likely in the near future and therefore listing it under Appendix II will unlikely have any significant conservation impact.
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Amend annotation #5 for Pericopsis elata
Afromosia is a highly valued timber native to Central and West Africa. It is currently listed under Appendix II with the annotation #5 which restricts the listing to “logs, sawn wood and veneer sheets”. However, loop holes have been discovered where traders from range States have been exporting sawn wood with minor, superficial transformations in order to circumvent CITES controls.
The proposal now wants the annotation to be changed so that it includes transformed wood (and plywood), as follows:
“Logs, sawn wood, veneer sheets, plywood, and transformed wood.”
According to TRAFFIC, the intention to include transformed wood (and plywood) to close the observed loophole seems an appropriate amendment and has been supported by the Standing Committee Working Group on Annotations.
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Include in Appendix II
The African padauk is a native African species that is currently listed as ‘Least Concern’ under the IUCN. Its timber is used in the international trade and it has been evidence of an increase in export of timber from some range States. The species population is thought to be declining, though the species is widespread and locally common.
Placing the species under Appendix II would help in the trade and harvest regulations. The current level of harvest for timber is likely to be unsustainable and TRAFFIC believes that this almost certainly exceeds the rate at which harvestable-sized trees are being replenished in the population.
• Recommended proposal in CITES appendices: Amend annotation #4 for Aloe ferox
The bitter aloe is a medicinal plant native to South Africa and Lesotho. It has been listed under Appendix II since 1975. The proposal seeks to amend part f) of annotation #4, so that it includes Aloe ferox as part of the finished product. The current annotation says the following:
All parts and derivatives, except:
a) seeds (including seedpods of Orchidaceae), spores and pollen (including pollinia). The exemption does not apply to seeds from Cactaceae species exported from Mexico, and to seeds from Beccariophoenix madagascariensis and Dypsis decaryi exported from Madagascar;
b) seedling or tissue cultures obtained in vitro, in solid or liquid media, transported in sterile containers;
c) cut flowers of artificially propagated plants;
d) fruits, and parts and derivatives thereof, of naturalized or artificially propagated plants of the genus Vanilla (Orchidaceae) and of the family Cactaceae;
e) stems, flowers, and parts and derivatives thereof, of naturalized or artificially propagated plants of the genera Opuntia subgenus Opuntia and Selenicereus (Cactaceae); and
f) finished products of Euphorbia antisyphilitica packaged and ready for retail trade.
The proposed amendment would say the following:
f) finished products of Aloe ferox and Euphorbia antisyphilitica packaged and ready for retail trade.
This term, as used in the CITES Appendices, refers to product, shipped singly or in bulk, requiring no further processing, packaged, labelled for final use or the retail trade in a state fit for being sold to or used by the general public.
According to TRAFFIC, “South Africa exports large quantities of wild sourced Aloe ferox extract and derivatives, the latter having increased proportionately in recent years apparently due to increased processing of finished products in South Africa. South Africa has said that most of the derivatives they have reported are finished products packaged and ready for retail trade and propose that they be excluded from CITES controls by the proposed amendment to the annotation.”
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are three galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other two galleries for this week’s selection, click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 1 and Weekly Selection Gallery 2.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are three galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other two galleries for this week’s selection, click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 2 and Weekly Selection Gallery 3.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are three galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other two galleries for this week’s selection click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 1 and Weekly Selection Gallery 3.
There is an expression in Afrikaans that goes “so taai soos ‘n ratel” – which translates to “as tough as a honey badger”. Across the continent honey badgers have earned the reputation of being tough, even lending their name to an armoured personnel carrier used by the South African Defence Force. This reputation is in part due to its appearance, that stocky frame and those long powerful claws, but really it is the honey badger’s tenacity that sets it apart from the rest. After all, this is a creature who snacks on honey from the notorious African ‘killer bee’ hives and thinks nothing of eating venomous snakes and even taking on lions.
Simply put, honey badgers are the Chuck Norris’ of the African bushveld.
Honey badgers are easily identified by their striking colouration: jet black with a grey mantle, and a white stripe running from the head down to the base of the tail. The mantle and the stripe may vary in colour and thickness from one individual to the next.
Honey badgers are sexually size-dimorphic, with males at least one-third larger than females. From the shoulder, the honey badger stands at a height of 250 mm high. The males weigh on average 9-16 kg, while females weigh 5-10 kg.
Even though they may be small in stature, honey badgers are built for battle. They have loose-fitting skin, which is 6mm thick around the neck, that protects their vital organs during a brawl and allows them to wriggle out of any grasp and even twist around to bite any assailant silly enough to grab them. They have short, sturdy legs, with five toes on each foot, armed with powerful claws of up to 40mm in length! Their low-slung frame and short legs make them animals of stamina, not speed, and their distinctive jog-trot allows them to relentlessly pursue their prey until it has collapsed with exhaustion.
Honey badgers are territorial and use their anal scent glands to mark their territory. They can turn these glands inside out, and emit a pungent distraction when escaping from predators.
The honey badger (Mellivora capensis) is the only species of the genus Mellivora and belongs to the diverse Mustelid family, which includes eight other badger species, otters, weasels and the wolverine. The name badger was given to the honey badger because of its superficial resemblance to the Eurasian badger, but the two species are not closely related, and the honey badger is the only representative species of a separate subfamily.
As many as 12 honey badger subspecies have been suggested, but intraspecific taxonomy has not yet been sufficiently studied, and no DNA investigation of subspecies has been completed. The suggestion of subspecies based on pelage (fur) colour and pattern is dubious at best as the honey badger’s colour – particularly the grey mantle and white stripe pattern – is highly variable and changes with age.
The honey badger is widely distributed and can be found in a variety of habitats – from dense rain forests and arid deserts to sea level and afro-alpine steppes in the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia. They are found across sub-Saharan Africa from the Western Cape in South Africa through to southern Morocco and south-western Algeria, and across to the Middle East and India.
BEHAVIOUR
While known as being affectionate, protective and involved mothers, honey badgers eke out most of their existence alone. As solitary carnivores, males and females only meet up to mate before again going their separate ways. The males play no part in rearing the young.
They do not have a fixed den, but rather move about their home ranges, usually sleeping in a different self-dug hole every night – though they have also been known to use old aardvark and warthog burrows on occasion. Honey badgers are intelligent creatures who have even been spotted using tools. They are also expert diggers, and it takes them roughly 10 minutes to excavate a burrow in hard ground.
The honey badger is very adaptable; for example, it is naturally diurnal during winter, but if there are humans around, it will adopt nocturnal habits.
In southern Africa, honey badgers do not have a fixed breeding season and kits are born year-round. Honey badgers usually only have one or two kits at a time after a six-month gestation period. Kits are born blind and will stay with their mother for roughly 14 months before going off on their own.
During this long period of dependency, kits need to learn the skills of hunting, climbing and digging from their mother, as these do involve a certain degree of coordination and technique that takes some time to learn.
Despite their ferocious reputation honey badgers are seldom unnecessarily violent. They will defend themselves if attacked, even against buffaloes or lions. When defending itself, the honey badger can produce a booming ‘rattling-roar’ and will rush towards its attacker, rather than away from them. There is a reason why the Guinness Book of Records lists the honey badger as the ‘most fearless animal in the world’…
Honey badgers have an acute sense of smell which helps them to locate their prey, which they catch mainly through digging. While they feed on a wide variety of foods including birds, small mammals, insect larvae, scorpions, lizards, rodents and eggs, their most impressive kill has to be highly venomous snakes such as cobras, puffadders and black mambas. Honey badgers have been known to sleep off the effects of a snake bite, although it is not known whether this would happen if it is bitten by a highly venomous snake species.
Although ground-dwelling, honey badgers are also accomplished climbers and can scamper up a tree to raid bird nests or beehives. Honey badgers have immensely strong jaws, and in sparse regions such as the Karoo they provide for themselves by cracking open tortoise shells and feasting on the meat inside.
There is anecdotal evidence that the honeyguide bird species guide the honey badger to wild beehives by calling and leading the way, so that the honey badger can break open the hive to feast on the honey and bee brood (the eggs, larvae and pupae of honeybees). This symbiotic relationship has been witnessed frequently in the wild, although no scientific study has been conducted to confirm or explain the behaviour.
In what is now often shared folklore, Kruger Park Ranger Stevenson-Hamilton suggested in 1947 that the honey badger would attack the testicles of larger animals, such as buffaloes and wildebeests, letting the animal bleed to death before claiming their prey. It should be noted though that this behaviour has not been reported after Stevenson-Hamilton’s claims.
As tough as they are, honey badgers do have to be on the lookout for natural predators such as lions, leopards, pythons and hyenas. But their greatest adversaries are humans.
Many badgers suffer gruesome fates when they encounter humans, whether it’s being poisoned, gin-trapped or shot by beekeepers, hacked up for traditional medicine or being snared in traps set for black-backed jackal and caracal. Badger-friendly honey has become commonplace in many shops in South Africa, in an attempt to provide a financial incentive to honey farmers to conserve honey badgers – the solutions often being as simple as placing beehives high up, out of the reach of foraging honey badgers.
Another obstacle to the conservation of this unique species is the sheer size of their home range, with males occupying roughly 638 km², and females 138 km². This would mean that the majority of protected reserves are too small to serve as a safe haven for a viable population of honey badgers.
The honey badger is currently listed as ‘Least Concern’ by IUCN, but their population is decreasing. Honey badgers tend to live in low densities, which makes assessing the population harder. Their status has risen to ‘Near Threatened’ in Southern Africa in the past, as well as in Morocco, and they are considered ‘Endangered’ in Niger. In Israel, honey badgers are a protected species.
“While on safari in Linyanti, Botswana a few years ago, I met an Australian couple who were keen to see a honey badger. They had seen lions, leopards, elephants and so many other awesome species, but hilarious YouTube memes about this fantastic survivor had created a strong desire to see one. They spoke of little else during the two days that we shared a game drive vehicle. Alas, they saw no honey badgers during that safari, but in a twist of fate, we saw one on the drive back from the airstrip after having dropped them off for their journey home! Hopefully, they have since had better luck.
“The honey badger is the stuff of myth and legends, one of the true characters of the African bushveld, and a reminder to us all that life is what you make of it, and that it takes character and true grit to beat the odds.” ~ Simon Espley, Africa Geographic CEO
Growing up watching Beverly and Derek Joubert’s documentaries and idolising Jane Goodall, Noelle has always dreamed of living in the bush. For now, she writes about her bush adventures from her home in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a particular soft spot for chacma baboons, and she advocates for these charming primates every chance she gets. By far her favourite adventure has been being a foster mom to an orphan baby baboon.
I was shocked to read about the sudden closure of a well-known luxury safari operation in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. My dismay was not only because I personally know the owners of this wonderful operation and know what a terrible blow this must be to them. It was also not only because of the tragic loss of tourism jobs and potential for safari-goers to share in the incredible wilderness of this part of the Selous in Tanzania. My deepest alarm came from the realisation that the Selous will lose 150,000 hectares of wilderness landscape to alternative land use, and this at the cost of some 2.6 million trees, and an uncountable number of other plants and animals.
To clarify my position, I do not believe that Tanzania should be deprived of the option to solve their electrical supply problems, and I do realise that there are probably many facets to this issue that I am not even aware of. However, this event has once again highlighted the reality of our greatest threat to the survival of wildlife in Africa – the availability of land.
For some years now, I have been arguing for the real imperative that we should all be focused on: To unify the conservation community behind a common goal of preserving wildlife habitats from alternative land uses, and not allowing the fragmentation of interconnected wilderness spaces, as this too reduces the populations of animals that these habitats can support. So, with this imminent loss of land in the Selous fresh in my mind, I came to wondering about how to illustrate again the importance of this imperative.
The relationship between the well-being of wild animal populations and habitat sizes can be found in the many scientific papers that analyse the dramatic decline in various species’ numbers over the last hundred years or so. In this article, I am choosing to focus on the two most iconic examples of such declines – lion and elephant populations.
Please note that this piece is not intended as a scientific paper, it is not peer-reviewed and it does not claim to answer all problems facing African wildlife. Instead, it is aimed at highlighting the almost linear relationship between animal populations and the availability of habitats that those animals have to survive in.
Lion range habitat and population
Let’s begin by looking at lions. In the case of lion, the maps below show the decline in lion range area from the historical full range extent of lions in Africa, to the current picture, which represent about 8% of historical range according to the data published on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (latest assessment dated 20 June 2014).
It is well accepted and widely published that the lion population in Africa has decreased in the last century by 90%. So, comparing these numbers then shows the population reduction mirrors the reduction in range habitat of 92%.
Interestingly, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (2017-3), supports the habitat argument, citing the following threats to lion:
“Habitat loss and conflicts with humans are considered the most significant threats to the species.”
Elephant range habitat and population
Turning to elephants, there was a well-reported drop in elephant numbers from 1979, when the estimated African elephant population stood at 1,3 million, to 2007 where the population had dropped to between 472,000 and 690,000. At best, the population reduction was 47%, while at worst it was as much as 64%. Let’s assume it to be the worst at 64% drop in the elephant population. Since then, there was a further 30% drop in elephant numbers as reported in the Great Elephant Census of 2014.
Let’s then look at the range maps of habitats which supported elephant in 1979, to that of 2007, and then again in 2014. The available range habitats for elephants had reduced by at least 65%, between 1979 and 2007, further dropping by another 30% between 2007 and 2014. There is an astounding correlation between the population drop and the available range habitat data.
Once again, this correlation and habitat threat is underlined in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (2017-3), which states the following primary threats to elephants:
“Currently the most important perceived threat is the loss and fragmentation of habitat caused by ongoing human population expansion and rapid land conversion.”
Future of wilderness landscapes
Closer to home, here in the Greater Kruger, we experience the same land-use pressures that conservationists face all over Africa. A pressing example is the proposed 120-hectare citrus farm development on the border of the Greater Kruger National Park. Today we are awaiting a decision from the authorities on whether this development will be allowed to go ahead. If it does, it will represent another loss to the collective wilderness landscape, and will drive a wedge of agricultural development in between existing protected areas.
If these types of development are allowed to continue, it can lead to the fragmentation of a network of protected areas that has taken many decades to integrate. Whilst we are working hard to maintain and grow the connected Greater Kruger National Park, there are those who do not seem to understand the importance of a large, unfragmented open system.
The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA), of which the Greater Kruger forms an important part, is a visionary network of linked protected areas. It contains approximately 2,000 lions and over 20,000 elephants. Every single one of these animals can call the GLTFCA home because millions of hectares are secured for conservation purposes. If we want to see thriving wildlife populations together with the economic benefits these can bring to local people, we need to unite behind habitats and wise land-use. This means cooperation between private nature reserves, government parks and other types of land-holdings that are compatible with conservation goals.
Getting back to the broader African picture, I am not saying that there are no other pressures on wild animal populations in Africa. Poaching, the bushmeat trade, trade in animal parts and human-wildlife conflict are all factors affecting a seeming onslaught on Africa’s wildlife. Many of these factors are blamed individually for the plummeting numbers of certain species in Africa, and many people take up a call to battle against one, or a number, of these factors.
But, while all of these issues are important, we must not lose sight of the one fundamental truth. Wild animals cannot exist if there is no wilderness habitat for them to live on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Don Scott has over 15 years of experience in the Aerospace Engineering Industry in Africa, Europe and the USA, as well as 15 years in the safari tourism industry. Don’s journey with tourism started in the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve in 2001. Today, Don and his wife, Nina, are the owners of the Tanda Tula safari camps in the Timbavati. Don is deeply involved and dedicated to both community development and conservation through tourism in the region. He sits on the executive committee of the Timbavati as well as on the Greater Kruger National Park task team for Responsible Tourism and Best Practice.
Sleeping lions can make great sketching subjects – especially when they choose to lie out in the open, like this lioness in Botswana’s Chobe National Park. Looking down on an animal can look unnatural in a sketch, but I was far enough away from this lioness that the angle wasn’t a problem.
It took me exactly 5 minutes to create the pencil sketch and I added the watercolour later in the day, from memory and imagination. I also added some vegetation, which makes the finished piece look more natural.
In case you are wondering, I filmed this with a GoPro, attached to my sketchbook with a Jaws Flexclamp.
The nice thing about videoing your sketches is that you can look back and see how you sketched, what you would change, and exactly how long each sketch took.
Want to learn my techniques for sketching animals from life? Then join me on an Africa Geographic Art Safari.
Want a glimpse into an African Art Safari? Have a look at Africa Geographic’s Art Safari video, with Alison Nicholls, below
OPINION FROM ERIK VERREYNNE – LIVESTOCK AND WILDLIFE VETERINARY SURGEON IN BOTSWANA
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
OPINION FROM ERIK VERREYNNE – LIVESTOCK AND WILDLIFE VETERINARY SURGEON IN BOTSWANA
The debate about the proposed lifting of the hunting ban in Botswana continues. It’s not surprising that elephants dominate the debate and that the arguments are based on various perspectives and perceptions. Various solutions are offered and are driven by arguments on lethal versus non-lethal approaches and hunting versus photographic tourism industry sustainability.
What is not acknowledged by many participants, is that this very complex situation is highlighting a very important conundrum facing conservation. The issue is not simply about elephants. The issue is about elephants and people, more precisely wildlife and people.
Human presence close to conservation areas, and the interfaces it creates, is the most important conservation challenge faced in Africa. The best way to illustrate this conundrum is to analyse the situation from a holistic perspective.
Botswana, with some of its neighbours, is facing unique challenges concerning its wildlife. Nearly 17% of Botswana is under Protected Areas, otherwise known as National Parks and Game Reserves. That is more than the 10% stipulated internationally. Very few of these protected areas have any fences and none are fully fenced, allowing wildlife to come and go. An additional 32% of Botswana is designated as Wildlife Management Areas where people and wildlife co-exist in some form or another.
More than 65% of Botswana’s wildlife occurs outside the Protected Areas, in the Wildlife Management Areas(WMAs). Surrounding these WMAs lies the unprotected pastoral and farming areas. Communities reside along the boundaries of Protected Areas or inside and along many WMA boundaries, where they and their livestock must share the resources with wildlife. Subsistence livestock and crop production are the main sources of livelihoods. The land division in Botswana creates a huge spatial overlap between people and wildlife.
The scale of the demographic human-wildlife interface in Botswana is well illustrated by the elephant issue. The elephant range includes most of the Ngamiland District in the west, all of the Chobe District in the north, and parts of the Central District in the east and south. The elephant range in northern Botswana varies from 85,000 km² during the dry season to more than 116,000 km² during the wet season.
According to Dr. Mike Chase (Elephants without Borders), the elephant population in Botswana was estimated at between 116,191 and 136,036 during the dry season of 2018. (In the absence of other published population data, I will refer to those survey results). Only about 23,000 km² (about 20%) of the elephant range falls within the Protected Areas, about 70,000 km² (or 65% of the range) in WMAs and forest reserves, and the rest of the range covers ranches and pastoral areas.
During the aerial survey in 2018, only 20% of the elephants (about 25,222) were counted in the Protected Areas, 57% of the elephants (nearly 72,000 at an estimated density of 1.4 elephant/km²) were counted in WMAs and forest reserves, and 22% (about 27,750 at an estimated density of 1.2-1.3 elephant/km²) were counted in pastoral areas and on ranches.
The elephants have taken semi-permanent residency in these areas and may only move during the rainy season. In theory, this means that, if elephants and people were evenly spread, there would be a high probability of an elephant within 600m from a person at any given time in the pastoral and farming areas. In reality, both settlements and human activities overlap with elephant concentrations where common resources like water are shared.
Significantly, nearly half of Southern Africa’s elephants were counted during the survey in an area as big as South Carolina or Portugal. From another perspective, more than 5% of the total estimated population of elephants in Africa was counted only in the small section of pastoral areas in Botswana demarcated solely for agricultural use.
Ngamiland District has a population of about 165,000 people (at a density of 1.5 persons/km²) while Chobe district has a population of about 26,000 people at a density of 1.25 person/km². The 2016 Botswana agricultural report indicated a total of 238,132 cattle and 6,876 ha of subsistence crops on 9,072 holdings in Ngamiland. The dry period aerial count report indicates nearly half the cattle population in Ngamiland shares the landscape with elephants at a cattle density of 1.4/km². Almost all subsistence crops farming in Ngamiland falls within the elephant range.
In 1992, the elephant population was estimated at 55,000 – so the current elephant population is more double what it was about twenty seven years ago. At the same time, the human population has increased, and activities expanded. Botswana is now looking after nearly half the Southern African elephant population in an area of fewer than 100,000 km², and nearly 80% of these elephants share the land with people.
The drivers for human-wildlife conflict are obvious and the price to pay is hefty. The international perception that Botswana is one big wilderness is skewed and as such creates a skewed expectation about wildlife and people.With a total human population of fewer than 2,5 million people, the argument that there are too many people is invalid. The situation clearly illustrates how expectations based on wrong perceptions can drive arguments and solutions. Many do not want to accept there is a crisis in Botswana because they downplay the human component and expect one big game reserve.
The current debate focuses much on numbers and asks whether Botswana has too many elephants. That inevitably leads to the question on the limits of Botswana’s international responsibility towards elephant conservation. There is no doubt that elephant numbers internationally are under pressure. There is also no doubt that elephants play an important role in modifying landscapes, and should be conserved.
Acceptable densities of elephants in different landscapes and thresholds for management vary and the impact on vegetation is more important than the numbers. Even though the vegetation impact in certain areas looks severe, the population density in Botswana is within the acceptable limits of 2-3 elephant/km² – the elephant density according to the 2018 survey averages about 1.22 elephant/km² across the range in Botswana.
But again, range and impact can be misleading:
Firstly, the range is artificial, as 22% of the elephant range in Botswana is not intended for wildlife.
Secondly and more importantly, is the issue of the impact of elephants on the ecology, and ecosystem resilience to recover or change – where the land is subject to differing uses. These issues (elephant impact and ecosystem resilience) differ when people, livestock and elephants share the same landscape. Impacts where there are spatial overlaps between people, livestock and elephants are likely to be more severe and the ecosystem will recover more slowly.Acceptable density thresholds of elephants in those areas should, therefore, be less than they are in ecosystems with little or no overlap between people, livestock and elephants.
Furthermore, when acceptable elephant densities are determined, the impacts on people and livelihoods are of paramount importance – yet are being ignored.Management objectives of areas shared by people and livestock also consider human needs and are likely to be less considerate of the long-term ecological benefits that might be brought about by elephant landscape changes. In other words, in these areas, there is of necessity a bias towards human needs, and tolerance of elephants is reduced.
In a country that has already set aside nearly half of its surface area for some form of wildlife conservation, the levels of crop damage, livestock losses and damage to infrastructure in areas that have been zoned mainly for human use, clearly indicates that the threshold of acceptable damage by wildlife has been exceeded in those areas.
From a pristine ecological perspective, the answer about elephant numbers in Botswana may be that the status quo is acceptable. From a human-wildlife conflict perspective, however, it is safe to conclude that Botswana has too many elephants in some land use areas. Management interventions that aim to decrease the elephant densities in the specific areas and preventing influx into more densely populated areas are therefore justified.
That raises another challenge facing Botswana.
The international conservation status of a very charismatic and iconic species dictates the limits of accepted wildlife management practices available to resolve the problem.
Elephant conservation has increased in profile due to rampant poaching, and management options tend to focus on increasing elephant numbers by increasing safety from poaching and avoiding losses. Methods to control populations are accordingly not considered anymore.
Where elephant numbers have dropped significantly in some countries due to rampant poaching, numbers in Botswana have increased to unacceptable levels in certain land use areas. The human-elephant conflict in Botswana requires a critical evaluation of current elephant conservation measures. The success rate of many of the options are hailed as high, but when measured considering people as part of the landscape the success rate becomes questionable and threatens the sustainability of the management activity.
Corridors inside countries and across international borders are a much-promoted solution for natural dispersal of elephants from high density to low-density populations. The corridors are established to allow dispersal while avoiding human conflict, and as a result, human development has to be reduced in these corridors.
The establishment of the KAZA TFCA to accommodate the redistribution of the estimated 230,000 elephants in five Southern African range states is considered a milestone in elephant conservation. Despite media reports of a big influx of elephants into Botswana as a safe haven and movement between Botswana and its northern neighbours, the most recent aerial surveys do not support the expected movement north into the KAZA TFCA.
According to EWB reports, the elephant population has been stable since 2010 and instead of moving north to an area of lower densities, elephants in Botswana are moving south and deeper into human-populated areas, despite the presence of fences. Does this imply the various range states have reached their saturated densities or does that mean the corridors have been selected incorrectly and are failing?
Whatever the reason, the conundrum faced is that the current solution to Botswana’s elephant problem is currently not working, and an unsustainable number of elephants are sharing the land with people, and Botswana is running out of time.
Reducing elephant numbers
Translocation of elephants is under consideration, but enormous costs involved in relocating large numbers of elephant is likely the reason, despite invitations and donations, that no elephants have been relocated out of Botswana. The number of elephants that would have to be relocated from Botswana to make a difference in areas of conflict with people amounts to many thousands, which would be impractical. As such the potential benefit of relocation is limited for Botswana, and more beneficial in establishing new populations in previous range states stable enough to control poaching.
The potential use of contraception in elephants in Botswana is also considered, but contraception is a long-term management tool to be used to reduce population growth in smaller populations in selected areas. It will not provide immediate solutions to the current challenges.
That leaves the coexistence of humans and wildlife, and the concept of sustainable utilisation. Coexistence remains the most important strategy when the major conservation challenge of lack of new conservation land and increased pressure on existing Protected Areas. Many NGOs in Botswana are doing sterling work in finding ways to promote peaceful coexistence. Coexistence, however, has some limitations because it requires the cooperation of both people and elephants, and the former is value-based. Coexistence is determined by “how” and “how much” people can benefit from the coexistence. The elephant crisis in Botswana illustrates the limitation very effectively.
Coexistence in wildlife management areas where most of Botswana’s elephants occur has actually been in place for many years. Although education has resolved some human resistance, the increased number of elephants in recent years has diluted the perceived limited benefits and reduced community cooperation. The communities now demand and support the lifting of the hunting ban. For coexistence to be restored in these areas, human resistance has to be reduced, by reducing elephant densities or increasing tangible benefits for the local people.
Tangible benefits through tourism income can provide the lion’s share of benefits, but protein provision and trophy hunting income must be considered to restore lost cooperation. Tourism-based incentives on their own have proved to be insufficient – partially because thresholds of impact were based on elephant needs and partially because the benefits to communities did not increase as elephant numbers and impacts increased.
Coexistence in pastoral areas and livestock ranches presents the biggest conservation dilemma for Botswana and illustrates the limits of coexistence.
By marketing “wilderness”, we have created an expectation with eco-tourists who do not want to see rural people and livestock while on safari. That excludes a major source of benefit that would promote coexistence in pastoral areas. As a result, the priority of coexistence in the pastoral and ranching areas is strongly biased towards protecting people and their livelihoods against elephant damage. In short, local people view their own existence and livelihoods as a priority and consider coexistence as unnecessary because localised tangible benefits from elephants are perceived as non-existent. Rather, they demand total protection from elephants or removal of elephants.
The sheer number of elephants “coexisting” in the affected pastoral areas renders total protection a very difficult and expensive process that becomes difficult to justify from a taxpayer’s perspective. The use of bees, flashing lights and chilli pepper in various forms have been trialled with various degrees of success and while it may work in some areas, it did not work in others.Unless we can educate the international tourist that an Africa with people, livestock, crops and wildlife is worth a paying visit, consumptive-based benefits to promote co-existence in pastoral areas will remain the reality.
Where do you draw the line? Elephants will expand their range if allowed to. As witnessed in Botswana, they inevitably reach more developed areas with higher income-generating activities. Tourism and hunting do not provide sufficient benefits to promote coexistence, and so a problem-animal control culling program needs to be instigated – to protect people and property. The only way to prevent large scale bloodshed is to prevent elephants from entering these areas. That introduces the option of fences.
Botswana is very aware of the intrinsic value and international conservation responsibility towards elephant conservation. The growth of the elephant population testifies to that. But the elephant problem faced needs to be acknowledged. While Botswana is accommodating a significant population of elephants in large Protected Areas, most Botswana elephants are outside these protected areas, sharing the land with people at densities that put enormous strain on resources.
People are part of the equation and should be part of the solution. That includes adapting our management objectives and impact assessment to accommodate the needs and impacts of local communities, which will naturally require limits on densities and dispersal. A common tendency as part of opposing arguments is to attribute community concerns to manipulation by stakeholder groups, mostly because the opposing stakeholders fear the community concerns may contradict more idealistic solutions. Another strategy is to blame it on political manipulation. Unfortunately, these tactics do not provide solutions but remove the focus from the real community concerns and limit the painful dissection needed to prevent crisis management from overriding much needed lasting practical solutions.
Resolving the challenges will require a combination of solutions and critical assessment of current approaches. It will require accepting that where people and wildlife are sharing the landscape, the needs of communities are important in wildlife management objectives.
A solution will require an acceptance of the concept of limits and barriers, and that coexistence is value-based and depends on tangible human benefits correlated to sacrifices. It will require acceptance that benefits in some areas cannot be provided by photographic tourism only.
It is therefore justified to consider consumptive-based benefits. It will have to address the contradiction and challenges the unequal distribution of an internationally desired species can cause.
After all, Botswana is much more than simply elephants.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are three galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other two galleries for this week’s selection click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 2 and Weekly Selection Gallery 3.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are three galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other two galleries for this week’s selection, click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 1 and Weekly Selection Gallery 2.
Our Photographer of the Year 2019 is now in full swing and there is only a month left to go before entries close!
There are three galleries showcasing this week’s Weekly Selection. To see the other two galleries for this week’s selection, click here:Weekly Selection Gallery 1 and Weekly Selection Gallery 3.
Identifying elephants is one of Elephants Alive’s four main research angles and helps us to understand population dynamics and factors influencing elephant movements. Identifying elephants depends on looking at vital physical characteristics which differ between individuals. e.g. body size and shape, tusk configuration and ear features, such as notches, tears and holes.
Unfortunately, there are still a lot of elephants out there with very few notches and holes in their ears, especially younger individuals, which makes them much harder to identify. It’s then a case of finding other clues to their identity, such as the veins on their ears, or body scars.
Based on the photographs collected in the field, identikits of each individual elephant are drawn, detailing their unique physical features. And using these, we can then identify the individuals we see in the field.
Identifying individuals is incredibly essential and enables us to investigate questions with a high level of detail, e.g. documenting the influence of life-history effects such as adolescence or dispersal, or the impact of social relationships.
For example, we can use ID studies to build a picture of a population’s social network by observing who spends time with whom, allowing us to detail the number and strength of connections held by different individuals. Such studies on elephants in the past have highlighted the importance of matriarchs in family units and older mentors in bachelor groups (more specifics regarding these individuals below).
Social benefits can be an important driver of elephant movements, something which Elephants Alive also has a very rich data set on, having collared close to 100 elephants in approximately 140 collaring operations.
ID studies provide a great base layer over which a considerable number of other methods can be layered, enabling us to investigate everything from DNA to population dynamics. For example, by combining ID data with genetics, we can investigate the kinship structure of populations, paternity success, and assess whether related individuals have stronger bonds.
By combining ID data with personality assessments or hormonal analysis, we can start to understand how different personality types behave and interact, and investigate which individuals are most affected by stress. We can even use ID data to run mark-recapture studies for detailed population estimates.
When thinking of specific individual types in elephant society who have pivotal roles, matriarchs and older bulls spring to mind.
Matriarchs
• Matriarchs have a crucial role in elephant societies. With age comes experience and a vast accumulation of social and ecological knowledge including knowledge of their surroundings, such as the availability of food and water in periods of drought, safe migratory routes, and predatory threats.
• Individuals in elephant groups benefit immensely from the influence of an older leader who can make crucial decisions about predatory danger. Playback experiments in Amboseli found that groups with older matriarchs responded more appropriately to predatory threat (male lion roars) than groups with younger matriarchs (McComb et al. 2011).
• Matriarchs have superior spatial memory of migratory routes and water- or resource-rich areas which translates to better survival of offspring. In Amboseli, calves with more experienced mothers were better able to overcome periods of stress, especially regarding food shortages (Moss et al. 2011).
• Family units show complex social ties, but it is the older females who are critical members of the network, being the most well-connected and influential. Poaching targets older individuals for their larger ivory, with the consequence that many family groups suffer the loss of their matriarchs. Socially, elephants have proven to be remarkably resilient to poaching, with daughters taking up their mother’s social roles (Goldenberg et al. 2016). If an individual’s mother was highly social and died, the offspring also tended to be highly social.
• Traditionally females are viewed as repositories of knowledge, but we now know that older, dominant bulls are also incredibly important for a well-functioning elephant society.
• Older bulls are of great importance with regards to suppressing musth and abnormal/aggressive behaviour in younger bulls (Slotow & van Dyk 2001). Their presence helps to maintain social stability and behavioural norms.
• Older bulls are vital members of a population’s social network. Older bulls are socially well-connected, interacting often and with many others. This indicates a high level of influence and leadership potential and demonstrates their importance as information sources for others (Chiyo et al. 2011).
• Genetically, older bulls are also disproportionately important. Male reproductive dominance is determined by size, and size by age as elephant bulls grow throughout their life. Females prefer to mate with older bulls, and older bulls have more paternity success than younger males, with the number of calves fathered at a given age peaking between 45 and 53 years old (Hollister-Smith et al. 2007).
• Chiyo, Patrick I., et al. (2011) Association patterns of African elephants in all-male groups: the role of age and genetic relatedness. Animal Behaviour 81.6: 1093-1099
• Goldenberg, Shifra Z., Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and George Wittemyer (2016) Vertical transmission of social roles drives resilience to poaching in elephant networks. Current Biology 26.1: 75-79
• Hollister-Smith, Julie A., et al. (2007) Age, musth and paternity success in wild male African elephants, Loxodonta africana. Animal Behaviour 74.2: 287-296
• McComb, Karen, et al. (2011) Leadership in elephants: the adaptive value of age. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278.1722: 3270-3276
• McComb, Karen, et al. (2001) Matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge in African elephants. Science 292.5516: 491-494
• Moss, Cynthia J., Harvey Croze, and Phyllis C. Lee, eds. (2011) The Amboseli elephants: a long-term perspective on a long-lived mammal. University of Chicago Press
• Slotow, Rob, and Gus van Dyk. (2001) Role of delinquent young “orphan” male elephants in high mortality of white rhinoceros in Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa. Koedoe 44.1: 85-94
Three years ago illegal logging in Malawi’s Dzalanyama Forest Reserve became so rampant that army forces were deployed to the site to protect the trees. Although politicians have since taken action to address the deforestation crisis, the continued devastation of trees across the country has led some to call for the soldiers to return.
Militarising Malawi’s forests may sound like a drastic measure, but the truth is that the country is at a tipping point. At current rates of deforestation, Malawi could be stripped of all trees by as early as 2079. One of the major drivers of deforestation is Malawi’s dependence on wood for meeting its energy needs, given that 89% of Malawians don’t have access to electricity. Illegal cutting of trees on a commercial scale is fuelled by both a growing urban demand for charcoal within Malawi and an international demand for hardwoods.
Rapid deforestation triggers a dangerous domino effect, leading to potentially catastrophic impacts on wildlife, biodiversity, ecosystems and weather patterns. The tragic fatalities as a result of recent flooding in southern Malawi is a stark reminder that land degradation can literally be a matter of life and death.
Putting the nation’s woodland under military protection is clearly not a long-term solution to this crisis. If we are to preserve the country’s most precious natural resource, the Government – and other stakeholders – must take a more progressive approach.
Initial signs are positive. Building on the success of its pioneering work to address the illegal wildlife trade, the Government is now turning its attention to wider conservation challenges, including deforestation. The National Charcoal Strategy is promoting alternative sources of cooking fuels, while a new Forestry Bill is expected to pass this year that will bolster regulatory mechanisms for the protection of forests and introduce stiffer penalties for perpetrators of forest crimes. Much of this work has been driven by the Malawian Parliamentary Conservation Caucus, of which Lilongwe Wildlife Trust is Secretariat. It is hugely encouraging to see that high-level political commitment to this issue cuts across party lines.
But political will and legislative reform is only part of the picture. Progress also depends on changing hearts and minds at the community level.
The theme of today’s International Day of Forests – ‘Learn to Love Forests’ – captures this point perfectly. The fact is that people protect what they value, which means that legal and political interventions to address deforestation must go hand-in-hand with targeted education and communications campaigns.
Instead of stationing troops in protected areas, we must build a national army of citizen-custodians who understand the significance of protecting trees and are empowered to live more sustainably within their environment.
This is precisely why we are working in collaboration with the Government and UN Environment to design an ambitious national campaign that will drive more sustainable environmental practices. As a first step, we are conducting research into people’s attitudes and behaviours in relation to nature. We want to understand how people feel and relate to natural resources like trees so that we can identify crucial levers and barriers to changing behaviours.
As part of this work, we will also develop an ‘ecological consciousness score’ that will serve as a powerful tool for measuring attitudinal change, and has the potential for use in other contexts and geographies beyond Malawi.
As ever, there is no silver bullet when it comes to curbing widespread ecological loss. On a political level, every government department has a role to play in restoring Malawi’s woodlands, from agriculture, water and electricity to finance, industry and infrastructure. But if we want to amplify impact from high-level decision-makers, we also need to engage people in across Malawi to take a more active role in fighting for their country’s natural capital.
Press release written by Louise De Waal and Blood Lions
The Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) has proposed that the Captive Lion Breeding (CLB) industry should continue as long as it is properly regulated and appropriate legislation introduced
This ignores the PCEA resolutions from the two-day Parliamentary Colloquium on CLB in August 2018, which included the resolution (9.1) specifying that the “DEA should as a matter of urgency initiate a policy and legislative review of CBL for hunting and lion bone trade with a view of putting an end to this practice.” This Resolution was subsequently adopted by parliament making it a Parliamentary Resolution.
Currently, South Africa is holding between 9,000-12,000 lions in captivity, in approximately 300 facilities for a number of commercial purposes, including canned hunting, breeding and the lion bone trade.
In a shocking reversal of the overwhelming condemnation of CLB expressed during the August Colloquium by a wide range of conservation and welfare experts and forcefully endorsed in the PCEA report thereon, DEA merely reiterated the same tired justifications for CLB as if the Colloquium had never taken place.
During last week’s meeting, DEA reported that of the 227 breeding facilities inspected in the Free State, Limpopo, North West and Eastern Cape, nearly 40% (88 facilities) were non-compliant with, among others, the Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) Regulations.
In the Free State of the 111 facilities inspected, 62 were found to be in non-compliance with TOPS Regulations. Most facilities were also found to be operating with expired permits. All permits were however renewed without providing reasons for renewal.
DEA further reported (incorrectly) that activities involving petting and walking with big cats are not allowed in the Free State and Western Cape, and therefore no permits were issued to facilities to conduct such activities. However, there are many facilities in both provinces that offer these exploitative activities to thousands of tourists and volunteers.
The committee appeared unconcerned that these activities are taking place without or with inadequate regulation in the North West, Limpopo and Gauteng. DEA has only four inspectors to cover the entire country and admitted they were under-resourced.
DEA inspections are only TOPS compliance checks in conjunction with provincial authorities and DEA inspectors are not trained to carry out welfare inspections. The NSPCA is the sole organisation mandated to carry out welfare inspections however neither the NSPCA nor PCEA has been able to obtain a full list of CLB facilities from DEA.
On 25 February 2019, the Minister announced the formation of a High-Level Panel to review the existing policies, legislation and practices related to the management, breeding, hunting, trade and handling of elephant, lion, leopard and rhinoceros. There has however been no public consultation on the Terms of Reference of the panel and membership is restricted to those with experience of Sustainable Utilisation. From the PCEA chair’s closing remarks, it seems certain that this panel will review the Resolutions of the PCEA Colloquium Report.
Blood Lions, a leading organisation that works to end the captive lion breeding, canned hunting and lion bone trade industries in South Africa, is deeply concerned by the outcome of the recent briefing.
“DEA’s recommendation to regulate an industry which has been thriving for over 20 years already, under so called ‘governance’, is proof of ineffective legislation and poor regulation. Leading global conservation and scientific authorities state that the captive predator breeding industry has no conservation value whatsoever, and in fact flouts internationally accepted ethical and welfare protocols.”
Blood Lions urges DEA to follow the sound resolutions made in the PCEA Colloquium report, which included this vital statement advising DEA to “urgently initiate a policy and legislative review of the captive breeding of lions for hunting and the lion bone trade with a view to putting an end to this practice”.
Press release from University of Pretoria/Sea Search – Namibian Dolphin Project
Research led by scientists at the Namibian Dolphin Project has shed light on a new level of complexity communication amongst dolphins. This research, conducted by Morgan J. Martin, a PhD candidate from the University of Pretoria has found that the small Heaviside’s dolphins (Cephalorhynchus heavisidii) selectively switch between high frequency, echolocation clicks (i.e. biosonar) used to navigate and search for prey, and lower frequency clicks that comprise communication sounds which help to maintain their highly social lifestyle.
Further, unique patterns were found within some communication sounds which leads scientists to believe that these dolphins have developed a more sophisticated way to communicate messages or emotion. Also, Heaviside’s dolphins appear to decrease the number of sounds they produce when in larger groups, potentially as a means to control the noise level and improve communication across the group.
About Heaviside’s dolphins
Heaviside’s dolphins are only found in the Benguela Ecosystem along the west coast of southern Africa and range from southern Angola to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. They are found in shallow waters along the coast and are one of the smallest dolphin species on Earth (< 1.7 m long).
“Heaviside’s dolphins are a poorly understood species, and we are working to collect as much baseline information as possible on their numbers and behaviour,” says Dr Simon Elwen, a marine mammal expert at the University of Pretoria and director of the Namibian Dolphin Project.
What we know about sound use in Heaviside’s dolphins
All dolphins use sound to find objects in their environment, such as fish. This process, called echolocation, involves the animal producing a sonar pulse, commonly termed a ‘click’, which hits a target, producing an echo which the animal hears and processes, effectively ‘seeing the world with sound’. Most dolphins echolocate with clicks which cover a range of frequencies, from around 10 kHz to 200 kHz; however, Heaviside’s dolphins are one of 13 species that have shifted their echolocation signals to occur only in an incredibly high and narrow frequency band around 130 kHz (almost seven times higher than the 20 kHz upper limit of human hearing).
Also, most dolphins also use other sounds, such as lower frequency whistles, to communicate over long distances; however, these 13 species do not produce whistles for communication. These acoustic adaptations are thought to reflect a type of acoustic crypsis, meaning that these adaptations decrease the dolphins’ risk of being overheard by predatory killer whales.
The current study links specific sounds produced underwater by Heaviside’s dolphins with their surface behaviours to understand the function of different sounds, including social signals.
“Although we can’t see what the dolphins are doing underwater, their surface behaviour is often used to interpret what is happening below the surface. By combining acoustic recordings of the dolphins underwater with the simultaneous behaviours observed at the surface, we can piece together a vocal repertoire of the types and functions of sounds these dolphins can produce,” says Dr Tess Gridley, a co-author on this study (based at the University of Cape Town).
This research has shown that the lower frequency sounds discovered are indeed used for communication, but Martin emphasises that there’s still much more to learn, “These dolphins communicate by emitting bursts of clicks very rapidly (more than 500 clicks per second) at highly varying repetition rates. We don’t yet know what information they can encode when they produce these sounds, but it appears they have a more complex communication system than previously understood.”
Imagine a potential form of dolphin Morse code where dolphins emit clicks in specific patterns or series, to communicate something specific like their emotional state. Unique patterns of communication sounds were paired with some particular dolphin behaviours seen at the surface including aerial leaping, backflipping, mating and tail slapping the water’s surface. So, they might be using this dolphin Morse code to tell group members what they are doing or that they are excited.
Also, the team investigated how the number of sounds produced by a group changes with increasing group sizes. Heaviside’s dolphins reduce the number of communication sounds produced when in large groups. This might be to keep them from ‘talking’ over each other and would help improve communication across the group.
This study has increased our understanding of the function of different Heaviside’s dolphin sounds as well as shed light on how this species mediates communication in groups.
Full report: Morgan J. Martin, Simon H. Elwen, Reshma Kassanjee, Tess Gridley (2019). To buzz or burst-pulse? The functional role of Heaviside’s dolphin, Cephalorhynchus heavisidii, rapidly pulsed signals. Animal Behaviour.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2019.01.007
The authors gratefully acknowledge research funding by the University of Pretoria, a United States Fulbright Research Fellowship, a National Geographic Society grant in conjunction with the Waiit Foundation, the Claude Leon Foundation and the National Research Foundation.
OPINION POST FROM CLARE DOOLAN – TOURISM INDUSTRY PRODUCT AND SALES MANAGER
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
OPINION POST FROM CLARE DOOLAN – TOURISM INDUSTRY PRODUCT AND SALES MANAGER
So you’ve been reading the press. Looks bad, doesn’t it? Botswana wants to shoot elephants for money they say. Not just that, but ideas for managing Botswana’s elephant population include packaging them up for pet food.
The easy reaction is a horror-filled “how COULD you?!” Petitions do the rounds, while people ‘act now’ by stating their sadness on social media. But IS this action? Can signing a petition improve the livelihoods of communities living with wildlife, while gaining none of its benefits?
If it pays, it stays
Read any argument about why hunting isn’t ‘necessary’ and people will point to photographic safaris. “Look,” they’ll say, “this is a great alternative which doesn’t put a bullet between an animal’s eyes.”
But, is it?
While I can’t claim to be a scientist with easy solutions to Botswana’s human-wildlife conflict problems, what I do know a bit about, is tourism.
As the Marketing Manager for one of Botswana’s larger tourism operators, I spend most of my days either promoting travel to Botswana or travelling in Botswana. I love Botswana so much that I made it my home. Put me in front of a breeding herd of elephants and I’ll stay all day. Elephants are ALWAYS doing something interesting, and I’m guilty of adding running commentary to their antics, at the risk of being considered insane.
Now, over to my day job, when I’m standing in the office of a tour operator on another continent, who’s selling travel to Africa. When I make these visits, my intentions are twofold. Firstly, help people understand what Botswana has to offer as a destination. Then, recommend safari camps, areas and experiences which make the best Tinder match with their client book.
“And the game viewing. Is it good there?” they’ll ask.
Yes, photographic tourism is a great income earner. It puts value on the land wildlife inhabits, just by letting the animals stay there. No need to plough a field and grow a crop, or bring in a gun and a taxidermist. We just need to build a safari camp, and the money will pour in. Or will it?
People often blame hunters for being ‘consumptive’ when they visit wilderness areas. In order for them to be happy, an animal needs to be shot, stuffed and hung on the nearest wall – or so the feeling goes. But photographic clients also come with their own demands. Before they’ll get on the plane, they want the Africa they visit to match the Africa of their dreams. Unspoilt. Filled with wildlife and worthy of dinner table brags, like “that time a lion stared us down, not five feet away” and then, “pass the potatoes please. We can recommend a great safari outfitter after dessert”.
But, in order for the story to be told, the lion needs to be seen.
And so, those of us selling travel to Africa focus on offering the most remote, unspoilt safari possible, with the best-bet of seeing the most of whatever is out there. These travellers may not want a buffalo head to take home, but they sure as hell need a stack of ‘insta-worthy’ photos as their bounty. Lots and lots of photos.
Where the wild things are, but the tourists aren’t
Elephants Without Borders’ recent aerial survey reports that only 20% of our elephants are in Botswana’s national parks (including Moremi Game Reserve). Another 57% are in Wildlife Management Areas and Forest Reserves, including not just the private concessions of the Okavango Delta and Linyanti, but also ex-hunting concessions which aren’t currently earning a tourism revenue.
By contrast, 22% of our elephants (more than what’s in our national parks) are in pastoral or other unprotected areas (Chase et al, 2018), where communities are in conflict with wildlife, and tourism doesn’t improve their livelihoods.
So why don’t we build safari camps in all these other areas, and spread the love a little further?
Sadly, the photographic traveller is often just too fickle.
The camps which make the most income from photographic safaris, are those which maintain the dream of unspoilt Africa: scenically pretty, full of wildlife, and far from villages and people living with human-wildlife conflict. An Africa which, for the most part, doesn’t actually exist: so, can only be found in very few places.
Send a traveller with a $3,000 a night budget to Ngwasha & Sepako, which have a combined count of 12,728 elephants (Mike et al, 2018) and they’ll demand a refund.
I mean, who’s ever heard of those places, right?! Certainly not the friends who’ll be at your next dinner party. So, we’ll stick with Mombo thanks. (Moremi Game Reserve, where you’ll find Mombo, has 8,402 elephants by comparison.)
An area may host 12,000 elephants, but if its densely vegetated, you won’t easily see them. Further, if water is only seasonally-available for wildlife, animals will often just be ‘passing through’, rather than hanging around for months on end. This is why so many of Botswana’s safari camps are based near permanent water instead.
So, back to that question:
“And the game viewing? Is it good there?”
The answer is often no.
So, forget bragging at the next dinner party. But will a hunter go there? The answer is yes.
Our tourism model is broken, how can we fix it?
Forget relying on the two percenters who grace Botswana’s high-end safari camps to form the sum total of our tourism income. Most travellers can’t afford a USD$3,500 a night holiday anyway. If we want to increase tourism’s earning potential, get more people experiencing Botswana, and have more Batswana earning from tourism, we need to get more creative.
Those of us selling travel to Africa need to reframe the way we present it. We need to stop teaching travellers that Botswana is pristine wilderness and wildlife, or nothing at all. We need to encourage people to learn about human-wildlife conflict, and donate to organisations trialling mitigation techniques with communities (try Elephants Without Borders, Ecoexist or Elephants for Africa).
After all, people have co-existed with wildlife longer in Africa than anywhere else on Earth.
For those of you travelling to Botswana: seek out experiences beyond the straight-up safari. Support Batswana who offer unique ways of introducing you to Botswana, regardless of whether it includes wildlife or not.
Those of us operating tourism businesses need to do better than just peddling animal spotting from the back of a vehicle. We need to create tourism experiences around villages and towns, and take the pressure off our wilderness areas. They’ll be cheaper to run, easier to access, and more affordable for the ‘average’ traveller. Smaller overheads mean greater opportunity for a more diverse ownership – including Botswana’s own citizens.
In the meanwhile, I’ll be promoting what I love about Botswana more than ever. This is not the end of a conversation, but the start of an opportunity to diversify how people experience Botswana, and to create more opportunities for Botswana to show off her heritage to the world.
Travel in Africa is about knowing when and where to go, and with whom. A few weeks too early / late and a few kilometres off course and you could miss the greatest show on Earth. And wouldn’t that be a pity? Search for your ideal safari here, or contact an Africa Geographic safari consultant to plan your dream vacation.
Press release by NEAT – Namibian Environmental Awareness Training
Namibian Environmental Awareness Training (NEAT) has just launched a three-month research project in the Kunene region in northwest Namibia to understand the relationship and interactions between rural communities and the regions’ iconic nature and wildlife. This study will allow NEAT to develop tailored environmental education programmes for schools and communities, to empower them to actively engage in and benefit from nature conservation.
The Kunene region is one of Namibia’s last wildernesses and home to rare desert-adapted elephants, rhinos and lions, as well as numerous other endangered species.
Himba, Herero, Damara, San people and many other indigenous communities also live in the region, often in remote villages and in direct contact with nature and wild animals.
Rural livelihoods often depend on natural resources and are affected by human-wildlife conflict or environmental disasters such as droughts. Wildlife populations are also under pressure, facing threats from habitat loss and illegal poaching.
NEAT’s research and education programme will address these issues together, recognising that human prosperity and biodiversity conservation are inextricably linked.
NEAT started the research study on Sunday, 3rd March 2019. Over the coming three months, a team of four conservationists and educators will visit eight different communities from across the entire Kunene region and interview adults, children and school teachers. Two experienced UK-based scientists will assist with data analysis. The results will be shared with Namibian school directors and the Minister of Education, who have already expressed their interest in this study.
The project is led by NEAT founder Steven Maseka, an award-winning Namibian environmentalist who previously worked in Namibia’s world-renowned Community-Based Natural Resources Management programme and featured in the 2018 BBC documentary Pangolins – The World’s Most Wanted Animal.
The first phase of the project is supported by crowdfunding, and you can help immensely by donating here.
It was late in the evening when we sat down for a beautifully prepared three-course dinner at the impeccably decorated Manor House in Samara – a game reserve located near Graaff-Reinet in the Great Karoo. The main topic making the rounds was about the much-anticipated lion release, which took place earlier in the day. Well, technically it happened, though not in the way it was planned…
Waking up at the crack of dawn, the Samara team and a small group of lucky people, including yours truly, had eagerly made our way to the boma where two lions – Titus, a three-year-old male, and Sikelele, a four-year-old female – had been living for the past six weeks. Today was the day of their release into the reserve. A day that would herald the start of new beginnings in Samara history.
The lions had been spotted at the far end of the boma, sleeping under a bush. The gate was quickly opened, and a fresh gemsbok carcass lay just a few metres outside the entrance in the hopes to entice them out… We waited quietly in the game drive vehicles, about 25 metres away from the gate, the first warm rays of the sun hitting our backs as the sound of cameras zooming in on anything that moved broke the otherwise silent group.
A few minutes passed, then murmurings amongst the rangers and a few concerned glances were shared. Maybe they haven’t noticed the gate was open? Perhaps they need more time?
Half an hour later and still no sign. One of the rangers decided to check up on the location of the lions by circling the outside perimeter of the boma. He soon came back and dejectedly reported that the lions were still dozing under the bushes… flat-cats.
So, with the promise from Marnus, the general manager, that we would be informed as soon as any movement happened, we continued with our day, taking advantage of the available time to explore the vast landscape of Samara.
Now a lion release might not seem like a big deal – relocations happen all the time across the country – but in this case, it is quite significant for what Samara stands for, and what the owners and staff are hoping to achieve for the Great Karoo and its wildlife.
To understand more about the Great Karoo and the importance behind animal reintroductions by Samara, let’s first take a brief moment to step back in time to see how the Great Karoo became what it is today and why it’s such a unique and special place.
A semi-desert landscape, the Great Karoo is considered internationally famous in palaeontological circles for its abundance of pre-dinosaur fossils. The region covers two significant extinction events, the end-Permian (252 million years ago) and the end-Triassic (200 million years ago), and is home to rich fossil beds that preserve approximately 80 million years of vertebrate evolution that documents early primitive reptiles to the transitional stage between reptiles and mammals. This is the only place in the world where such an extended fossil record of the early evolution of ‘reptilian’ life is preserved in a single basin.
Incredible geological transformations over millions of years from glaciers to desert dunes to volcanic lava, and erosion over time, helped create the landscape that we see today.
Fast forward to recent history, and we discover that less than two hundred years ago large herds of antelope – such as eland, blesbok and springbok – roamed the grass plains. Also present were quagga (now extinct), Cape buffalo, black rhino, ostrich, wildebeest, lions, leopards, painted wolves (African wild dogs), hyenas and jackals.
Amongst the wide variety of indigenous wildlife, the springbok stood out above all others for their strange and puzzling behaviour.
What could be said to be on par with that of the Great Wildebeest Migration in East Africa, the Karoo once played host to its very own migration spectacle of trekbokke – ‘migrating antelope’.
Not much is known about this phenomenon as it was never scientifically studied, but accounts from the 19th century tell of herds numbering in the millions.
In his book, The Migratory Springboks of South Africa, the Trekbokke (1925), S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner recalls the time in 1896 when he and two farmers, who were used to estimating small stock numbers, attempted to estimate the amount of migrating springboks, saying:
“With the aid of the field-glasses, we deliberately formed a careful estimate, taking them in sections and checking one another’s calculations. We eventually computed the number to be not less than five hundred thousand — half a million springboks in sight at one moment. I have no hesitation in saying that that estimate is not excessive.”
However, the springboks that they could see were just part of a massive herd, which in total covered an area of approximately 138 x 15 miles (222 x 24 km)!
Cronwright-Schreiner declared: “To say they migrate in millions is to employ an ordinary figure of speech, used vaguely to convey the idea of great numbers; but in the case of these bucks it is the literal truth.”
Following the rains and resultant nutrition across the Karoo basin, these migrating herds were of such enormity that it would sometimes take a week for all the springbok to pass.
They would eat their way across the landscape, an unstoppable force grazing their way through vegetation like a locust swarm. This may sound destructive but, like a natural veld fire, the springbok manure and hoof action helped prepare the soil for the next rainy season, and also helped to prune and invigorate the vegetation.
Lawrence G. Green’s book, Karoo (1955), provides a personal account by Gert van der Merwe of the great springbok migration:
“At last came a faint drumming. No doubt the Bushman had sensed this drumming hours before, with his ear to the ground. Only now could Gert hear it. The cloud of dust was dense and enormous, and the front rank of the springbok, running faster than galloping horses, could be seen. They were in such numbers that Gert found the sight frightening. He could see a front line of buck at least three miles long, but he could not estimate the depth. Ahead of the main body were swift voorlopers, moving along as though they were leading the army.”
Unfortunately, the last natural springbok migration was recorded in 1896. Due to human interference – by overzealous hunters and farmers dividing the land with barbed wire fences – the springboks faced too many obstacles to continue their natural route, and so it came to an end.
The expansion of human settlement in the Karoo caused much of the wildlife to be displaced or wiped out. With the occupation of the area by stock farmers, cattle, sheep and goats gradually replaced the wildlife and the grass receded along with the changed grazing and weather patterns.
It is at this point where Samara comes in. Reintroducing indigenous wildlife back into the Great Karoo has been a vision of Samara’s and its owners. Since the inception in 1997 of Samara, Mark and Sarah Tompkins have made it their mission to rewild the Great Karoo, recreating a self-sustaining ecosystem and restoring it to its former glory.
Over the last 22 years they have been painstakingly restoring eleven reclaimed farms that were once degraded and overgrazed, removing the internal fences of their 70,000 acres property and allowing the land to first rest and recuperate for at least a decade before reintroducing indigenous species that had gone locally extinct. They hope that one day the reserve could act as a link between other conservation areas – from Camdeboo National Park in the west to Mountain Zebra National Park in the east – creating an ecological corridor for wildlife to traverse, and perhaps even see the return of such great spectacles like the great springbok migration.
Since their journey began, Samara has engaged in an ambitious programme of animal reintroduction, some of the more notable reintroductions to date include:
Cheetah
In 2004, Sibella – a young female cheetah rescued from abuse at the hands of hunters – was the first among three cheetahs to be released into Samara. They were the first cheetahs to step back into the wilds of the Karoo in 130 years, after hunting and persecution drove them to local extinction in the 1870s. Sibella thrived in her new environment, successfully rearing 19 cubs in four litters before she died of natural causes in 2015 at the ripe old age of 14. Near the end of 2018 Samara was proud to announce that Sibella’s last daughter, Chilli, gave birth to a second litter of cubs.
Already under serious threat from poaching and illegal trade, Samara did their part for rhino conservation in 2006 when they introduced white rhinos into the reserve. Then in 2013, they introduced south-western black rhino (Diceros bicornis bicornis) – a desert-adapted subspecies of the critically endangered black rhino. According to Samara, they are one of only two private reserves in South Africa to house this subspecies, the population stronghold being in South African National Parks and Namibia.
Samara takes rhino protection very seriously, and several measures form part of the anti-poaching strategy, including dehorning, patrols, surveillance and community education.
Springbok
In the hopes to restore what once was, Samara recently reintroduced 800 springbok to the reserve and has plans to increase that number to several thousand in a bid to recreate the natural ecosystem processes of holistic grazing. It is hoped that the reintroduction of springbok and the growth of the herds will enable the reserve to meet its objective of reversing decades of prior livestock overgrazing.
Elephants
After a 150-year absence, elephants were successfully reintroduced into Samara in October 2017. A founder family herd of six elephants came from Kwandwe Game Reserve near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape and were soon joined by two mature bulls, who came from Phinda Private Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal, in 2018. Both elephant reintroductions were part-sponsored by the NGO Elephants, Rhinos, People.
The reintroduction of elephants has helped restore the function of the megaherbivore ecosystem processes in Samara. They have plenty to eat, and no supplementary feeding is required as they enjoy grazing mainly on cabbage trees and jacket plums that grow in the reserve.
Tracking collars have been fitted to two of the elephants: the sub-matriarch of the family herd, and the one bull, so that they can be tracked for conservation, ecotourism and academic purposes.
Reintroducing a founding lion pride has been Samara’s latest milestone in its journey to restoring a fully-functioning Great Karoo ecosystem. Lions once roamed the mountains and plains of the Karoo, though over time were wiped out by hunters and farmers, with the last wild lion spotted in the region in 1840. There is a pressing need for conservation initiatives targeting lions as the species has dwindled by 43% in the past 20 years, with current lion populations estimated to be between 20 000 and 30 000. However, researchers believe that the number is closer to 20,000.
At the end of 2018, a new chapter started as the first pride of two lions arrived at Samara, and were officially released into the reserve in January 2019. This marks Samara as the first Big 5 private game reserve in the Great Karoo region, and at the same time, this forever shifts the predator-prey dynamic in the reserve.
Additional reintroductions over the years have included dozens of plains game like red hartebeest, eland and Cape mountain zebra, to name but a few. Incredibly there has also been the natural return of other species, such as the elusive Cape leopard and Cape vultures.
Now that we’ve covered a bit of the background, it’s back to the evening’s dinner after a long day out with no word from the rangers as to the movements (or lack thereof) of the lions…
We were finishing off our main course when Veronica, the assistant manager, approached the table.
“I have an announcement to make,” she declared with a hint of a smile.
The table quietened down, turning towards her with anticipation
“I have a message from Marnus,” she went on calmly. “He says that the lions have finally left the boma and that you must all head outside as he is waiting to take you to where they are.”
It took us a mere moment to process what she had just said… and then all hell broke loose. Napkins flew into the air, chairs were pushed hastily away, and the room erupted in an energetic frenzy as everyone scrambled to get their cameras and jackets while hot-stepping it to where Marnus was waiting in the vehicle.
Dessert would have to wait!
Soon we were on the road for the short ride to the boma. It was pitch black and slightly chilly, and Marnus drove by the boma’s gate, left open since the morning, surveying the area with a spotlight for any sign of the lions – the gemsbok carcass lay untouched.
Had they really left without feeding? Surely they were hungry? Would they vanish into the night, leaving us equally excited yet disappointed at the same time? Questions and theories to their location flew around in hushed whispers.
Trying to remain positive, we slowly drove around the area, the spotlight dancing across the landscape, creating shadows that had us second-guessing, when suddenly it fell upon a sleek feline figure walking about a hundred or so metres away – everyone gasped – it was Titus! Moving like the ghost of his ancestors, he was silently making his way through the thick acacia trees towards the carcass.
In anticipation, we drove back to the carcass, only to find that Sikelele had returned in the last few minutes and was already tucking into her dinner, unperturbed by our presence.
Our patience was rewarded when Titus soon joined her — seeing the two lions calmly eating together sparked a flurry of muted congratulations and rejoicing amongst those of us lucky enough to witness this historic event. That night, after speeches and champagne, a sense of relief and hope for the future took us to bed for a blissful night’s sleep, while the founding lion pride of Samara strolled under the stars, exploring their new home in the Great Karoo.
The Karoo covers almost 40% of South Africa’s land surface and stretches over the provinces of the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, Free State, and Western Cape. No exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo is available, so its extent is also not precisely defined.
The Karoo, however, is distinctively divided into the Great Karoo (or Groot Karoo) and the Little Karoo (or Klein Karoo) by the Swartberg Mountain Range area. Both regions lie almost entirely within two of South Africa’s eight botanical biomes: the Nama Karoo and the Succulent Karoo.
The massive Nama Karoo is South Africa’s second-largest biome which extends into southeastern Namibia. It is defined as a vast semi-desert region, and the name is derived from the Khoi San word kuru, meaning ‘dry’. The Succulent Karoo covers the arid western parts of South Africa, including Namaqualand and the Richtersveld, up to the south-west region of Namibia. It is distinguished by its arid or semi-arid climate, allowing for a rich diversity of succulent plants and animals.
The Karoo is partly defined by its topography, geology and climate, and above all, its low rainfall, arid air, cloudless skies, and extremes of heat and cold. It is also home to the widest variety of succulents on Earth. Here you can find the richest desert floras in the world, with 40% of these species not found anywhere else on the planet.
ABOUT SAMARA
Samara Karoo Reserve is a family-run, award-winning, malaria-free, Big 5 reserve in the Great Karoo. It is located in the Eastern Cape province, 53 km southeast of Graaff-Reinet – the country’s fourth oldest town. Spanning 70,000 acres of Great Karoo wilderness, Samara offers a Big 5 safari with a difference.
Consisting of 11 former livestock farms assembled since 1997, Samara’s vision is nothing less than the rehabilitation of an entire landscape. Key to the Samara experience is the concept of co-creation, where every guest plays a role in rewilding the landscape and preserving it for posterity. Activities include game drives, guided walks, wilderness picnics, cheetah tracking on foot, aardvark spotting (best sightings to be had in winter), birding, hiking and a luxury star bed (open October to April). Children of all ages are welcome, and there is a Samara Kids Programme that caters to children up to the age of 12 years old.
Thea was graciously hosted at one of the two accommodation options at Samara:
The Karoo Lodge is a restored farmhouse encircled by a natural amphitheatre of mountains. Combining colonial comforts and modern-day luxuries with a rustic and welcoming feel, the Karoo Lodge is the perfect place to relax, either outside by the pool or on the verandah. The lodge has nine, en-suite double rooms of varying sizes and caters for individual travellers, couples and families.
The luxurious Manor House is a modern yet understated villa which reflects the local Karoo landscape and traditions with a unique twist. It comprises four, en-suite luxury suites, which can be booked independently or the entire villa can be taken over on an exclusive-use basis. This option is popular with families and groups looking for privacy, indulgence and complete relaxation.
For those seeking just a bit more privacy and adventure, Samara offers a star bed – a bedroom on a raised wooden platform. The star bed is some distance from the camp and overlooks the Milk River, where wildlife comes to drink. You will be dropped off at the private star bed in the evening and picked up the following morning. Your stay in the star bed includes a romantic sundowner drink followed by a moon-lit dinner. You will sleep high up and safe from predators and things that go bump in the night.
Your bed is as comfortable as those back in the camp, and a mosquito net protects you from pesky insects. The treehouse has a toilet and hand-basin. Awaken the next morning to the big skies and birdsong of the Karoo as another beautiful day dawns in Africa, before being collected and taken back to the main camp to freshen up. This is a wonderful, romantic and very memorable twist to any safari.
For accommodation options at the best prices visit our collection of camps and lodges: private travel & conservation club. If you are not yet a member, see how to JOIN below this story.
The Tracker Academy, a training division of the SA College for Tourism, operating under the auspices of the Peace Parks Foundation and funded by the Rupert Family Trust, was founded and is hosted at Samara. The one-year full-time intensive course into the dying science of tracking, led by experienced trainers, is the first of its kind in Southern Africa.
Samara makes its land available free of charge to the Tracker Academy for all its semi-arid practical training sessions and as part of its charitable donation to the Academy, also provides lecturing facilities and accommodation for the trainees.
As a former field guide and teacher, Thea has combined her passion for the English language and love of wildlife to work behind the scenes as a content editor sharing African wildlife, travel and culture with a global online audience. When not in front of the screen she makes time to get out and explore the beautiful Cape Town wilderness in search for her favourite reptile species (and other fascinating creatures, of course).
The imposing Atlas Mountains of north Africa stretch thousands of kilometres, creating an almost impenetrable barrier between the Atlantic and the mighty Sahara. The High Atlas, referred to as Idraren Draren by the Berbers who have made this hostile environment home for centuries, means “Mountains of Mountains”. Of these it is Jebel (Mount) Toubkal that rises over all and the reason for our visit.
The Red City (Marrakech) grew ever smaller in our rearview mirror as we sped due south with our trusty Berber driver, Rashid, who spoke no English and even less French. But it didn’t matter. He knew where he was going.
After finally dissuading him from stopping at all the usual tourist traps along the way selling Argon Oil, famous to the region, we reached the town of Imlil, the unofficial gateway to this part of the Atlas mountains. We did not linger, our journey continued up steep hairpin bend roads with sheer drop offs to the village of Aroumd.
Aroumd was quiet and positively diminutive, built on the edges of a rocky floodplain dotted with apple and walnut trees. Lunch was served at our hotel (Mount Toubkal Lodge) with breathtaking views over the valley leading up to the snowy summits of Toubkal.
We spent the afternoon exploring the steep, winding pathways of Aroumd and as we climbed higher we finally left the village behind. On a large lookout point we sat side by side and surrendered to the heat of the sun as contemplated our adventure to come.
Light only reached our valley after 8am in the morning. We set off with our guide Ibrahim, a man stocky in nature who had climbed the mountain over 400 times. We were in good hands but he left us to it for long stretches of the day as he caught up with friends along the hike.
It was of no consequence, the route is simple to follow, slowly winding its way up the side of the valley that culminates at the three refuges. Along the way we passed numerous police checkpoints on the way up, a response by the Moroccan authorities to the tragic incident that occurred in late 2018. The 11-km hike took us a steady four hours and saw us gain over 1,000m in altitude.
While there were three refuges available, all run by different organisations, we had elected the Refuge de Toubkal CAF (booking ahead advised, altitude 3,207m). The refuge was absolutely bursting at the seams with climbers and skiers from all over.
As the sun dropped behind the neighbouring peaks the temperature plummeted. We found shelter inside the refuge and drank sweet tea.
There was hardly a moon as we stepped onto the virgin snow with our cramponed shoes. Ice axe at the ready we were the first to head up.
Soon, however, a scattering of 40-50 lights were dancing in our wake. We kept our pace steady to stay ahead of the multitudes. The night was bitterly cold and standing still was not an option. Or so we thought…
Ibrahim slowed to a stop, “We stop here for 5 minutes. I pray, Ok?”
He wasn’t joking, I checked. I cursed under my breath. I had lost feeling in my toes an hour ago. I checked my watch. It was 6am. After what felt like an hour, but was only a moment, we continued. We were desperate to get blood flowing again.
The sun breached the horizon as we arrived at Tizi’n Toubkal (south col at 3,940m). We ditched our crampons as we navigated the boulder field up the summit ridge. Still, a nervy snow traverse just below the summit made me question the wisdom of that act.
Suddenly the summit triangle loomed ahead of us, announcing an altitude of 4,167m.
There was no one but ourselves on that beautifully windswept morning. We looked out over Morocco, the Sahara to the southeast, the Atlantic to the west.
In his IUCN report titled ‘Africa is changing: should its protected areas evolve? Reconfiguring the protected area in Africa’,wildlife vet and protected areas consultant Bertrand Chardonnet suggests that the following factors are required to effectively conserve biodiversity in Africa’s protected areas:
1. A minimum of US$7-8 per hectare per year of funding 2. Political backing and management skills 3. Support from local communities
Chardonnet also suggests that the larger, more ecologically intact areas are vital because they hold higher biodiversity than the smaller, more disturbed areas. Human population growth is mentioned as placing increasing pressure on these protected areas.
He recommends an increase in protected area size and boundaries, not by evicting people already living in those areas, but rather by the reclassification of areas not currently under sufficient ecological protection.
Figure 2. Evolution in the human population density in five Africa countries from 1960 to 2017
First opportunity:
Chardonnet notes that the ongoing decline in big game/trophy hunting opens up the opportunity to join up former hunting areas with protected areas – this process being subject to the availability of sufficient funding.
Second opportunity:
The second opportunity highlighted by Chardonnet is the potential creation of community tourism conservancies in these areas – with benefits relating to conservation and community development, which will also facilitate better management of human-wildlife conflict. The financing of these tourism projects is seen as a considerable business opportunity.
Chardonnet stresses that no protected area can function without a prevailing rule of law and good governance. In this regard, political commitment from governments is vital, as are the related sovereign services of security, the rule of law, appropriate legislation and control of its enforcement.
He also emphasised that protected areas cannot be operated in isolation and that the integration of conservation areas and community development are vital strategies. The combination of tourism investment and conservation (donor) funding as a global common good is also highlighted as being crucial components for success.
Figure 3. Map of the conservancies and the Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya
The report includes four interesting Appendixes, as follows:
This is a summary of this thorough and lengthy report, and we advise you to read it in full, to better understand the issues.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BERTRAND CHARDONNET is a doctor in veterinary medicine by training. After a doctoral thesis in Guinea Bissau on wildlife management, he started to work in West Africa in 1985 as adviser for livestock breeding. Over the years, he has worked as chief game warden of Bamingui-Bangoran National Park in Central Africa Republic, adviser to the Director of Wildlife in Burkina Faso, adviser to the Minister of Environment in Chad and head of Rinderpest eradication in West and Central Africa.
During this time, he also served as co-chair of the IUCN Antelope Specialist Group. He has also performed wildlife veterinary services and consulted as protected areas and wildlife specialist, focusing on ecological monitoring, anti-poaching strategies, conservation strategies and protected areas planning.
Chardonnet has worked in 40 African countries, and today he focuses on training, ecotourism and wildlife photography.
Azura Selous, a luxury game lodge situated along the banks of the Great Ruaha River in the remote Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, has announced its sudden closure due to the unexpected arrival of loggers in the area.
In a newsletter sent out to various members of the travel industry, Azura Selous stated that the loggers intend to clear the area for the flooding that will occur during the construction of the hotly debated Stieglers Gorge hydropower dam along the Rufiji River.
Azura’s management team made the decision to close the lodge due to the damage and disturbance that the loggers will cause to the surrounding environment.
The Stieglers Gorge hydropower project has come under intense scrutiny from a number of wildlife organisations and activists, who are concerned that the $3 billion project will seriously affect the ecosystem of Selous Game Reserve.
According to latest news reports, seventeen Tanzanian companies have been awarded tenders to clear 1,500 square kilometres of terrain inside Selous – an estimated 2.6 million trees – to make way for the hydropower plant.
Selous Game Reserve is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is considered one of the largest remaining wilderness areas in Africa, covering an area of 54,600 square kilometres.
Upon completion, the plant will provide 2,100MW of electricity to a country that is currently extremely under-supplied. The plant will be designed to supply more than double the country’s power generation capacity. According to Tanzania’s Minister for Energy, Medard Kalemani, the plant is expected to completely end the country’s power woes and sustain local industries with electricity and sell the surplus power to neighbouring countries.
In addendums to his IUCN report titled ‘Africa is changing: should its protected areas evolve? Reconfiguring the protected area in Africa’,wildlife vet and protected areas consultant Bertrand Chardonnet proposes that big game/trophy hunting is in a state of decline and is no longer able to pay for its ecological footprint, leading to poaching and habitat loss in hunting concessions.
Chardonnet’s proposal is against the background of the following three indicators:
1. The progressive disappearance of big game/trophy hunting zones due to farming activities linked to population growth. Countries such as Senegal, Niger, Chad, CAR, DR Congo, Sudan, Malawi and Angola have lost 90% of land formerly available to big game hunting. In contrast, countries such as Kenya, Gabon, Cote d’Ivoire and Botswana (subsequently changed) chose to close big game hunting.
Amongst countries still offering big game hunting, ecosystem degradation and decline of game species have led to the non-use of significant portions of former big game hunting areas – 72% in Tanzania and 40% in Zambia. In Tanzania, 110 out of 154 hunting zones have been abandoned because they are no longer profitable for big game/trophy hunting. This represents a surface area of 140,000 km2 or four times the size of Tanzania’s national parks.
2. The decrease in the number of shot animals
Tanzania is Africa’s leading country for big game hunting in unfenced areas, and yet the numbers of lions and elephants shot have plummeted over the last six years (see Figure 1 below).
Despite a six-year age limit on lions (only lions older than six years may be shot), in 2015 66,7% of the lions shot were five years old, or younger. Aside from the issue of the hunting of under-age lions, this statistic demonstrates the lack of suitable lions left to hunt.
Additionally, during that time the annual lion-hunting quota awarded by the Wildlife Divisions was 315 until 2015, and then 207 since 2016. This mismatch between available lions (as per Figure 1) and quotas was behind the reason certain Western countries controlled and even banned the imports of sport-hunted lion trophies.
Figure 1. Graph Evolution in the number of lions (left) and elephants (right) shot each year in Tanzania, and trend lines (in red)
The dramatic surge in ivory poaching in Tanzania has led to the collapse of elephants available for hunting (Figure 1), as big game hunters target the same large-tusked individuals that poachers target. Taking into account the slow growth rate of tusks, it will take decades of protection with zero offtake before elephant hunting can recommence – a likely death-blow for the big game hunting industry in Tanzania. As was the case with lions, the awarded quotas were far more than what was available – with 200 elephants available on quota up to 2013 and 100 since 2014. The suspension of elephant trophy imports into the USA was only imposed in 2014 – far after the decline in available elephants and had little impact on the sustainability of the trophy hunting industry.
In northern Cameroon, the animals harvested per annum halved over the period 2008 to 2016, despite the same number of hunters.
3. The decrease in the number of hunters
The number of hunters in countries that provide trophy hunters to Africa has dropped dramatically. For example, in the USA, the number of hunters had fallen by 18.5% between 1991 and 2016, from 14,1 million to 11.5 million. In France, the drop was 50% in 40 years.
When it comes to big game hunters visiting African countries, the numbers are not as easy to access, but South Africa has seen a 60,5% drop in eight years, from 16,594 in 2008 to 6,539 in 2016. In 2018, the former president of the Tanzanian Hunting Operators Association said that lion and elephant hunts had dropped to a handful. Figure 2 below shows the reduction in foreign trophy hunters visiting that country.
Figure 2. Evolution in the number of foreign hunters in Namibia from 2007 to 2013
Let’s talk about money
The average spend in Tanzania by trophy hunting operators for anti-poaching efforts was US$0.18 per hectare per year – far off the current standards of US$7-8, and Kenyan Wildlife Service’s figure of US$14. By spending a mere 2% of the required amount, Tanzanian trophy hunters have not been able to maintain biodiversity in those areas. Total revenue generated by the 200,000 km2 of hunting areas in Tanzania is US$30 million per annum, whereas the conservation cost for that land, if done correctly, would be US$150 million per annum.
When it comes to contributions to local communities, the average trophy hunting operator in Tanzania spent US$0,08 per hectare per year, compared with tourism concessions in Kenya’s Maasai Mara paying US$40 per hectare per year – without counting the redistributions linked to entry fees and employee salaries.
Moreover, the amount collected from Tanzanian trophy hunting operators were not all used in Tanzania, as highlighted in the Panama Papers financial scandal, which underlined the poor governance of this sector.
A functional trophy hunting area would have a lion density of 2 per 100 km² and therefore requires about 5,000 km² (500,000 hectares) to shoot one lion per year, sustainably. The expected annual spend to keep poaching at bay for that land alone would be a minimum US$4 million (500,000 x US$8). This compares to the sales price of an average lion hunt of US$50,000 (the price paid for Cecil the Lion). In other words, the going rate for a lion is 2,5% of the cost to keep that lion area safe from poachers and habitat loss.
In South Africa Peter Flack, one of the leading defenders of hunting in 2018 wrote in his blog that after a 50% decrease in the number of foreign hunters in just a few years, many game farmers were killing their wild animals and replacing them with cattle, given the poor economic situation of the game farming sector. This follows the attempts to manipulate the wild, ethical character to keep these exploitations economically viable using artificial means, first of all through the hunting of lions kept in small enclosures (canned hunting), then through the genetic manipulation of ungulates to produce animals with different colours or larger trophies sought after by hunters. Condemnation of both practises has come from all corners, including groups of IUCN specialists, and the prices of these animals have now dropped to their lowest level. This leaves numerous game farms without real sources of income and thus without any means of funding their conservation.
Tourism versus big game/trophy hunting
In Kenya, tourism recorded a turnover of US$2.8 billion in 2017 for 429,500 direct jobs. Kenya does not permit big game/trophy hunting.
In neighbouring Tanzania, the figures were US$1,975 billion and 446 000 direct jobs off 57,800 km2 from tourism areas. By contrast, big game/trophy hunting in Tanzania generates US$30 million in revenue and creates 4,300 direct jobs – off 200,000 km2 of hunting areas.
In Botswana, tourism generated US$687 million in revenue in 2017 and created 26,000 direct jobs. By contrast, in 2014 (when big game/trophy hunting was banned) the trophy hunting industry generated under US$20 million in revenue and created 1,000 jobs.
In conclusion, big game/trophy hunting:
1. has seen a rapid decline in Africa over several years;
2. does not protect the natural habitat from habitat loss and poaching
3. can only finance a small percentage of the sum required for its conservation; and
4. does not provide sufficient socio-economic benefits.
Hunting used to be a conservation tool, but in the vast majority of cases, it no longer plays this role and will not do so in the future either. Before many hunting zones are colonised, it is essential to recover part of some of them to improve the configuration of certain protected areas and, through this, nature conservation.
The absence of the economic profitability of big game/trophy hunting confirms that consumptive management cannot generate sufficient income to conserve nature. The solutions thus now involve the funding of public goods, which involves living animals, and not the development of conservation actions based on the commercialisation of dead animals.
To read Chardonnet’s report in this regard, refer to page 33 (Appendix 2) and page 37 (Appendix 3) of this document.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BERTRAND CHARDONNET is a doctor in veterinary medicine by training. After a doctoral thesis in Guinea Bissau on wildlife management, he started to work in West Africa in 1985 as an adviser for livestock breeding. Over the years, he has worked as chief game warden of Bamingui-Bangoran National Park in the Central Africa Republic, an adviser to the Director of Wildlife in Burkina Faso, an adviser to the Minister of Environment in Chad and head of Rinderpest eradication in West and Central Africa.
During this time, he also served as co-chair of the IUCN Antelope Specialist Group. He has also performed wildlife veterinary services and consulted as protected areas and wildlife specialist, focusing on ecological monitoring, anti-poaching strategies, conservation strategies and protected areas planning.
Chardonnet has worked in 40 African countries, and today he focuses on training, ecotourism and wildlife photography.
A new study suggests that banded mongoose pups that receive the most nurturing and attentive escorting in the first months of their life breed more successfully than others. Banded mongooses live in social groups, and for each pup, there is a single adult known as an ‘escort’ – that is not their mother or father – who cares for them one-on-one. These escorts carry, groom and protect the pups, who in turn will inherit lifelong habits and behavioural traits from these role models. This access to extra care and resources during the early part of life is known as the ‘silver spoon effect’.
Now a new study published in Philosophical Transactions B shows that the care mongoose pups receive in the first few months of life play a crucial role in their future successes and that this ‘silver spoon effect’ has a lasting, long-term effect on both their survival and later reproductive success, long after the short-term period of care has ended.
The study, based on data taken between the years 2000 and 2016 from a habituated population of wild banded mongooses living in Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda, found that pups that were closely escorted were heavier as they achieved sexual maturity – which is associated with higher reproductive success. Crucially, for female pups, the amount of care received had the most significant impact on how successfully they reproduced throughout their adult life, over and above effects of larger size.
The study provides a fascinating insight into how helping behaviour shapes the life history of social mammals including humans, that evolved in cooperative family groups in which offspring were cared for by helpers (grandparents, older siblings) as well as their parents.
“Our study shows that the impacts of early life care extend well past the initial caring period. As humans are also very sensitive to early life conditions, these ‘durable benefits’ of cooperation may have played an essential role in shaping the development, health, and life history of our own species.” said one of the authors, Professor Michael Cant from the University of Exeter.
The study looked at a 17-year dataset and found that despite being born on the same day, pups within the same litter are not always equal: some pups spend all day with their escort while others are left to fend for themselves from an early age.
“We know that care and resources received early on in life have profound effects on health and wellbeing in humans. Our study shows that also in mongooses, these early differences accumulate, with bigger pups receiving more care and doing better overall”, said lead author of the study Dr Emma Vitikainen, from the University of Helsinki.
Full report: Emma I. K. Vitikainen, Faye J. Thompson, Harry H. Marshall and Michael A. Cant (2019). Live long and prosper: durable benefits of early-life care in banded mongooses. Philosophical Transactions B.https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0114
BOTSWANA 2018 AERIAL SURVEY – OF ELEPHANTS, BAOBABS AND CATTLE
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
Specific aspects of this survey have been the subject of heated social media debate and political posturing from all sides. Which is a pity, because this peer-reviewed report covers a lot more than the numbers of elephant carcasses – be they fresh, old, poached or natural deaths. You can also read about how baobab trees are being impacted by elephants, about significant increases in populations of many species and reductions in others, and about fluctuations in livestock numbers.
This fascinating and comprehensive report is well worth the read, especially if you wish to participate meaningfully in these critical discussions.
Turtles, tortoises and terrapins are reptiles from the same order – Testudines (or Chelonii)
Turtles, tortoises and terrapins are reptiles with bony or cartilaginous shells. They belong to the taxonomic order of Testudines, or Chelonii – which comes from the Greek word ‘khelone’, meaning interlocking shields or armour. Interestingly, their shell – unlike claws, nails, horns and beaks – contains nerves, so they are quite receptive to feeling through their shells. For example, they can feel the pressure of weight on their shells and will experience pain if their shell is broken or cracked.
They are typical reptiles: cold-blooded (ectothermic), have scales, breathe air, and lay eggs on land.
However, the terms used to describe these species can get a bit confusing, depending on the type of English used.
Turtle, tortoise, or terrapin? What’s in a name?
The distinction between a turtle, tortoise or terrapin comes from what habitat they are adapted to live in, though the terminology differs slightly in certain countries. Depending on where in the world you’re from, the term ‘turtle’ can be used to refer to all species under the order, whereas on the other hand, ‘turtle’ could also only apply to the water-dwelling/marine species.
In America, all chelonians that live in or near water are commonly referred to as turtles, whereas in countries where British English is used (such as in the United Kingdom and South Africa), the word turtle relates to species that live in marine environments. At the same time, terrapins are those that live in freshwater, and tortoises are land-dwelling species.
Of course, these are all just generalisations and, depending upon where you live, these terms may be interchanged or used in different ways. That being said, in general, there are a few commonly accepted distinctions between turtles, tortoises, and terrapins.
A green turtle in the sea. Green turtles are named for the greenish colour of their cartilage and fat, not their shells.
Turtles (marine)
Marine-based turtles spend most of their lives at sea, only returning to land to lay eggs. Their shells are flat and streamlined to help reduce drag while swimming. Unlike land-based tortoises who have short, sturdy legs, turtles have flipper-like limbs that help them to swim more efficiently – though this makes getting around on land far more difficult.
Turtles enjoy a varied omnivorous diet, and depending on the type of turtle, they may eat jellyfish, small invertebrates, sea sponges or sea vegetation such as seaweed or aquatic algae.
Turtles can grow to substantial sizes! The largest is the leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea). It’s easily distinguished by the lack of a bony shell, which is replaced by a leathery carapace. Adult leatherbacks have an average length of 1-1.75 metres and can weigh anywhere between 250 to 700 kg.
Tortoises live exclusively on dry land and are usually found in hot, dry environments. Their shells are not streamlined like marine turtles but are instead shaped like a dome, and they have column-shaped feet with claws.
They are not good swimmers, but will occasionally enter bodies of water (such as at a waterhole or even a puddle) to clean themselves or drink water.
Even though they are known to eat a small amount of meat, tortoises are mainly herbivorous, primarily eating low-lying shrubs, cacti, grasses, weeds, fruit, and other forms of vegetation.
Like marine turtles, tortoises can grow quite big and can live for a very long time. The giant tortoises of the Galapagos and the Indian Ocean, along with the Aldabra tortoise from Seychelles, are the largest. They can weigh as much as 417 kg and can grow to be 1.3 metres in length.
The oldest known living tortoise (also regarded as the oldest living terrestrial animal in the world) is Jonathan – a Seychelles giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea hololissa) living on the island of St. Helena – who is due to turn 187 years old in 2019.
Terrapins are the semi-aquatic, freshwater-living versions of turtles. They live in either fresh or slightly salty (brackish) water, and you will find them by waterholes, ponds or lakes. They tend to swim quite often, but also spend their time on land, basking in the sun and occasionally burrowing in the mud. Their name comes from ‘torope’, a Native American Algonquian word meaning ‘a little turtle’.
Their hard shell is slightly streamlined yet also slightly domed (like tortoises). Even though they can swim, they don’t have flippers like a turtle, but rather legs similar to tortoises. You could say that they are like a mix between a turtle and tortoise.
Red-eared terrapins, also known as red-eared sliders, are considered one of the world’s worst invasive species due to escaping or being released (as pets), into the wild. They cause adverse impacts in the ecosystems they occupy because they have certain advantages over the native populations.
Terrapins are omnivorous, and their diet can consist of molluscs, small fish, crustaceans, insects, algae and other aquatic plants.
Unlike turtles and tortoises, terrapins remain relatively small. However, there are some giant species of terrapin out there, such as the snapping turtle (found in America, hence the use of the term ‘turtle’) which is capable of growing to over 60cm and weigh up to 80 kg.
Terrapins are aggressive and will bite. They have incredibly sharp claws and a powerful snapping jaw. Although they do not have teeth, they can easily take a finger off with a single chomp. They may also ‘bark’ when angry.
The Comoros. It’s a name that conjures up a rich history of mighty sultans who once ruled over a melting pot of different cultures on islands at the end of the world. A volcanic archipelago off Africa’s east coast, the Comoros is made up of three major islands, called by their French names: Grande Comore (Ngazidja), Mohéli (Mwali), and Anjouan (Nzwani). Once an important trading post in the 15th century for Arab, African and European traders, today Comoros lies far off the beaten track, bringing no more than 3,000 tourists per year to its wild shores. And yet here I was.
“What is your purpose for visiting Comoros?” the immigration official asked, bored.
“Tourism” I replied cheerfully.
She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. She handed back my passport, “Bienvenue a Comoros”.
The first thing I did was to try and get my hands on a car to get around. I approached a booth that claimed to hire out vehicles from a reputable company. The man behind the booth was reluctant.
“Too expensive,” he said as if by the look of my appearance, he could tell that my budget would not suffice.
“My brother has a car, however, that you could rent… much cheaper,” he suggested hopefully.
And so it was. No paperwork. No hassle. And only €40 cash in hand. The car, however, was an absolute liability. No wing mirror, questionable brakes and generally a poor disposition to roadworthiness. It was perfect.
I spent the next four days exploring Grande Comore, the main island of Comoros, with Moroni as its hustling and bustling capital city. While the main attractions were concentrated in the north of the island, I first headed south as storm clouds loomed over the horizon.
Just outside of Moroni I came upon the village of Iconi, home to the impressive 16th-century ruins of the Palais de Kaviridjeo where the mighty Sultan of Bambao once ruled. The ruins are overlooked by steep cliffs where it is said women once leapt to their deaths to avoid being sold into slavery by Malagasy pirates.
Further south, I explored the village of Sangani, a small village partly destroyed by one of Mount Karthala’s (an active volcano) eruptions in recent times. I continued south on increasingly deteriorating roads to the village of Chindini on the far south of the island. Then I ran out of fuel…
The tropical rain poured down with a vengeance as I negotiated prices with some local vendors for some fuel held in yellow jerrycans. The rain was beautifully warm. Soon I was on my way again and headed up the east coast. The road all but disappeared, but I was distracted by the beauty of Mount Karthala’s flanks that dominate the south. A blend of vibrant greens and earthy browns punctuated with the odd hidden cove. It was a truly wild island.
It was then that I started to notice that the roads were littered with the carcasses of countless vehicles, left to the mercy of the elements. The driving was of a frighteningly terrible standard in Comoros, but there was more to this story. So I asked a local taxi driver.
“These cars come from France. When they break, we cannot get the spare parts to fix them, so we abandon them next to the road,” he told me casually.
This made a lot of sense. Comoros is a graveyard of vehicles.
To the north, I drove along empty roads to the famous Mitsamioula beach. Sadly, like most of Comoros, it was covered in plastic and rubbish due to a lack of a proper waste management system. I pushed on to Maloudja, a palm tree-lined beach which was absolutely stunning (read: less plastic). I walked along the three perfect bays that led to the Trou du Prophete (Hole of the Prophet) where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have sought refuge behind some tall rocks in the bay from marauding pirates.
Along the way, I took a peek at the abandoned house of former mercenary Bob Denard (who launched four attempted coups in Comoros). Comoros has endured an extremely colourful political history averaging a coup d’etat – by assassination or otherwise – every two years since 1975. Delightful.
I pushed on to Lac Salé (Salt Lake)– a stunning little coastal crater lake – and hiked up the Dos du Dragon (Dragon’s Back), the aptly named spine of the sleeping dragon. The views are incredible from the top.
Mount Karthala volcano looms large over the southern part of Grand Comore, its imposing presence a constant reminder of the fury that bubbles just below the surface. I simply could not resist the opportunity to look down from its crater rim, usually lost in the clouds above.
But it would not be easy; it was a 32 km hike. By 3 am we were on the trail heading up in the cool of the night. Over the next six hours, we climbed over 2,000 metres in altitude until we reached the rim. The crater was breathtaking and according to my guide due to erupt soon.
On my last day on the main island, I explored Moroni. The town is gritty and busy, especially in the chaotic Volo Volo Market, but the locals are friendly. I spent several hours aimlessly strolling through the quiet Old Town that leads to the iconic landmark in the harbour: the Ancienne Mosquee du Vendredi (Old Friday Mosque) dating back to 1427. While the streets cannot rival the beauty of Zanzibar, there are just enough ancient Zanzibar doors to remind me of it. The old town is an oasis of calm within the city.
And so, my time on Grande Comoro came to an end, and now it was time to move onto my next adventure: exploring the island of Mohéli, the third island that together with Grande Comore and Anjouan forms the archipelago of Comoros.
An imposing mountain ridge of impenetrable green jungle bisects the island, isolated beaches lie undiscovered in secluded bays, and some of the most incredible coral reefs in the Indian Ocean thrive just below the surface. This is Mohéli. It is paradise, visited by fewer than 400 tourists a year… but getting to this paradise isn’t always so easy.
“What time is your flight?” the check-in lady at Prince Said International Airport enquired, barely looking up.
“1 pm” I replied confidently.
A look of confusion spread over her face, “There is no plane at 1 pm, wait me here”.
I had been told flying within Comoros could be a bit hit-and-miss, mostly miss. In the past, the infrequent traveller had also had the choice of making the crossing to neighbouring islands on rickety, less than sea-worthy motorboats, but due to the poor safety records the government, probably wisely, put a stop to this. As such, the plane was the only way. Given my original flight had already been cancelled and rescheduled, this was not promising news.
Nevertheless, an hour later, a plane with a pilot had been located that could take me across to Mohéli. But I had to hurry. It was leaving in 5 minutes. I grabbed my luggage and ran.
My 10-seater caravan touched down on the tarmac strip in Fomboni after a 20-minute flight, and we were directed to an unassuming yellow building with a rusty sign: Mohéli International Airport. I was given the third degree by a policeman who questioned the purpose of my visit, made to fill out a document especially for foreigners, and told to learn more French for my next visit.
I promised I would.
A car was waiting to whisk me away. We left Fomboni behind and headed southeast to circumnavigate the island to the diminutive and laid-back village of Nioumachoua (home to Laka Lodge) that looked out across at the islands of Mohéli Marine Park. It was an hour and 30 minutes over a terrible road through a tropical rainstorm. Rain pelted our little car as I caught glimpses of some incredibly remote and wild stretches of coastline.
Laka Lodge was an oasis of calm on the southern part of Mohéli with simple bungalows situated just off the beach. I would manage five days just fine, but first I had to attend a local Comorian wedding taking place in the centre of town. It was a colourful affair with much dancing!
The days passed in a heartbeat. Morning runs in the sweltering humidity, followed by snorkelling with turtles in the bay followed by watching magical sunsets from nearby viewpoints as the kids from the village played a game of football on the beach down below.
The highlight of the trip was, however, the diving. Mohéli Marine Park, established in 2001 as the first National Park of Comoros, is home to some of the healthiest coral still left in the Indian Ocean (it is part of the northern Mozambique channel) and frequently visited by humpback whales, green sea turtles and manta rays.
A 15-minute traverse over to Leprosy Island – yes, you read that right: a place where unlucky sufferers were sent to either heal or die… given the graveyard it was mostly the latter. The graveyard is gradually being eroded by the waves, leading to somewhat morbid discoveries every once in a while. The coral just off the island, however, is magical.
On more than one occasion we prepared our gear and rolled back over the edge of the boat into the crystal clear waters, dropping down quickly to coral outcrops beneath that teemed with a staggering variety of fish. The hours spent underwater were over in a flash, and it was with some sadness that I kicked for the surface, leaving such beauty behind.
On my final night, we travelled to the fishing village of Itsamia, a place where the endangered green sea turtle comes and nests all year round. Under a moonlit night, we watched a prehistoric creature haul herself up the beach, lay her precious eggs and exhaustedly return to the depths of the ocean. It was a humbling experience to witness.
Mohéli is everything you could want from an island getaway: remote, undeveloped, unspoiled and wild. It is a place that would typically exist only in people’s imaginations. But we are lucky, for it exists.
The Comoros remains undiscovered, for now… but there is an incredible beauty to be found, and one day people will come in large numbers. I’m sure of it. For now, you have the opportunity to have the country almost entirely for yourself. One simply has to go; I’m glad I did.
The Comoros, known officially as the Union of the Comoros, is a little-known archipelago that consists of a group of volcanic islands at the northern end of the Mozambique Channel of the Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and the southeast African mainland, about 290 km off the eastern coast of Africa. The islands from northwest to southeast include Grande Comore (N’gazidja), Mohéli (Mwali), Anjouan (Ndzuwani), and Mayotte (Mahore).
Mayotte, geographically part of the Comoros archipelago, is claimed by Comoros but is administered by France.
Sometimes referred to as the ‘perfumed islands’ due to the fragrant plant life, the Comoros was an important trading post for Arab, Persian, African and European traders from the 15th century onwards. In the 19th century three of the islands were annexed by the French, hence their names – Grande Comore, Mohéli and Anjouan – while their Comorian language names are given in parentheses. In 1975 they gained independence, though Mayotte, the fourth island, remained a French territory.
Created through volcanic activity over the ages, the Comoros is a nature-lover’s paradise. From stunning coral reefs that offer exquisite diving experiences to uninterrupted white sandy beaches, dense forests and active volcanoes. That said, the Comoros does not have a well-developed tourist industry. Less than 3,000 tourists pass through the archipelago each year as visitors looking for an island experience in the region instead choose destinations such as Réunion, Mauritius, the Seychelles, or Madagascar.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, MAURICE SCHUTGENS
Born in the Netherlands but raised at the end of a tarmac road in a remote Ugandan village, Maurice was always going to end up living in Africa. After a brief stint in Europe, he returned to this great continent to pursue a Master’s in Conservation Biology at the University of Cape Town, which was followed by several years of traipsing across the globe in search of adventure and stunning wild places. For the last few years, Maurice has been based in Kenya and is working towards securing a future for African elephants and the landscapes on which they depend. He is a passionate conservationist, amateur explorer and his camera is always with him! You can follow more of his adventures on Facebook, Instagram and his website.
OPINION POST FROM GAIL POTGIETER – HUMAN-WILDLIFE CONFLICT SPECIALIST
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
OPINION POST FROM GAIL POTGIETER – HUMAN-WILDLIFE CONFLICT SPECIALIST
A sub-committee appointed by President Masisi of Botswana recently made its recommendations in a White Paper regarding the hunting ban and human-elephant conflict. Among their recommendations, they suggest that the hunting ban be lifted, efforts are taken to confine elephants to the protected areas and/or reduce the population through culling, and that the government should focus on reducing human-elephant conflict. These statements are highly controversial among urbanised people in Western societies who are concerned about the rights of animals they don’t live with, whereas many Batswana welcome the statements – as is evidenced by the many comments on Facebook threads from people with Setswana-sounding surnames.
My purpose here is not to defend the list of recommendations, because a White Paper is in effect not final – it is merely a list of issues for further discussion. The social media furore of outraged people that predictably followed the White Paper announcement is largely driven by those with little understanding of the context in which these recommendations have been made. And so, I would like to provide that necessary context. Hopefully, this context will give you a deeper understanding of what is going on in Botswana since former President Khama handed over the reins to President Masisi.
Democratic vs. authoritarian styles of governance
As a result of this White Paper announcement, Western news media seems to mourn the change of presidency in Botswana, and yet in Botswana itself, this is not the case. To find out why perhaps it is necessary to look at the apparent difference in the governance style of these two presidents.
Masisi consulted with his people by setting up this task team specifically for “Social Dialogue”. The broad community consultation process was actioned at the request of parliament, in recognition of calls by citizens and local scientists to re-think the hunting ban. This may not seem revolutionary to outsiders, as this is surely what presidents of democratic governments should do. But for the citizens of Botswana, this simple act of consultation was seemingly both a breath of fresh air and a blast from the past. The spirit of democracy and consultation is what made Botswana a successful nation, and some say that this was sorely missed during Khama’s rein.
The slow machinations of government and consultative politics were not the chosen route by former President Khama, and some of his decisions and rulings were made without the necessary consultation. One little-known fact about the hunting ban is that it was never ratified by parliament, and is therefore not actually an official policy of the government of Botswana. Changing the policy or legislation would have required a more thorough, democratic process, which would conceivably have failed. Instead, the then President Khama gave his brother, the Minister of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism (MENT), the power to suspend hunting permits, with supposed annual review. The Khama government thus closed down the industry without bothering to ask the people if they thought it was a good idea and entirely ignored recommendations from a respected local conservation organisation.
Finding solutions requires research – Or not
In the current furore, I hear many people calling for different solutions to the elephant issue, rather than trophy hunting or culling.
“There must surely be some ways to live together,” we hear.
Although no one has found the ultimate solution, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks used to have sound policies and management strategies for reducing problems with elephants, yet these were overturned by the Khama administration. Research-focused non-governmental organisations in Botswana are still working on finding innovative ways to reduce human-elephant conflict – Ecoexist, Elephants for Africa and Elephants Without Borders. If you want to help Botswana find better ways to coexist with their elephants based on sound scientific research, I suggest supporting these good organisations.
A major issue is that, for nearly two years, neither these nor any other research organisation (e.g. those working on human-lion conflict) have been able to obtain permits for new research projects. The opportunities to develop innovative new ideas were thus effectively blocked by the Khama government. Many people know about the hunting ban, but few have heard about the research ban – which was implemented in much the same way. It seems that researchers from non-profit organisations were not contributing enough money to the country’s economy – which surely speaks volumes for what the previous administration thought about the role of research. This year, President Masisi lifted the research permit ban – so there is now some hope of finding new solutions to these problems.
Even with new solutions, elephant management is expensive – both financially and in terms of human resources. As more and more government resources are channelled towards the elephants, other wildlife is being ignored. Conservation should be about much more than a single species, however charismatic it may be.
Community conservation nearly destroyed
Involving communities in conservation has proven to be successful in Namibia and Zimbabwe, and Botswana was moving in this direction until this strategy was blocked by the former administration. Communities that live in the heart of the Okavango Delta (including the villages of Khwai, Mababe, and Sankoyo) lost P7 million and 200 jobs after the hunting ban, and when they tried to make up for it by switching to ecotourism, their income was threatened. The supply of meat from the hunting industry was also the only reliable source of protein these people had, as livestock farming is all but impossible in areas teeming with predators, and these villages are hours from the nearest towns where meat is sold.
Khama’s government took away the rights of local communities over their land by dictating that land authorities could no longer sign leases with communities. This took away the communities’ right to negotiate with an investor of their choice, forcing them to accept whichever investor the Botswana Tourism Organisation chose for them. The resultant restriction of income, jobs, and protein in these areas has further impoverished people who were reliant on these things to feed their families, send their children to school, and generally help themselves out of poverty. Former President Khama’s decisions made the rural poverty trap even more difficult to escape and forced once-proud, employed community members to rely on government hand-outs to survive. President Masisi has since changed the Khama policy to ensure that the communities’ rights over their land and natural resources are once again respected
It does not help that some of the communities in question are San people (known as Basarwa in Botswana), who have a long history of displacement and oppression in Botswana and neighbouring countries. Whilst the communities in the Delta retained some income through ecotourism, the impacts of the hunting ban were even more severe among San communities that most tourists have never heard of – like XaiXai, Hukuntsi, and Zutshwa. These communities are located in the dry parts of the country, far from the main tourist hubs. The ban on hunting covered both trophy hunting and subsistence hunting, so these communities were not allowed to make an income, or even feed themselves in their traditional way.
Is Africa only allowed to govern democratically when it suits the West?
One of the fascinating things about this recent furore, and others like it, is seeing how differently environmental issues are handled between Western countries and those in Africa. When wolves expanded their range in Europe, livestock farmers were up in arms, wolves were shot – which some local governments allowed, in the interests of keeping the peace (and their votes). Similarly, although there is no scientific evidence that badgers spread Bovine Tuberculosis in the UK, they are still culled due to popular perceptions. Preventing the badger cull would be good for the environment, but political suicide.
These issues are debated among Europeans, some of whom are for wolves and badgers, and some against. The same can be said for wildlife-related debates in the USA, Australia, and elsewhere. Oddly enough, none of these issues hit the African press. I have never picked up an African newspaper to find people writing letters to the editor about the “unjust culling of badgers in the UK” or pleading to “let the wolves live!”
Nonetheless, if one were to ask any rural African farmer if he or she would prefer living with rather harmless badgers instead of elephants, I’m sure we know the answer!
In case the answer isn’t obvious to you, consider this: elephants have killed 36 people in Botswana in the last few years, with 14 deaths and many more serious injuries recorded since February 2018. Many crop farmers have lost their entire annual yield in just a few nights, which severely compromises their food security. Elephants effectively impose a curfew on any human movement after dark. Women who have spent the day working their fields, collecting water, and feeding their families can no longer walk over to their friends’ houses at the end of the day for a relaxing chat. To do so when elephants are around is life threatening. Yet when they ask their democratically elected government to “do something” about the elephants in their backyards, and their government finally starts listening to them, those living in the comfort of their urban homes in Western societies are outraged!
After years of being bound and gagged by international interests and by her own former president, Botswana has finally stood up and started to speak. I suggest we sit down, stop judging, and start listening.
I would like to acknowledge three Batswana colleagues who are working or have worked in the conservation sector (both government and non-government) in Botswana. They checked the article for accuracy and provided valuable input.
The sentiments I share in this article are endorsed by 25 conservation scientists, wildlife managers, community-based conservation support organisations, resource economists and journalists from Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States of America, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
PERSONAL STATEMENT FROM DR MIKE CHASE (ELEPHANTS WITHOUT BORDERS)
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
PERSONAL STATEMENT FROM DR MIKE CHASE (ELEPHANTS WITHOUT BORDERS)
On the 7 January 2019, I submitted Elephants Without Borders (EWB) survey report titled ‘2018 Aerial Survey of Elephants and Wildlife in Northern Botswana’ to the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) for their review. I wish to state categorically that, apart from having the survey peer-reviewed by eminent scientists, EWB has not released this survey report.
Prior to submitting it to the Government of Botswana (GoB), the report was extensively peer-reviewed, verified and validated by some of the world’s foremost authorities on elephant conservation and wildlife aerial surveys. Many of these reviewers were or are members of the IUCN African Elephant Specialist Group. I took great care in consulting with elephant biologists who have undeniable qualifications. I can, therefore, confirm that this report has not been released by me to ‘second guessers’ or anyone else not qualified to review a report of this scientific subject matter.
In September 2018, the BBC reported that Elephants Without Borders (EWB) counted 87 poached elephant carcasses while flying our aerial the survey in northern Botswana. The news went viral and a misinformation campaign ensued. At the time, because I remained committed to completing the survey and determining the extent of elephant poaching, I did not respond to the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories which dismissed my genuine concern about what the survey revealed – an increase in elephant poaching. The information I shared was true and verifiable and has since been complemented by additional data.
To date, I have not given a response to the unfounded claims levelled against me and my supporters. Let me state at the onset – we observed dozens of poached elephants – ‘close to the Okavango Delta wildlife sanctuary’. To make sure we had this correct, I chartered a helicopter and visited elephant carcasses to determine their cause of death. Carcasses were verified by both ground and low altitude assessments. I did not have the resources to visit every recently killed carcass seen on the survey, but of the over 100 carcasses of concern, 90% were confirmed as poached.
I reported these criminal acts to the appropriate authorities on a case-by-case basis almost immediately, as they were sighted, and long before any articles appeared in any media. In total, I submitted 16 incident reports to the authorities, following standard procedures that EWB has followed on all previous surveys. These reports included photographic evidence and GPS locations of all suspicious dead elephants and suspected poachers’ camps.
Map 1. Elephant carcasses seen on the 2018 elephant survey relative to those confirmed or suspected of being poached in poaching hotspots.
It is worth noting that public discussion about my concern for elephant poaching is often focused on secondary issues (political, donor, policy and contractual) instead of addressing my call to acknowledge and deal with a potentially serious problem. This is unfortunate because my purpose in reporting to the GoB and subsequently Batswana journalists was to inform them of an escalation in criminal activity.
I was accused by some of being a “traitor” and “liar”, whilst some thought I should be banished back “to where I came from”, and others still thought it better if I was “killed”. My figures were immediately refuted, and labelled “fake news”.
As an Honourary Wildlife Officer, elephant ecologist, professional guide and concerned citizen, I have a duty to report sinister activities in our National Parks and wilderness areas. Critics created a devastating echo chamber of spiced-up allegations by simply repeating other’s unsubstantiated accusations against me.
Our detailed technical report shows that the weight of evidence is indisputable and supports our warning that elephants are being killed by poachers at worrisome levels in four poaching hotspots near a world-renowned ‘wildlife sanctuary’ where gangs of poachers are operating.
In response to the original BBC article highlighting my poaching reports, in October 2018, the BBC were invited to Botswana by the GoB, to film and report on any evidence of alleged elephant poaching. On the 8 January 2019, with full press accreditation from the Office of the President, the BBC came to film their story (Full press accreditation below).
On the 10 January, I received a letter from GoB regarding EWB’s Survey Report which states: “no person or organisation shall be authorised to either disseminate, discuss its contents let alone anything related thereto”. Ironically, this stipulation contradicted the very permission already provided to the BBC by the relevant authorities. Furthermore, such a demand has never been imposed on any previous survey reports or publications.
I wish to clarify that EWB was not under contract to the GoB, and no taxpayer’s money was used to pay for this survey. EWB did not ‘tender’ for this work. The aerial survey was funded by both EWB and the Conservation Trust Fund (CTF). CTF is administered by an independent board of trustees who voted in favour of awarding a grant to EWB. CTF is specifically mandated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to use CTF funds explicitly for elephant conservation. As with previous aerial survey collaborations between EWB and DWNP, the survey team included a DWNP observer.
Despite widespread decreases in African elephant populations in the last three decades, Botswana has, until now, been the exception – where elephants have been safe with low levels of poaching for ivory. Strong law enforcement policies, good governance and the political commitment of conservation-minded leaders kept Botswana’s elephant population secure and stable.
Elsewhere in Africa, the initial reaction of authorities to elephant poaching has been to deny reports of increasing incidents, refute census results or block reports from being published. Such denials have proven disastrous as levels of poaching that initially seemed no more than a nuisance rapidly escalated into population collapses for elephants. Thankfully, openness is becoming more common. Earlier this month the South African government announced that poaching in Kruger National Park has reached a recent high, with 71 elephants killed for their ivory in 2018.
My motive in speaking now is to refute falsehoods and aspersions levelled at both the scientific data and my credentials, to honour those people who have spoken supportively on my behalf, and most importantly to provide what I believe is vital information for Batswana. I hope that by being informed, the people will be motivated to take the necessary action to stop poaching before it gets worse. We cannot solve problems if we don’t acknowledge them.
In ending my personal statement, I ask for a calm discussion on elephant conservation issues, without animosity or personal attacks, in order to reach agreement on the necessary actions needed to ensure successful ongoing elephant conservation. Elephant poaching in Botswana is happening on the scale I proclaim. By continually denying the extent of poaching, we might be undermining international support.
I believe that in avoiding transparency, we could be exposed to a potential threat that can adversely affect our tourism, our economy, our international reputation as a country that is the conservation flagship of Africa, as well as the rule of law. I have dedicated my life’s work to conservation in Botswana, the country of my birth, and I will continue my life and my work as a dedicated elephant conservationist, researcher and academic.
Report peer review
On the 7th January 2019, Elephants Without Borders (EWB) submitted a comprehensive technical report on the 2018 aerial survey of elephants and wildlife in northern Botswana to the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP). Prior to submitting this report to the Government of Botswana (GoB), EWB had the report extensively peer-reviewed, verified and validated by some of the world’s foremost authorities on elephant conservation and wildlife aerial surveys.
The following professionals reviewed the report: Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton CBE, Dr. Paul Elkan, Dr. Richard Fynn, Mr. Falk Grossman, Dr. Keith Leggett, Dr. Keith Lindsay, Dr. Chris Thouless, Prof. Rudi van Aarde, and Dr. Samuel Wasser. See Summary of Reviewers here or Download Summary of Reviewers as PDF here.
Reviewers stated the reports “conclusions are robust, and indisputable” another said, “this is a very thorough and carefully documented report demonstrating exceptionally high rigor”. The survey and report are the most comprehensive and efficient study of elephant numbers ever undertaken in northern Botswana.
BOTSWANA GOVERNMENT QUESTIONS ELEPHANT SURVEY BY DR MIKE CHASE
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
BOTSWANA GOVERNMENT QUESTIONS ELEPHANT SURVEY BY DR MIKE CHASE
Botswana’s Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism has questioned a new report by Elephants Without Borders (EWB), the organisation contracted in 2018 to conduct an aerial survey of elephants in northern Botswana. In a recent press release, the ministry’s permanent secretary Thato Raphaka said the government was not satisfied with the report by Dr Mike Chase – director of Elephants Without Borders.
Raphaka said that there were concerns about the methods used to count the elephants and that it was “regrettable that Dr Chase, in a report purporting to be scientific, includes an astonishing number of pictures of dead elephants, 63 pages to be precise. This is definitely not standard practice in aerial survey report writing.”
He went on to question why the authors of the report did not “sound the alarm” in 2014 when the survey results showed a significant difference in elephant carcass ratio from 2010: 2% in 2010, 7% in 2014, and a slightly higher ratio of 8.1% in 2018.
“Surely, greater concerns should have been expressed after their 2014 survey than now when the ratio is only slightly higher,” said Raphaka. “In fact, independent reviewers have raised concern around the authors’ interpretation of carcass ratios to conclude that mortality rate has recently increased in northern Botswana.”
He did acknowledge that the government was “under no illusion that poaching has become a threat to Botswana with her large elephant population”, and concluded by asking that the report’s authors “immediately submit their raw data to IUCN AESP for further independent review in the interest of transparency.”
The Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism wishes to inform the public that we have received a report of the 2018 aerial survey of elephants and other wildlife species in northern Botswana undertaken by Elephants Without Borders. Although the Department of Wildlife and National Parks participated in the conduct of the survey through secondment of one officer, it was not involved in the analysis and report writing.
A review of the methodology used in the survey indicates that it is sound and was based on the established methodology for flying aerial surveys using transects. We, however, have concerns about the blending of several different techniques, i.e. sample counts, total counts and reconnaissance flights.
The rationale for this is not well explained, and we would have expected the authors to provide the raw data as is standard practice to the IUCN African Elephant Specialist Group (AESG), the foremost authority on continental elephant numbers so that it can be independently assessed.
The figure reported by the authors in the report on the number of elephants in their survey area is not statistically different from the 2014 survey. The only reasonable conclusion that can be inferred from the authors’ statistical analysis is that the population has remained stable between the two surveys. The results of the survey are at odds with statements attributed to Dr Mike Chase in an interview with BBC (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45396394).
It is regrettable that Dr Chase, in a report purporting to be scientific, includes an astonishing number of pictures of dead elephants, 63 pages to be precise. This is definitely not standard practice in aerial survey report writing.
By their own admission, only a portion of all carcasses observed during the aerial survey were verified by helicopter. The authors report that only 33 out of a total of 128 suspected poaching events were actually confirmed by ground verification.
Another interesting point is that the authors reported a carcass ratio of 2% in 2010 and 7% in 2014, with 8.1% reported for 2018. The 2014 figure is almost four times higher than the 2010 figure, but the authors did not sound the alarm at the time. Instead, at that time, the authors considered Botswana an elephant safe haven. Surely, more significant concerns should have been expressed after their 2014 survey than now when the ratio is only slightly higher. Results from the survey also indicate that sex ratios are not as skewed as one would expect from a population under heavy poaching pressure since large bulls usually are targeted first, an admission made by the authors on pages 17 and 18 of their report.
In fact, independent reviewers have raised concern around the authors’ interpretation of carcass ratios to conclude that mortality rate has recently increased in northern Botswana. We are under no illusion that poaching remains a threat to Botswana with her large elephant population. Our own statistics and regional trends in recent years bear testimony to this fact. We have always reported transparently on these conservation efforts to the international community.
Our elephant population is the largest on the continent, a testimony of the great lengths that we have gone to protect this iconic species. We stand ready to work with the international community to ensure that we continue to secure our natural heritage for the nation’s posterity.
In conclusion, we call upon the authors of the report to immediately submit their raw data to IUCN AESP for further independent review in the interest of transparency.
Editorial note: The use of the term ‘wild’ horses below is in keeping with popular references, although in fact, these horses are feral, and not indigenous to the area.
Sourced from third-party site: Oxpeckers, written by Linda Baker
Namibian environment officials last week shot and killed three spotted hyenas blamed for the near extinction of its famed wild horses.
A long-running battle between the desert-dwelling wild horses and hyenas, which share a single water point in the arid southern Namib-Naukfluft National Park, reached a crisis point as horse numbers plummeted recently from 286 to only 77 remaining animals.
“We are now in the final hour of the wild horses’ existence on the planet,” the Namibia Wild Horses Foundation warned in early February. It called on the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET), custodian of both the hyenas and the horses, to take immediate action to save the horses from extinction.
An international social media frenzy joined the call, with articles, petitions and debates about the plight of the horses. Minister of Environment Pohamba Shifeta is due to join representatives of the foundation and the Namibian Environment & Wildlife Society (NEWS) at a public debate titled “Are horses more important than hyenas in our national parks?”, scheduled to take place in Windhoek on Thursday, February 28.
The only remaining foal in the park was attacked and wounded by hyenas last week, with gruesome images of its injuries circulating on social media. Two attempts to catch and translocate the hyenas proved futile, prompting the MET to shoot three hyenas, including a large female thought to be the main cause of foal mortalities.
MET spokesperson Romeo Muyunda told Oxpeckers that three more hyenas would be captured and translocated elsewhere in the park, at a good distance away from the horses. Trap cameras showed up to 11 hyenas at diversionary feeding sites in 2017.
While horse lovers across the globe cheered, environmentalists condemned interference, stating that “MET appears to be contradicting its own tourism and wildlife policies by advocating the removal of the hyenas from the national park”.
“Spotted hyenas are classified as vulnerable and are therefore a conservation priority in Namibia,” NEWS said in a statement.
“To have a natural species killed in favour of a feral species in a national park is a very, very sad day for carnivore conservation,” commented a carnivore researcher who asked not to be named.
NEWS said killing or translocating the spotted hyenas would only temporarily reduce predation of the feral horses, until new hyenas fill the gap left by the removed animals. The exact number of horses killed by hyenas is also debatable, as drought and disease also account for mortalities, the organisation said…
“With no adult females to look to for reassurance, guidance and learning, one can only imagine the youngsters’ distress. Zimbabwe continues to exploit its wildlife to the highest bidder with no meaningful oversight. Recognising elephants as sentient beings, South Africa has banned the capture of elephants from the wild for captivity. Zimbabwe must urgently follow suit to redeem itself.”
Elephant experts at Humane Society International/Africa have condemned Zimbabwe’s capture of 35 baby elephants, some as young as two years old, who have been stolen from their mothers and are awaiting export to foreign zoos. According to The Times of London, the young elephants are being held in pens in Hwange National Park while travel crates are prepared and the documents finalised for the detrimental 7,000-mile journey to China.
Footage provided to Humane Society International/Africa shows the youngsters frantically pacing around the Hwange pens, some showing signs of stress such as temporal streaming (dark streaks down the side of the face from the temporal gland) and others demonstrating wide-eyed, ear-splayed defensive postures.
Iris Ho, senior wildlife policy and programs specialist at Humane Society International, who attended the Summit, stated: “Ripping baby elephants from their mothers is morally indefensible and ethically reprehensible. We cannot agree more with the Honourable Balala and the African Elephant Coalition regarding the conservation and welfare concerns related to the deliberate capture of wild elephants for the purpose of holding them in permanent captivity outside their natural range.”
Based on the trade data of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), since 2012 Zimbabwe has exported 108 young elephants to zoos in China despite opposition from other African countries, elephant experts and non-governmental organisations including the Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International.
Audrey Delsink, Humane Society International/Africa’s wildlife director and an elephant biologist, said: “The capture of baby elephants from the wild is barbaric, and captivity will be a life sentence of suffering. Video footage shows that these young animals are already displaying stress behaviour after being ripped away from their mothers and bonded family groups, and are terrified. Calves normally remain closely bonded to their natal family groups; females never leave their families whilst males only leave the herd at 12-15 years of age.
Delsink’s sentiments echo those expressed last week by Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Tourism & Wildlife speaking at the African Elephant Coalition Summit in Nairobi. The Honourable Najib Balala remarked, “Trade in live elephants should only be for the purpose of enhancing the conservation of the species in its natural habitats (in-situ) as the only appropriate and acceptable destination.”
The AEC’s press statement of the Summit called for an end to the export of wild elephants to zoos and other captive facilities. These positions are reflected in the proposals and documents submitted by the AEC to the 18th meeting of the CITES Conference of Parties which will take place this May in Sri Lanka.
In collaboration with the AEC, Humane Society International co-authored a report highlighting the challenges that the live trade in elephants poses to the CITES regulations.
WATCH: Exclusive footage by journalist Oscar Nkala of baby elephants captured from Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe for export to captive facilities in China in February 2019
ABOUT HUMANE SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL
Humane Society International (HSI) and its affiliates together constitute one of the world’s largest animal protection organisations. For more than 25 years, HSI has been working for the protection of all animals using science, advocacy, education and hands-on programs. Celebrating animals and confronting cruelty worldwide.
DECODING SCIENCE POST with information from the University of Bristol
For over 150 years the function of zebras’ stripes has intrigued scientists, with several proposed theories including avoiding predators, better heat regulation and a social function, yet there is still no agreement between scientists.
Now a new study by the University of Bristol, published in the journal Plos One, has provided additional support to the one theory that zebras’ stripes act as a deterrent towards flies and other blood-sucking parasites, which confuses and discourages them from landing and taking a bite.
Researchers from the University of Bristol and UC Davis, USA, spent time on a horse farm in Britain where they investigated the behaviours of tabanid horse flies around captive plains zebras and uniformly coloured domestic horses using video analysis techniques.
They discovered that the stripes don’t deter horse flies from a distance, with both zebras and domestic horses experiencing the same rate of circling from the flies. However, video analyses revealed differences in approach speed, with horse flies failing to slow down on approach to zebras, which is essential for a successful landing.
Professor Tim Caro, Honorary Research Fellow from the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “Horseflies just seem to fly over zebra stripes or bump into them, but this didn’t happen with horses. Consequently, far fewer successful landings were experienced by zebras compared to horses.”
Dr Martin How, Royal Society University Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences, added: “This reduced ability to land on the zebra’s coat may be due to stripes disrupting the visual system of the horse flies during their final moments of approach.
“Stripes may dazzle flies in some way once they are close enough to see them with their low-resolution eyes.”
To make sure that the effect was not caused by the difference in smell between zebras and horses, the scientists placed different coloured cloth coats – black, white or zebra-striped – over the horses to observe horse fly behaviour. Just as before, when horses wore coats with striped patterns, they experienced fewer horse fly landings compared to when they wore single-colour coats.
The research also directly observed zebra and horse behaviour in response to biting flies. Zebras exhibited preventative behaviour, such as running away and tail swishing at a far higher rate than horses. Consequently, any horse flies that did successfully land on zebras spent less time there compared to those landing on horses, with few staying long enough to probe for a blood meal.
In Africa, horse flies carry dangerous debilitating diseases such as trypanosomiasis and African horse sickness, which cause wasting and often death. Therefore, it is unsurprising that zebras utilise both behavioural defences and morphological striping to avoid horseflies.
The scientists did acknowledge that the latest experiment was carried out in Somerset rather than around the biting flies of Africa, and other limitations included that the path of the flies could only be seen in two dimensions from video recordings and that the horse coats were made of different materials.
However, this research provides new evidence for the theory that zebras evolved dichromatic striped coats to evade biting flies and has considerable implications for the horse industry.
Full report: Tim Caro, Yvette Argueta, Emmanuelle Sophie Briolat, Joren Bruggink, Maurice Kasprowsky, Jai Lake, Matthew J. Mitchell, Sarah Richardson, Martin How (2019). Benefits of zebra stripes: Behaviour of tabanid flies around zebras and horses. Plos One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210831
OPINION POST FROM DERECK JOUBERT – CONSERVATION SPOKESPERSON, FILMMAKER AND LODGE OWNER
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
OPINION POST FROM DERECK JOUBERT – CONSERVATION SPOKESPERSON, FILMMAKER AND LODGE OWNER
Respected conservation spokesperson Dereck Joubert has reacted to the recent recommendation by a Botswana government committee that the ban on trophy hunting should be lifted, elephants culled and fences erected to prevent certain wildlife migration:
GREAT PLAINS STANCE ON BOTSWANA’S PROPOSED ‘BLOOD LAW’
Our beautiful Botswana is under siege by lobby groups. Yesterday a white paper was submitted to the government recommending wildlife utilisation with a series of suggestions to:
a) open up the largely condemned hunting of elephants and all wildlife again;
b) the culling of massive numbers of elephants;
c) the setting up of canning factories for those dead elephants to convert them into pet food;
d) more fences; and
e) the active cutting off of wildlife corridors.
At first, I thought it was a cruel April Fools’ Day announcement, but no one is laughing today. I have given this white paper a name and if it passes I believe it should be called ‘Botswana’s Blood Law’.
Internally we are meeting to understand what it means to Great Plains, to our conservation efforts and to you, our partners, guests and friends. Whilst disturbing, I cannot for a moment believe that any government, let alone Botswana’s, which is world renown for being moderate and well informed, would adopt this policy. We believe that it will be stopped in its tracks but we are soliciting support to help express exactly how shameful it would be to institute a policy such as this.
I have seen enough dead elephants from the bad guys. I don’t need to see a thousand more piles from our own government. I have seen the damage fences can do. We don’t need more fences we need fewer. I have promoted connective corridors my whole life, with the science being quite clear: according to the very theories of Darwin and Wallace (Biogeography), that the smaller the island the more likely and rapid the rate of extinction. Botswana’s proposed ‘Blood Law’ would be instituting policies to do all of that.
We will be voicing our opinion against this, as strongly as we can. I will be doing that personally, as the CEO of this company, our foundation, and as large investors in Botswana. Great Plains Conservation will be doing the same.
As a global community, and a local one, we are better than this and our entire ethos at Great Plains Conservation is based on caring; caring for our communities by sharing revenues and benefits, caring for our guests and partners, and caring for the environment and everything in it. Not one element of this white paper is about caring. It is just the opposite, and so, we are registering, via this announcement, that we are opposed to the very substance of the proposal.
Our pledge to you, industry partners and guests, is that we will do whatever we can to engage legally and respectfully to make sure this ‘Blood Law’ is not passed in Botswana.
Dereck Joubert
CEO Great Plains Conservation and Great Plains Foundation
BOTSWANA GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCEMENT – HUNTING BAN SHOULD BE LIFTED
Post series: Botswana elephants – to hunt or not?
The international furore over the Botswana government decision to recommence the hunting of elephant (and other species) necessitates an understanding of the entire picture. This post is one of eight posts from various sources looking at this issue from different angles. The other seven posts you should read to get the full picture:
BOTSWANA GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCEMENT – HUNTING BAN SHOULD BE LIFTED
A report submitted by a Botswana government subcommittee has proposed that the ban on hunting should be lifted and the hunting industry grown, that elephants should be culled and the meat processed, some animal migration routes closed and human-wildlife conflict strategies implemented.
The report was officially handed over to President Mokgweetsi Masisi at a briefing on Thursday. The subcommittee, made up of seven cabinet ministers and one junior minister, have been consulting with researchers and hunters as well as attending weeks of public hearings on the elephant hunting ban, which was introduced in 2014 by the previous administration.
The report and its recommendations will now be debated by the President and the cabinet, before becoming law.
HANDOVER NOTES OF THE CABINET SUB COMMITTEE ON HUNTING BAN SOCIAL DIALOGUE REPORT BY HON FRANS VAN DER WESTHUIZEN MINISTER OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT (21/2/19) [FULL TEXT]
Salutations
1. It is my pleasure to officially handover a report of the Cabinet Sub Committee on Hunting Ban Social Dialogue to His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Botswana, Dr. Mokgweetsi Eric Keabetswe Masisi.
2. I wish to highlight that the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism, pursuant to Statutory Instrument no. 2 of 2014, took a decision to stop hunting of wildlife in all areas of Botswana effective January 2014.
3. Your Excellency, the hunting ban has become a subject for discussion in the country because of its apparent experience and observed consequences, with two schools of thought on the debate;
• Proponents of the hunting ban postulate that it is a good and noble conservation effort which will create a conducive environment for increased wildlife populations, and;
• Those against the hunting ban are of the view that hunting is a good wildlife management tool if properly implemented.
4. They maintain that if and when wildlife populations and human livelihoods are taken into consideration, this would translate to communities becoming good conservationists. It was also observed that as communities realise the potential value and associated income to be derived from wildlife resources and related activities, they will be converted to be good conservationists as opposed to concentrating on negative aspects of property destruction and loss of human lives caused by wildlife.
5. It is on the basis of the above that in June 2018 His Excellency the President established “The Hunting Ban Sub Committee of Cabinet” to kick-start a social dialogue aimed at reviewing the ban on hunting. The Cabinet Membership of this Committee is as follows;
• Minister of Local Government and Rural Development- Chairperson
• Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism
• Minister of Transport and Communications
• Minister of Employment, Labour Productivity and Skills Development
• Minister of Youth Empowerment, Sports and Culture Development
• Minister of Agricultural Development and Food Security
• Minister of Basic Education
• Assistant Minister for Presidential Affairs, Governance and Public Administration
6. Your Excellency, this is a Consultation Report as assigned, it therefore embodies communication between those consulting and those consulted on the identified problem: The Hunting Ban. The report covers the consultation outline, opinions of those consulted, conclusions and the recommendations.
7. It is essential to note that the consultations covered Kgotla meetings, Full Council meetings as per Appendix 1 (page 33), submission of papers and meetings with individuals and private entities at different forums outside the kgotla. Those entities consulted include Elephants Without Borders, Community Trusts such as KALEPA-Kazungula, Lesoma, Pandamatenga, CECT-Chobe West as well as the NGO Council, Botswana Wildlife Producers Association and individuals including Richard White, Mark Kyriacou and Richard Pascall of Bartrek Ranch in Tsabong.
8. Your Excellency, the Terms of Reference as clearly highlighted on Page 4 of this report guided the process of consultation.
9. From the submissions made by the communities and other stakeholders, the Committee as assigned by Your Excellency, found it necessary to propose the following recommendations, stated here in summary form.
• Hunting ban be lifted.
• Develop a legal framework that will create an enabling environment for growth of safari hunting industry.
• Manage Botswana elephant population within its historic range
• Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) should undertake an effective community outreach program within the elephant range for Human Elephant Conflict mitigation
• Strategically placed human wildlife conflict fences be constructed in key hotspot areas
• Game ranches be demarcated to serve as buffers between communal and wildlife areas.
• Compensation for damage caused by wildlife, ex gratia amounts and the list of species that attract compensation be reviewed. In addition, other models that alleviate compensation burden on Government be considered.
• All wildlife migratory routes that are not beneficial to the country’s conservation efforts be closed.
• The Kgalagadi southwesterly antelope migratory route into South Africa should be closed by demarcating game ranches between the communal areas and Kgalagadi Wildlife Management Areas.
• Regular but limited elephant culling be introduced and establishment of elephant meat canning, including production of pet food and processing into other by products.
10. Your Excellency, with these few remarks I hereby officially handover the Report of the Cabinet Sub Committee on Hunting Ban Social Dialogue to you.
I thank you Sir.
Additional information supplied by the Botswana government, dated 25th February 2019
The effects of climate change are especially obvious in arid environments where resources are scarce and subject to seasonal availability. However, the demographic mechanisms through which seasonal climate affects population persistence remains mostly unknown. Using detailed monthly life-history data collected by the Kalahari Meerkat Project between 1997 and 2016, scientists at the Universities of Zurich and Cambridge have now assessed how meerkats (Suricata suricatta) will fare in response to future changes in seasonal rainfall and temperature.
Meerkats are cooperative breeders that live in social groups. A dominant female monopolises most of the reproduction, while subordinate helpers assist in raising her offspring. Changes in the physical and social environment affect the growth, survival and reproduction of meerkats. For example, wet and warm conditions at the beginning of summer increase the growth, survival and reproduction of these animals. In contrast, high population densities and cold weather during winter decrease individual growth and survival.
Seasonal dynamics matter
The Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa is projected to become drier and warmer as a result of climate change. The new study investigates how consistently rising summer temperatures and rainfall fluctuations will affect body mass and growth of meerkats, resulting in lower rates of reproduction and offspring survival. However, this isn’t the only finding of the study.
“In addition to the common practice of modelling average annual dynamics, we took a closer look at seasonal dynamics and developed a specific climate change model,” says Maria Paniw of the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich. “We found that the picture is more complex: Seasonality matters because improving conditions in one season can partially counter the worsening conditions in the next season.”
The team linked changes observed in growth, survival and reproduction to changes in seasonal rainfall and temperature. Using these links in a population projection model, the scientists projected the population dynamics 50 years into the future, creating different scenarios based on a report on climate change issued by US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
The data shows that the combined effects of hotter and drier summers, in particular, may threaten the persistence of the meerkat population. In the study’s projections, fewer offspring were produced, resulting in fewer helpers in the population. In this scenario, the meerkat population plummeted, increasing the risk of population collapse.
In contrast, the negative effects of less rainfall in summer would be alleviated to an extent if winters became warmer, allowing meerkats to gain weight and step up reproduction. Taking these counteracting seasonal changes into account leads to a different scenario, in which the probability of extinction is less severe and the meerkats would still persist in 50 years.
Link between seasonality and populations dynamics
“The effect of an environmental change on a population depends on how individuals interact with their biological and physical environment, and how these interactions will change over time. Our study demonstrates that we have to accurately identify these interactions, especially in terms of how these interactions vary between seasons, to predict a population’s vulnerability in the face of climate change,” says Arpat Ozgul, senior author of the study and professor of population ecology at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich.
Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, co-author from the University of Cambridge and founder of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, adds: “Our work emphasises the importance of long-term, individual-based studies that extend over several decades. Only where data of this kind is available is it possible to assess the effects of climate change on animal populations and to understand the ecological mechanisms responsible for them.”
Full report: Maria Paniw, Nino Maag, Gabriele Cozzi, Tim Clutton-Brock, Arpat Ozgul (2019): Life history responses of meerkats to seasonal changes in extreme environments. Science. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau5905
Image provided by Paul Tully, with owner’s permission
Opinion post by Paul Tully – animal advocate and African tourism consultant
Have you ever wondered why South Africa seems to have so many captive lion cubs, in what are known as ‘lion parks’?
The reason, in my opinion, is one that we all need to face up to: IT’S A SCAM.
The still-growing lion cub petting industry masks a sinister legal industry in South Africa. Playing with cute little lion cubs is the tip of the iceberg – it’s what you don’t see that defines this abusive industry.
When tourists and volunteers visit one of the numerous ‘lion parks’ in South Africa and enter the play pens of young orphan cubs, their instinct is to question the situation. What? Why are so many lion cubs being orphaned? And, almost without exception, they are told a lie – that the cubs’ mothers died or abandoned them. This lie is repeated again and again – in marketing material, press releases and hashtags – so much so that even good, caring people repeat the mantra and become party to the lie, and the scam. You see, these lion cubs are forcibly removed from their mothers – to feed what has become a lucrative the lion cub petting machine.
THE BIG LIE:“These lion cubs are orphaned (or abandoned) by their mother.” Image provided by Paul Tully, with owner’s permission
We can all do the research. I’ve done it for five years, both as an animal advocate and consultant in the tourism industry. Spend 5 minutes on Instagram and see for yourself. There are thousands of images of young, motherless lion cubs (plus cheetahs and even tigers) and all of them are being interacted with by tourists and volunteers.
How could it be that there are so many big cat mothers out there suddenly willing to abandon their cubs?
This does not add up. Right?
On the face of it, lion parks look like fantastic nurseries for unfortunate ‘orphaned’ cubs – offering a caring home, and eventual return to the wild. Oh, and of course there are endless streams of tourists paying to manhandle the cubs continuously throughout the day – when lion cubs should be sleeping, feeding and bonding with their mother and siblings. Instead they are passed around like binoculars on a safari game drive.
According to South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs, South Africa has an estimated 8,000 captive lions in approximately 200 breeding facilities. One can add to this an unknown number of private (backyard) breeders that operate without permits and provide an endless supply of cudly merchandise to this hungry industry.
Each of these lion parks and breeding facilities may have between 1-4 breeding females. If we take a conservative average of two lionesses per facility – that’s 200 facilities, 400 lionesses and conservatively 2,400 lion cubs born every year (assuming two litters per year per lioness and three lion cubs per litter – an extremely conservative estimate).
Lion farmers/breeders speed-breed their lionesses by removing the cubs soon after birth, thereby inducing the lionesses into estrus once more. Wild lions breed only once per year, at the most. The tiny blind cubs have now become part of the machine.
>2,400 LION CUBS BORN EVERY YEAR TO FEED THE MACHINE
Where and what are all these lion cubs destined for?
There is no documented evidence of any captive-bred lion in South Africa having been released into the wild – despite claims to the contrary. So remove that solution from the equation.
So why are these lion parks claiming that their lion cubs are “orphans”? And what exactly is the journey for that lion cub after its petting shelf life has expired? What is the link between these tiny cubs and the burgeoning canned lion hunting industry?
• REMOVAL OF CUBS: This usually happens after only a few hours or days after birth, when the newborn lion cubs are forcibly removed by breeders from their mothers and sold or loaned to lion parks for exhibition and petting purposes. Volunteers have often described to me the days when newborn cubs arrive by the box-load. Again the reply to obvious questions is that the mothers died or rejected and abandoned their babies
• PETTING: Each tiny cub, initially still with closed eyes, is petted by thousands of tourists keen to experience a close encounter with a cute and cuddly big cat cub. The cubs are handed from person to person and forced to pose for the all-important selfies.
• WALKING: Once the cubs reach the age of about six months they become too big (and dangerous) to cuddle, and graduate to being walked with tourists, while a handler protects the tourists from being harmed by the adolescent and sometimes boisterous lions.
• VOLUNTEER EMPLOYMENT: Local and international volunteers are tempted to South Africa, with the tantalising prospect of caring for these newly “orphaned” baby lion cubs. These naive volunteers pay for such work experience at lion parks, believing the lie that there work is important conservation work – to ‘save’ orphaned cubs and help with ‘lion research’ and/or to ‘return the lions to the wild’
• TOURISM: Local and international tourists, in their thousands, pay around R100-R200 ($10-$20) for the opportunity to play with baby lion cubs and to walk with adolescent lions, usually at the same facility. These tourists are fed the same lies.
At this stage the lion parks wash their hands of their ‘orphaned’ lions.
A canned lion hunter and her trophy
• HUNTING: After two years of tourist petting and walking, the lion progresses to the second-last stage of its usefulness. The tourism industry now has no further need for this lion, and it is traded into the hunting industry, where it is shot by trophy hunters in what is known as ‘canned hunting’. Some of the lions are sold to zoos, others are kept back for breeding, but the majority disappear into the opaque and sprawling network of trophy hunting farms that are spread across the South African bushveld. Lion parks will often vehemently deny any association with the hunting industry, claiming that they sell / trade / swap lions to intermediaries and that they have no control over what happens after that. The lion parks will simply refuse to disclose the identities of the buyers or locations of the lions’ new homes, in order to keep the lions “safe from poachers”.
There have been several exposés on various lion parks around South Africa (CBS 60 Minutes, Carte Blanche, The Guardian, to name just a few), which have uncovered these sales and permits, demonstrating how cub petting facilities are selling their lions to known lion hunting outfits.
The canned hunt attracts trophy collectors paying anywhere from $4,000 for a lioness, to $40,000 for a male white lion (hunting wild white lions is illegal). The hunt takes place in a small fenced area (often the size of half a football field), complete with typical bushveld trees, for that African feel. The lion, fresh from captivity, is released into this enclosed area – and shot. Legally the hunt organiser needs only release the lion into this area for 36 hours for it to be classed as “fair chase”.
• LION BONE TRADE: The final stage for the (now dead) lion is the selling of its bones to the insatiable Asian market for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), for approximately $1000-$1500 per skeleton.
To avoid the usual slew of accusations and legal threats from this industry, let me be clear on one point: the lion park facilities offering tourists the opportunity to play with lion cubs are not the same entities offering canned hunting experiences. I will leave it to you to come to your own conclusions in this regard.
Recently I conducted a small research task on social media to highlight this issue.
Considering that Instagram is the go-to place for lion-petting selfies, I based my research on this platform, with the following results:
90% OF VISITORS TO LION PARKS ARE LIED TO ABOUT WHY THERE ARE SO MANY LION CUBS
Using popular hashtags and an appropriate time period to prevent double-counting of cubs, I asked my population of 100 respondents: “Did the park inform you about where these lion cubs (that you are interacting with) came from?”
Here are some of the replies. The level of deceit is obvious.
Of those answers gained from my questioning 90% were similar to those above. The other 10% stated that they either could not remember, were not told by the facility or that they didn’t ask about the whereabouts of the cubs’ mothers.
To be clear on this matter: 90% of lion park visitors polled were told the lie that the park’s lion cubs are orphaned or abandoned by their mothers.
What we have here is cruel exploitation of helpless lion cubs and the scamming of thousands of tourists and volunteers every year. And this is all legal, apparently.
This must end. The lion parks in South Africa are not only fuelling the trade in wildlife and wildlife parts, blatantly scamming innocent tourists and volunteers out of their money, and ruining South Africa’s proud tourism brand name.
In March 2016, the United States Department of Agriculture barred zoos from allowing cubs under four weeks old to be petted or fed by members of the public.
WATCH: The truth about South Africa's lion breeding industry. The Blood Lions YouthForLions team have officially launched a brand new animated clip showing the life cycle of a captive bred lion in South Africa, to create awareness across the globe.Clip credit: Dave CohenIllustrations by: PatrickGeorge
I urge and plea with South Africa’s Government to adopt a similar regulatory policy, and to ban all public interactions with big cats.
The effects of such restrictions would:
• Result in a decline in the non-conservation related breeding of big cats (namely lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards and mixed breeds);
• Create better monitoring capability of both the legal and illegal wildlife trade in South Africa;
• Ensure both local and international tourists are safeguarded from deceitful practices;
• Protect South Africa’s reputation as a respectable, responsible tourism destination;
• And repair South Africa’s conservation reputation, following years of abuse by this cub petting industry.
Instead of dwelling on the past and asking how this evil industry was allowed to mushroom and thrive, let’s take a step forward and simply end it. I believe in progress and that the South African Government, and President Cyril Ramaphosa particularly, can lead this beautiful country away from abusive industries like this.
It is up to all of us to stamp out the wrongs that we see. Please let’s start by stamping out the scam that is the big cat cub petting industry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Tully is an animal advocate and African tourism consultant, working with various South African companies and conservation projects.
Granitic in nature, laid-back in character and absolutely enticing at its core, this is Praslin, the second-largest island in Seychelles. It is a place of unparalleled beauty waiting to be explored…
Our Air Seychelles flight skimmed low over the azure waters before kissing the tarmac at Iles des Palmes Airport on Praslin.
Outside the airport, we rudely awoke a car hire sales assistant from her afternoon snooze. Who could blame her, it was 30 degrees! Once awake she was more than happy to send us off on our way in our little Kia. Having rented out a car to us she decided it was time to knock off for the day. We were loving this relaxed Seychelles vibe.
Our lodge, located high above the serene-looking Cote D’Or (Gold Coast), looked out over the picturesque St. Pierre Island shimmering in the bay far below with yachts dotted around her. The view was priceless and the slight increase in altitude a respite from the heat down below.
With our reliable Kia we went in search of adventure. Praslin Island is dominated by the lush jungles of the famed Valle de Mai National Park where visitors flock to lay eyes upon the rather shapely coco de mer (Lodoicea maldivica) – a rare species of palm tree native to Seychelles.
Centuries ago, when fishermen happened upon the nuts washed up on the shores, they believed they came from underwater forests home to terrifying sea monsters of the deep that preyed on unsuspecting fisherman. While this may no longer be true, seeing an endemic coco de mer is non-negotiable. To avoid the crowds, however, we opted for Fond Ferdinand Nature Reserve in the southeast of the island. Same nut, no crowds.
There is no shortage of spectacular beaches on Praslin. In fact, based on numerous internet polls, Anse Lazio may just be the ultimate award-winning stretch of coastline in the world.
The moment we laid eyes on it we couldn’t agree more. A perfect white sandy bay flanked by the most piercing of blue ocean waters. Still, given the crowds, we wanted to get away and find some solitude. We knew just where to find it.
An unmarked trail led away from Anse Lazio carving a path through the inland humid forest. It was a strenuous 1.5-hour hike along the contours of the bay. Suddenly we crested the final rise and there below us lay Anse Georgette, sparkling in the sun, turquoise waters lapping powdery white sands.
For the next few days, we grabbed our Kia and headed out to find secluded little bays, stopping only to play amongst the large granite boulders that are strewn along Praslin’s beaches.
We sampled mouthwatering Seychellois cuisine at Coco Rouge in Baie St. Anne and watched mesmerising sunsets with a cold beer in hand. It was a magical experience.
Praslin is the most incredible of destinations. It has more in common with its sleepy neighbour La Digue then the hustle and bustle of Mahé but in some ways, it’s completely unique. You’d be silly not to visit!
A new species of puddle frog (order: Anura, family: Phynobatrachidae, genus: Phrynobatrachus), has just been discovered by NYU Abu Dhabi researchers on the unexplored and isolated Bibita Mountain in southwestern Ethiopia. The research team named the new species Phrynobatrachus bibita or Bibita Mountain dwarf puddle frog, inspired by its home.
In summer 2018, NYU Abu Dhabi Postdoctoral Associates Sandra Goutte and Jacobo Reyes-Velasco explored an isolated mountain in southwestern Ethiopia where some of the last primary forest of the country remains.
Bibita Mountain was under the radars of the team for several years due to its isolation and because no other zoologist had ever explored it before.
“It had all the elements to spike our interest,” says Dr Reyes-Velasco, who initiated the exploration of the mountain.
“We tried to reach Bibita in a previous expedition in 2016 without success. Last summer, we used a different route that brought us to higher elevation,” he added.
Their paper, published in ZooKeys journal, reports that the new, tiny frog, 17 mm for males and 20 mm for females, is unique among Ethiopian puddle frogs. Among other morphological features, a slender body with long legs, elongated fingers and toes, and a golden colouration, set this frog apart from its closest relatives.
“When we looked at the frogs, it was obvious that we had found a new species, they look so different from any Ethiopian species we had ever seen before!” explains Dr. Goutte.
Back in NYU Abu Dhabi, the research team sequenced tissue samples from the new species and discovered that Phrynobatrachus bibita sp. nov. is genetically different from any frog species in the region.
“The discovery of such a genetically distinct species in only a couple of days in this mountain is the perfect demonstration of how important it is to assess the biodiversity of this type of places. The Bibita Mountain probably has many more unknown species that await our discovery; it is essential for biologists to discover them in order to protect them and their habitat properly,” explains NYU Abu Dhabi Program Head of Biology and the paper’s lead researcher Stéphane Boissinot, who has been working on Ethiopian frogs since 2010.
Full report: Sandra Goutte, Jacobo Reyes-Velasco, Stephane Boissinot (2019): A new species of puddle frog from an unexplored mountain in southwestern Ethiopia (Anura, Phrynobatrachidae, Phrynobatrachus), ZooKeys. DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.824.31570
The latest annual rhino poaching statistics have been released by the Department of Environmental Affairs. Minister of Environmental Affairs, Ms Nomvula Mokonyane, has reported significant progress on the implementation of the Integrated Strategic Management of Rhinoceros covering the period 1 January to 31 December 2018. But Susan Scott (STROOP – Journey into the Rhino War filmmaker) cautions against too much optimism.
The statistics show that in 2018 there was a decrease in rhino poaching incidents to 769, making it the third consecutive year that South Africa has seen a decline in rhino poaching, particularly in the national parks. This is a decrease of 259 rhino compared to 2017 (1,028 rhino poached). It is also the first time in five years that the annual figure is under 1,000.
A graph showing the number of rhinos poached between 2006 – 2018. Source: Dep. of Environmental Affairs
A total of 421 rhino were poached in the Kruger National Park, 16.5% less than the 504 poached in 2017, and one was poached at the Marakele National Park.
The number of poacher activities in the Kruger National Park declined by only two recorded activities during the year, with a total of 2,620 incursions and 125 contacts recorded during 2018.
The provincial and national breakdown for rhino poaching incidents in 2018 is as follows:
PROVINCES AND NATIONAL PARKS
2017
2018
SANParks
504
422
Gauteng
4
2
Limpopo
79
40
Mpumalanga
49
51
North West
96
65
Eastern Cape
12
19
Free State
38
16
Northern Cape
24
12
Kwa-Zulu Natal
222
142
Western Cape
0
0
Total
1028
769
With regard to the biological management of rhinos, the statement mentioned that “within Kruger National Park, the translocation of rhinos from Kruger as part of South Africa’s biological management innovations of expanding ranges and establishing additional rhino strongholds are challenged by the emergence of bovine tuberculosis in both black and white rhino, albeit at low incidence … the development of efficient systems to overcome this challenge is in progress”.
It continues, saying: “Even so, innovative biological management have used translocations within Kruger National Park as a mechanism to direct poaching to focus less on cows. This goes hand in hand with initiatives to dehorn rhinos embedded in strategic approaches that target individuals that frequent poaching hotspots, but more importantly, approaches that minimise the losses of cows. Complimenting these interventions are guarding initiatives that focus on regular individual monitoring of individual rhinos. These combinations of interventions seek to ensure maximising the breeding potential of both black and white rhinos.
“The integrated initiatives of SANParks to manage its rhino population have had varied successes. Within Kruger National Park the continued onslaught of poaching resulted in a continued decline of rhinos. SANParks conducted a distribution survey of rhinos that forms part of predicting future rhino localities that can inform pro-active anti-poaching and biological management. This also allowed the evaluation of the robustness of the techniques to obtain formal rhino estimates. The evaluation is in progress.”
The statement concludes saying, “Combating rhino poaching remains a national priority, and as such, all the relevant government departments will continue their close collaboration to ensure that this iconic species is conserved for generations to come. Although we are encouraged by the national poaching figures for 2018, it is critical that we continue to implement collaborative initiatives to address the scourge of rhino poaching.”
Filmmakers Susan Scott and Bonné de Bod – the makers of the award-winning rhino documentary STROOP: Journey into the Rhino Horn War – had the following to say regarding the latest rhino poaching statistics:
Of course it’s welcome news that we’re under 1,000 rhinos poached for the first time in five years, but if we look deeply into the release coming from the department, there are some grim facts that we need to look at, and we must look at what’s not in the release:
1. Poaching numbers
The stats are broken down by province, so it’s hard to see the state rhino stats versus the privately owned rhino poaching stats. And that would tell us a lot… we know that farmers have sold their rhinos, exporting them overseas or moving them to neighbouring range states while our state rhinos, those in Kruger in particular, are down in total numbers so there are fewer rhinos to poach**.
And we can look at the incursion stats that were also released, they are staying at around the same rate: 2,620 last year compared to 2,662 the previous year (1% decrease). So the onslaught is not stopping. We’re still at seven incursions a day. That’s not the amount of people… that’s the incursions… footprints seen in the park, sound picked up, rangers spotting poaching teams. So seven times a day a gang is active inside Kruger and those are the picked up incursions.
The onslaught is not subsiding and the loss of Ranger Respect Mathebule last year has also changed things for the ranger corps.
2. Tuberculosis (TB)
We’ve seen papers out on the TB inside the Kruger National Park from 2016* and Karen Trendler will tell you that that is because our rhinos are under severe stress from the poaching, and the drought of 2016/17 no doubt played a huge role. This is the first time the department has mentioned that our Kruger rhinos (black and white) have TB, although they say “albeit at low incidence”. They go on to say that South Africa’s veterinary regulations are strict about preventing TB from being spread into commercial stock, so they are developing systems for this challenge… this does mean that auctions are on hold, which also tells us the severity of this. And there is no mention if orphans rescued in the Kruger also have TB which will affect any protocols in place for that.
3. Recognition of collateral damage
The release goes on to say that translocations have happened within the park as a way to reduce poaching on cows. It’s very unclear from the language used, but it also seems that Kruger are dehorning cows in poaching hotspots. The actual quote is: “This goes hand in hand with initiatives to dehorn rhinos embedded in strategic approaches that target individuals that frequent poaching hotspots, but more importantly, approaches that minimise the losses of cows.”
This is a biggie. For years now there hasn’t been acknowledgement of this collateral damage where rhinos breed well, but cows poached not only removes that individual from the population but all future rhinos that could’ve been birthed by her and that could be as much as anywhere from 10 to 15 rhinos in her lifetime. This collateral damage is a real worry in this poaching crisis.
We’re a long way from it, but once rhinos get below a certain number in the wild, they become less productive, and can even become infertile which we’ve witnessed with the northern white rhinos, and isolated populations of the Javan and the Sumatran rhinos. Plus, have’t we always been told that rhinos in Kruger can’t be dehorned because they cannot defend themselves from lions and each other? We’ve all heard many stories of female cows protecting their young with their horns. This needs to be looked into more deeply.
The worldwide management of rhinos depends hugely on numbers coming out of Kruger. The poaching deaths yes, but more importantly the living numbers of wild rhinos in the world’s largest population, which of course is Kruger’s white rhino population. We have CITES in Sri Lanka in a few months time and this is the body that actually sets the agenda for rhino management for the next three years (they only meet once every three years).
So trading in rhino horn internationally will be decided at CITES and exporting live rhinos to Asia will be determined by what happens at CITES. So it’s very important that we know what the largest population of rhinos on the planet is…
Block-counting was the method used up until the last census, (Aug/Sept 2017). And the census results are usually released a few months after they are compiled but not this last one… it was released a year later, a day before World Rhino Day in September last year. We were in San Francisco for the world premier of STROOP and we were 10,000 miles away but still surprised that the press didn’t pick up on it.
White rhino numbers had declined by almost 30%. Thirty percent! Let’s look at this: the 2017 number was given as a range from 5,532 to 4,759 versus the previous census count in 2016 where the range was 7,830 to 6,649 and when that was released, Africa Geographic was the only publication to note that it was an 18% decline**.
I asked a DEA spokesperson why the most recent census results, the 2018 ones, had not been released yesterday and was told to get them from SANParks… we’ve been on this roundabout before. SANParks can’t release them to us, they release them to the department who then release them to the public. So this latest press release should’ve had the 2018 rhino numbers from the last Kruger census in 2018, but they’re not there. There have been a lot of rumours about “real” rhino numbers and if the block counting method of extrapolation is flawed leaving us all with the worry that the number is much lower than the range of around 5,000 counted back in 2017.
But the bigger picture that we must focus on is if we go back to the start of the poaching crisis… to 2010. The range of white rhinos counted in the park was 12,700 to 8,700***. In seven years, anthropomorphic factors (poaching and a little bit of the drought) have caused a 56 to 47% drop in our white rhino numbers in the Kruger. Half of our population is gone. Half. And we were told not to worry, rhinos breed well.
The next CITES is coming up and when the diplomats sit down in the huge conference halls to read through papers of white rhino management, our white rhino stats from 2017 will be a year and a half old, that’s what should’ve been in the press release coming out of the department today/yesterday. No wonder animals get uplisted at CITES when it’s almost too late… they’re working on old data. It’s the number that’s not in the press release that’s most important for our rhinos… how many are left, not just in Kruger but in the whole country.
In conclusion
The takeaway is to press the department for as much information as possible to help those in decision making processes… such as the correct and latest census results of Kruger’s rhinos. And the incursions are not stopping. Financial support has declined for Kruger and the worry is that it will decline further when South Africans see that rhinos poaching numbers have declined. Our rangers in Kruger, iMfolozi, and all our state parks need even more support now, we cannot take our eye off this.
Since the crisis started in 2010 we can now, by official numbers, say that we have lost at least half our white rhino population in the Kruger National Park, and that’s despite an incredible effort by the ranger corps. Now, more than ever, we should be ploughing in whatever support we can give them. The fight is a long way from over.
Acclaimed South African documentary, STROOP – Journey into the Rhino Horn War, continues its winning streak on the film festival circuit internationally. The film had its world premiere at the San Francisco Green Film Festival last September and picked up a further 10 awards during the rest of 2018, among them ‘Best Documentary’ at the prestigious San Diego International Film Festival. The start of 2019 sees STROOP winning four further awards at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards with the ceremony taking place at the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood on March 23. This week also sees an announcement from The Impact DOC Awards on the film winning the Award of Excellence for a Feature Documentary. The competition states that the exceptional storyline made it worthy of a further Special Mention from the Competition Jury. The Impact DOC Awards are given out annually to films making a difference in the critical issues of our times.
In more exciting news, STROOP has been officially selected for The Earth Day Film Festival, the Green Mountain Film Festival, the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, and the Wellington Film Festival in New Zealand (where it has also been nominated for Best Documentary). The film also screened on opening night at the Guwahati International Documentary Film Festival in India at the end of January. In a further nod to honour the film, STROOP is one of only five documentaries invited to have its Italian premiere at the Riviera International Film Festival in May. The international jury, which determines the prize for best documentary feature film out of the five in competition, will comprise various film, culture and art personalities and will be announced at press conference in Milan next month. As part of this achievement, STROOP will be translated by the festival into Italian, furthering the exposure of South Africa’s rhino poaching crisis around the world.
The film has now been officially selected for 20 international film festivals and has collected a total of 15 awards.
STROOP – Journey into the Rhino Horn War tells the shocking and touching story of the ongoing poaching of rhino and the trade in its coveted horn.
Despite this phenomenal worldwide critical acclaim however, STROOP has been unable to get local cinema distribution, prompting the Associated Press to report on the issue which was picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other leading newspapers around the globe. Undeterred, the filmmakers began self-distributing STROOP by hiring cinemas around the country and by promoting the local screenings on social media and in local press. The film subsequently played to packed cinema houses.
“It was quite incredible! We kept being told that no-one would come to see a documentary in our cinemas, let alone a documentary about rhino poaching, but the support has been overwhelming!”, says Bonné de Bod, one of the filmmakers of STROOP.
“We thought we’d put on one screening in Joburg and one in Cape Town,” adds STROOP director Susan Scott, “and both of them sold out pretty quickly… Cape Town in under 48-hours!
“So once we had a screening paid for by the public, we could then hire another cinema and then another one and then that’s how come we have been able to take it around the country to Joburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, Hoedspruit, White River and now Bloemfontein – this coming weekend – for our last cinema screening.”
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The international support of the film continues, with Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and Vimeo on Demand on their digital platforms this week. A delighted de Bod says, “this is our first film, and everyone tells us how the film industry is different to two years ago, to five years ago, to ten years ago… but that doesn’t frighten us!
“Because all of this is new to us, we’ve been pushing these new boundaries to get our important story seen around the world. The fact that these big tech giant studios believe in the film and will be making it available for anyone to see at any time, is exactly what we set out to do when we started making STROOP all those years ago! Now it really can be seen by millions… getting our rhino story everywhere!”
The film recently screened in Hong Kong on the public broadcaster RTHK, and also formed part of a judiciary workshop on tackling wildlife trafficking through the port of Hong Kong. Locally, STROOP is also having an effect in the enforcement sector, after having being screened to the South African Police Service trainees undergoing specialised training on wildlife crime.
Keeping their sights firmly on local awareness, Scott and de Bod have started on their community and school roll-out of the film, working with Africa Geographic and the Jane Goodall Roots and Shoots Foundation to get the film seen in areas without access to cinemas.
The film is also releasing digitally through its website: www.stroop-film.com
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I was born in New York, grew up in Sweden, and am currently living in the Balkans, using it as the base for my travels around the globe.
As a former field guide and teacher, Thea has combined her passion for the English language and love of wildlife to work behind the scenes as a content editor sharing African wildlife, travel and culture with a global online audience. When not in front of the screen she makes time to get out and explore the beautiful Cape Town wilderness in search for her favourite reptile species (and other fascinating creatures, of course).
