Long Live The Toad!

May 29, 2014May 29, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Quick! Hide! The toad’s approaching!

Like kudzu, loose strife, wolves and coyotes, garlic mustard, Asian beatles and now even Asian carp, this week poorly trained biologists are focusing on the newest of the worst “invasive” species, the “Asian Common Toad.”

“Invasive Species” is bad nomenclature. Most of what hyper, reactive biologists refer to as “invasive” is intended to mean “bad.”

In other words, if some form of life begins to dominate an ecosystem, it’s wrong and “invasive” when its doing so perilously threatens other established species in that ecosystem.

And that’s the rub. “Perilously” is subjective and darn it, give me several examples where so-called “invasive species” have radically and lastingly altered an ecosystem.

You’ll have a very hard time. There’s no question that there are “super” specious, like the toad I discuss below that scientists worry is now threatening Madagascar, but rarely have the alerts proved as prescient as they appear when announced.

(The best example of invasive species is native Americans wiped out by the smallpox brought by European colonists, and even historically I haven’t heard much of an argument that we shouldn’t have come.)

Like my strong but nuanced argument that poaching elephants isn’t the main problem, this takes some intellectual juice to understand, and the best example right now is the alarm that conservationists are raising against the Duttaphrynus melanostictus.

That alarm is sounded by none other than National Geographic, Nature, and pointedly, the BBC.

Nature called the event a looming “ecological disaster.”

It isn’t.

The toad is native to much of southeast Asia where it evolved. It’s toxic, so when eaten by other animals (and lots of other animals eat frogs and toads), they get sick and some die.

Discovered recently at a port in Madagascar, conservationists went ape. Madagascar is one of the most precious, unique ecosystems on earth, with up to 90% of the species found there endemic.

There’s no doubt that if left to prosper, Mr. Toad will impact Madagascar’s ecosystem. Just as the Lutherans did on the Iroquois. My point is that these alarms soliciting urgent responses to “control invasive species” are pointless, unnecessary and a scandalous misuse of resources.

“Pointless” because they don’t work. You might have been successful keeping garlic mustard out of your flower garden, but you’ll never get it out of your forest.

“Unnecessary” because mainly it’s pointless. Our failures to control invasive species have consistently and increasingly been spectacular defeats. And even if you believe that this series of defeats is reversible, would it be good for the planet?

Would the world have been better had kudzu really been eradicated? Would teepees be better than arched bell towers?

There are a couple examples in the world, the Galapagos being one, where I concede had the rat not gotten into the shed, or had been exterminated quickly enough, things would be better. But those examples are confined to rare and very small ecosystems of which the world just isn’t mostly composed.

Whereas the alarms of invasive species are overwhelmingly rung in large ecosystems, like North America.

Yet the resources allocated to these efforts, and the machismo with which it infuses the conservationist is not simply unbecoming and unscientific, it’s nonsense.

Take the toad.

The toad “invaded” Australia in the 1930s from climes north.

The fear then, as now in Madagascar, is that birds, snakes and everything precious would eat the toad and die. And many did.

Rachel Clarke and other scientists commissioned by the Australian Government to finally conclude what the toad actually did to Australia in the last century, decided that it had done really very little.

Paraphrasing the scientific report, a frog advocacy group in Australia claimed that Clarke and colleagues basically concluded that it was the “Yuk Factor” rather than any real threat to the ecosystem that drove the initial alarms.

“What’s the evidence for all this talk of ecological catastrophe and biodiversity impacts?” the organization asks then answers, “surprisingly little.”

Yes, many snakes died when eating the toads at first. That resulted in an explosion in the native frog population that was very positive for many other species as for a while there were fewer predators of them. And then, the snakes stopped eating the toads and prospered.

Yes, birds ate the toad and died. And then birds learned to eat only parts of the toad and didn’t die. And some birds, like the sacred ibis, developed an ability to eat the toad and not get sick.

In fact up to 90% of the species of some animals were initially wiped out by the toad in Australia. But then? They came back, learning or evolving how to live with them.

Madagascar is 13 times bigger than the demarcated political land and water area of the Galapagos Islands, but it is no less precious an island ecology. I think it reasonable to try to inhibit the invasion of the toad.

But there are a host of other more serious problems facing Madagascar, both ecologically and socially. If the toad is not stopped, Madagascar will not over time be considerably changed.

And it just isn’t unseemly, it’s unscientific, to scandalize what is actually the virtue of successful natural selection.

Long live the toad!

Killer Bee Helpful!

May 13, 2014May 13, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

I love this story! African “Killer Bees,” media ingrained mythical honey bees, may be what saves elephants from extinction!

My truck with many conservation organizations today is their scandalous exaggeration of elephant poaching, albeit I stipulate that elephant poaching is a growing problem.

In status quo (which includes increased elephant poaching), elephants are not going extinct.

But if extinction — or even seriously significant decline is postulated, the cause is not poaching. It is the human/animal conflict that is besetting virtually every major African game park on the continent.

Rapidly increasing human populations — particularly agricultural communities around dwindling protected wilderness habitats – is the main cause.

Combined with sluggish economies, massive unemployment, and a growing Asian demand for ivory, the conditions are ripe for increased elephant poaching.

I believe that by minimizing human/elephant conflicts, poaching will decrease.

Despite a couple television specials notwithstanding, elephant poaching isn’t easy. A savvy band of criminals takes considerable risk trying to down a jumbo. Once down the ivory harvest isn’t easy, either.

Many poachers are seriously injured in the hunt, and going to a medical clinic isn’t exactly possible unless the practitioner agrees to overlook the cause of your calve gash, which she isn’t supposed to do.

Many injured poachers get medical assistance from local villagers.

Very special knives and other tools for extracting the full tusk must either be uniquely forged by local blacksmiths or honed by artisans. Again, this requires those tradesmen to “look the other way.”

Community sympathy for poachers facilitates poaching… might be necessary for it to happen at all.

That sympathy comes from two different places:

Foremost are the farmers in those sympathetic communities adjacent wilderness areas who are trying so desperately to grow corn and water melons, two of the favorite foods of wild elephants, today.

Joining them are headmistresses, community leaders and clerics who are incapable of convincing a jumbo not to walk through their building.

Secondly, the sympathy comes from the politico enraged with the government’s inability to compensate farmers and preachers and school boards for their elephant damage, while generously financing more and more upmarket tourist camps.

The threat to elephants is that they live in a place where people no longer want them. Tourism revenue continues to decline as a portion of African countries’ wealth. Agriculture, education and media are now all more important.

So it seems to me that if we can find some wonderful way to keep elephants where they belong, poaching will become harder and harder to accomplish.

We’ve been trying everything:

Fences.

Electric fences.

Massive electric fences with big moats.

Pepper spray.

Siren horns.

Air guns.

The best ever I’ve found I just experienced a few weeks ago, again, in Botswana’s Nxai Pan National Park: surrounding the toilet and shower complex for the public camp site in the park are a dozen rows of cement blocks fabricated with tiny towers that have a steel rod piercing upwards from the middle.

Elephants really don’t like that. But it’s way, way too expensive for anything but a tourist who has to go.

Alas. African Killer Bees!

Beehives every ten meters linked by special trigger wires, so that when an elephant only lightly touches the wire, the bees are enraged.

Save the Elephants, the University of Oxford and the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund collaborated on this huge and very successful study.

You see, elephants have bought into the myth that these are “Killer” Bees.

Well, actually, researchers noticed a long time ago that elephants avoided eating their most favorite tree, the acacia, if bees were on the blossoms.

“This was followed by behavioural experiments demonstrating that not only do elephants run from bee sounds, but they also have an alarm call that alerts family members to retreat from a possible bee threat,” project leader Lucy King told AllAfrica.

Hey. Anybody out there can design a chip to scream out an elephant bee alarm?

On Safari: Dangerous Elephants

April 14, 2014April 14, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This safari is spending six fantastic days in the Serengeti, traversing it from bottom to top, and guess what’s dominating game viewing.

Lions, leopard and cheetah of course, and with no surprise as the Serengeti is probably the best place in the world for big cats. See Chris Kordash’s photo above.

But what was a surprise is the close second: elephant.

I’m beginning to rethink the “elephant problem” after our experience in the Serengeti and the Crater. I’m convinced now that the ele are acting as if poaching has increased substantially.

While we were at Ndutu, Howard Buffet was, too. He was announcing a $24 million grant to the Tanzanian government for increase elephant anti-poaching efforts, including a new helicopter and the requisite training for rangers to use it.

Charging us near Klein's. — Charging us near Klein’s.

A day or two before, when we were in the crater, I counted 107 very large all male elephants collected on the western side. Although their tusks were not as big as the old tuskers that came down to the crater in the 1970s and 1980s, they were among the larger of today’s.

It was clear they weren’t acclimated yet to the crater, or to each other. I didn’t see them on my last safari, and I’m sure they weren’t here last year. So this is a relatively new development, quite contrary to normal elephant behavior, and almost identical to what the big tuskers of the 1970s and 1980s did.

The crater is not a good place for elephant, because there isn’t a lot of browsing; it’s almost all grazing. But the 1970/80s elephants learned to live with it and were protected from poaching by the unique geography of the crater.

The elephants we saw were fighting, as big bull elephants are wont to do. The old tuskers don’t fight, anymore. They’ve learned to live with one another, and I suspect that’s what will happen with the current crew.

I continue to be very critical of much of the media’s reporting of elephant poaching, however. (Please see my numerous previous blogs.) Recently, for example, Emily Kelting in the Huffington Post misstated the total number of elephant by several hundred thousand and continued the scandalous suggestion that in ten years they will be no more elephant.

It’s that kind of juvenile reporting that further complicates the problem. Yes, poaching is on the increase and my own observations just on this safari support that.

But no, extinction is not imminent, and there is a more serious problem than poaching: regardless of the horrible poaching, there are still too many elephant.

It’s a difficult issue, because poaching must be stopped, and efforts from Buffett and others to do so are exemplary.

But Tarangire is no longer the only place to see huge numbers of elephant whose normal behavior is stressed.

Coming in today to the far north Serengeti near the Kenyan border, we counted over 100 elephant in one mass group, so collected it was hard to discern families. They were at the very edge of the park, adjacent Maasai farms.

These huge numbers seem to be almost everywhere we went on safari: from of course Tarangire, to even Manyara, to the crater, to Ndutu, to Seronera … everywhere. It’s quite possible elephant numbers are seriously declining because of poaching, but it’s also absolutely true that there are too many of them in the space that’s left.

And that distorts their behavior and makes them dangerous.

So let’s try to take a deep breath, thank Howard and others, but recognize the problem is very serious and unsolvable unless the overpopulation of elephants is also addressed.

Sunset over the Serengeti

March 7, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Old people often bemoan the dwindling frontiers of their youth: barefoot in the unregulated playground, the unhelmeted motorcycle ride, 3/2 beer, the willing mortgage banker, silent partners … and me?

The diminishing wild.

It’s been very difficult the last decade in particular watching the stress on the frontiers of the wild, especially in East Africa. So far they’ve held their own, but the ramparts are trembling.

And you can see what’s coming, what will replace the truly unmanaged wild.

Private reserves. Some of them are quite good.

Most are in South Africa, but East Africa has a very famous one that has been around for nearly 30 years, Lewa Downs.

Private reserves have existed in South Africa for actually more than a century, but you can really argue that Lewa was the dawn of a new era when private reserves were not mostly for hunting, but for protecting game.

Lewa began with 5,000 acres in Kenya’s beautiful northern frontier just north of Mt. Kenya, where the few remaining wild black rhino still roamed. The owners and investors of the ranch rounded up as many rhino as they could, and they’ve protected and farmed them ever since.

Today Lewa is 40,000 acres, mostly a not-for-profit conservation organization and proudly boasts of 62 free-ranging black rhinos. The reserve contains all Kenya’s big wild game, all within a massive, fenced wilderness that in many respects would not differ from the wild outside its borders, except that there is less poaching.

Lewa is adjacent the natural home of the very rare and critically endangered Grevy’s zebra, and so Lewa is now the Grevy’s principal hope for survival.

With several tourist camps built within the reserve, field science facilities and a growing endowment Lewa is now the premiere private reserve in East Africa, and a model for all of Africa.

But … it isn’t the wild I remember.

In South Africa private non-hunting reserves proliferate and are much more commercial and (financially) successful than in East Africa.

I am amazed, for example, with the speed with which the “Garden Route” has turned into a private wilderness.

Well nicknamed, the Garden Route is the coastal stretch between The Cape and Port Elizabeth. In times past it was known for its laid-back resortiness, spectacular coast and world-famous cliff walks (like the Otter Trail). Not unlike the coast from San Francisco to Mendocino.

The area did not have big game wilderness. In fact by the 1930s an official South African game count put the total big game remaining in an area the size of Maryland at 11 elephant. But as with much of undeveloped coastal California, as soon as you leave the coastal strip, there is wild land.

So in 1931 the South African government created a new wilderness out of nothing just off the coast, with the idea of repopulating it with big game. Today Addo Elephant Park has 450 elephant, as many for its size (630 sq. miles) as Kenya’s still totally wild Amboseli National Park.

But it’s not the wild, as not only is the exterior fenced, but there are sections within the fenced park that are fenced again, to protect certain species.

But the park has been so successful that a few years ago some of these internal fences were removed and even more exciting, cats have finally been introduced. Until just a few years ago the park was cat-free, managed to protect endangered species.

The “reintroduction” of predation into this man-made ecosystem will trigger the management of the park to more or less “lay off” the until now strict culling that had been employed. In a sense, the South Africans are trying with some critical success to wild-up a previously unwild area.

And all around Addo have developed many private non-hunting reserves, each usually dedicated to protecting one set of species or another. The Lalibela Game Reserve, for example, is specific to the protect of smaller cats like serval and sand.

I hope Addo’s patient, slow rewilding works. And I commend enormously Lewa and enjoy even the tinier places like Lalibela.

But every time I step onto my secret hills in the Serengeti, looking over miles and miles of undeveloped, roadless wilderness, I bemoan its coming to an end. I’m just an old man nostalgic for the dwindling frontiers of my youth.

No Pennies for Wonder

February 13, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 7 Comments

Have you ever wondered if it’s worth living?

Think about that phrase, carefully, especially the verb: “Wondered.” To me after all the science and experience of organic mechanics, “life” passes out of the threshold of clear understanding into absolute “wonder.”

Don’t peg me wrong. I’m radical pro-choice and don’t believe a fetus of any age has more will than the mother carrying it. I’m a staunch advocate for specific cases of euthanasia and the right of an individual to end their life.

I think using animals in some human medical research is necessary, and I see a need to embrace large animal culling in cases of serious human/wildlife conflict (and this can’t possibly ever include protecting someone’s roses from deer or trash cans from racoons!)

And I support completely the controlled breeding of captive wild animals in order to protect their gene pool.

But that doesn’t mean killing an 18-month old giraffe in front of TV cameras and cutting it up in front of primary school children.

That’s exactly what Danish officials at the Copenhagen zoo did Sunday afternoon.

Zoo officials in Denmark didn’t just get rid of an unwanted animal. They “dissected” it in front of children to demonstrate animal anatomy, and then they fed the pieces to their lions in front of TV cameras.

I don’t doubt both acts have educational value, but I “wonder” where Danish wonder has gone. What they did is dead wrong.

Here’s the important background:

Over my life time zoos have transformed their purpose from showing off unusual animals to researching ways to protect them.

Zoos came into their own in the 17th and 18th centuries when it became possible to transport weird and rarely seen beasts large distances and then keep them alive in habitats not natural to them. Zoos began to replace museums as the places people would visit to increase the “wonder” of their world, especially the distance places they’d never get to see.

In the 19th and 20th centuries in particular zoos grew immensely important to the world’s main cities.

It was one thing to buy a bag of popcorn and watch Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers wiggle into their aluminum foil tights and fly to the moon. That was “wonder”ful but you knew in your heart it wasn’t real.

It was quite another to walk into a zoological park and actually see King Kong glare at you!

Well into the end of the 20th century zoos were considered a public service. They were funded by the cities they served, and almost always free to all. The Great Conservatism that so decimated public service in the last half century reversed that, and most zoos are now mostly private institutions. And even public ones, like Copenhagen, face reduced public financing.

By the end of the 20th century the “wonder” of seeing a gorilla in a cage had seriously diminished. There was Animal Planet and Planet of the Apes.

The urgency was no longer just to display King Kong for grade schoolers who could see the king in the wild on their iPhone. It was to protect the king’s still wild relatives in distant jungles so that the life form didn’t disappear forever.

Species survival is today what zoos are all about.

The Species Survival Program in the U.S., and the European counterpart that played a role in the recent giraffe incident, are the preeminent missions for world zoos.

Among the many other things they do is to regulate the specific animals that zoos can have, breed and trade with each other.

The giraffe that was killed in Copenhagen last weekend was a subspecies of the reticulated giraffe, which is among the rarer forms still living in the wild in Africa. Its habitat is much more threatened than the habitat of the ordinary giraffe and so it is much more endangered.

One of the first things that happens to wild animals with a diminishing habitat is to become inbred. I’ve seen these giraffe in Samburu in Kenya already showing evidence of serious inbreeding in the wild, often in the form of splayed feet, irregular hide patterns, asymmetrical horns and more recently, many more benign tumors especially on the belly.

Inbreeding accelerates extinction in the wild. The pie-in-the-sky theory is that as wild animals go extinct, zoos can protect a healthy gene pool in the captive population, and then release these animals back into their natural habitats once the habitats become protected enough.

But if those captive animals are as inbred as the ones that went extinct in the wild, it would be pointless.

Alas there is a lot of euthanasia in zoos all over the world, including the U.S, and especially of big headliners like lion. In the U.S., however, all sorts of efforts are made prior to actual euthanasia.

It begins by limiting breeding to begin with, since all the animals’ genomes are pretty well known. The science isn’t wholly exact, but usually exact enough that animals that are abundant enough in the captive population need not be placed together so that they breed.

That was the first giant mistake that Copenhagen made although we haven’t yet been told the whole Copenhagen story. There are legitimate arguments “on the other side” that suggest breeding is as necessary to maintain the health of a female and the sire of an offspring, as to just create an offspring.

But once an inbred is born it is a liability to the long-term survivability of its species.

In the U.S. zoos will do everything possible before killing the animal. As in Denmark there are plenty of people willing to pay for it. That comes with a bevy of other problems, though, including whether proper care would be available.

Often big wild animals as pets end up being treated so poorly that I believe euthanasia is preferred.

Why not just separate the animal from the others and keep it at the zoo?

There’s the point, folks. Because there’s not enough money. Because there aren’t enough cages and space and employees, because zoos are no longer in the public domain but in private hands. Capitalism governs the mission no matter how compelling the science is. There are no pennies left for “wonder.”

It’s hard to imagine that the cold-hearted antic of this past weekend was the culmination of all these otherwise extraordinary attempts to find alternatives. The zoo officials seemed absolutely blindsided by their mission to protect the gene pool.

If all we need is science and wonder is expendable, what’s the point?

Save it By Killing it

October 25, 2013October 25, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 7 Comments

Sports hunting’s opposition to “listing” the African lion as an endangered species is a battle royale that unmasks the industry’s indifference to real conservation.

The Asian lion, nearly extinct in India and Nepal, was declared an endangered species in 1970. In July of this year the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), the agency charged with implementing America’s Endangered Species Act (ESA), announced it was considering listing the African lion in the same way it had listed the Asian lion in 1970.

(FWS, ESA, CITES are all magnificent but confusing. After this blog, below, I try to untangle them for you.)

FWS is acting in response to a request by five U.S. organizations: International Fund for Animal Welfare, Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society International, the Born Free Foundation/Born Free USA, and the Defenders of Wildlife and Fund for Animals

These organizations are reacting to a steep decline in lion populations documented especially over the last decade. The decline is related to a number of factors, some of which I’ve discussed in earlier blogs, but basically it boils down to a squeezing down of the size of the African wild as African countries develop so rapidly.

If FWS does “list” lion, it will have several immediate effects. The first is that zoos, circuses and a few individuals who own and possibly breed lion in the U.S. will be further regulated in how they do so.

There is little opposition to this, because the regulations are already pretty tight and zoo organizations are well allied to the EPA.

The second, though, has caused an explosion of opposition: Sports hunters will no longer be able to bring their “lion trophy” home.

As with elephant, today, a hunter could still go over to Africa and shoot a lion where a given country allowed it, but anything but the photograph of his hunt would have to be left behind.

A third but possibly the most important effect of such an FWS “listing” would come a bit later: That would be the similar “listing” of African lion as endangered by a world treaty, CITES. That would essentially end lion hunting throughout the world.

The opposition has exploded. I won’t cite all the sports hunting, NRA related and other organization that have gone ballistic. Just give Google a few words and you’ll spend your next month reading through them.

But I am appalled, however, that National Geographic editorialized against “listing” by citing a Tanzanian game reserve that it claimed was dependent upon “$75 million dollars annually from lion hunting.”

NatGeo took up the most prevalent argument around that listing the lion will turn off a spigot of development funds derived from hunting that is essential for conservation, and lion conservation in particular.

The research center NatGeo quoted is a part of the remarkably corrupt Tanzania Wildlife Department, and there’s not a scientist on earth that trusts them.

NatGeo cited three lion experts in the editorial. Paula White, director of the Zambia Lion Project, was one. Zambia as a country has just banned lion hunting and prior to that ban it was earning as much if not more than Tanzania in lion hunts. Kenya has banned all hunting since 1979, and both its lion population and its tourism has grown substantially since.

The second expert cited is the widely respected Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota. In 2010 Packer and two others published a paper in Conservation Biology that gave the Tanzanian government five steps that it must undertake if it were to continue allowing the hunting of lion.

The government has taken none of them.

But what is most of an affront to those of us who read NatGeo in the crib is that the editorial is written by an official of Safari Club International, the world’s largest hunting organization.

NatGeo, as I’ve said before, has gone the way of the Wall Street Journal and Congress. Just survey its weekly fare on its cable channel to confirm this.

Even the New York Times on its op-ed page allowed un-fact-checked statements by a Tanzanian official that were quickly pointed out fallacious by LionAid in the UK.

As any scientist will confirm, animal numbers in Africa are very hard to come by. Government statistics are poorly collected and compiled and often just made up. Tanzania is probably the worst example. So it is hard to wholeheartedly embrace LionAid any more than the Tanzanian government as they duke out numbers.

But the best statistics documented, by researchers like Packer, whose studied recommendations for lion conservation are then wholly disregarded by Tanzanian officials, suggests that those officials are the least likely to present good evidence.

My point in this blog is to argue that “banning hunting” is not going to harm conservation. I think Fish & Wildlife is well advised to consider that banning lion hunting will, in fact, promote conservation. It’s hard to imagine why banning the killing of a species in decline won’t be of some use, if not serious aid.

The recent moves by Botswana and Zambia, and the long history that Kenya has with banned hunting, provide warehouses of proof that banning hunting is a good conservation tool.

The pitiful attempts to enlist academic support for the opposition, as evidenced in the fallacious articles in NatGeo and on the op-ed page of the Times, is just further proof that facts mean little to an industry, which like those supporting the NRA, may be severely hurt by the listing.

So their real colors come out, their ire is fired, when their principal goal, hunting, is challenged.

No, you cannot save lion by killing them.

Endangered species is a somewhat complicated topic. America’s current Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973 was signed by President Nixon as a replacement of a 1969 law which had a rough start and rocky judicial test.

The ‘73 law went all the way to the Supreme Court where it was strongly affirmed, and it has been the law governing the protection of endangered species in the U.S. ever since.

Parallel to the American experience, the world as a whole was formulating a treaty that would protect species worldwide. Its first draft was in 1963, but after the American law was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1973, CITES was also formed in 1973 and now has 180 subscriber nations including the U.S.

While it’s not wholly true that CITES walks in lock-step with ESA, particularly in the last decade, it does tend to “list” species after ESA does.

This only makes sense, because what CITES does is ban the international trade of the species listed. ESA, on the other hand, has much more power within the U.S. It can stop the development of a dam, for instance, or forbid hunting even in a private forest, if it finds a species is being threatened by that action.

And because America remains the largest economy in the world, whatever ESA “lists” becomes easier for CITES to enforce if it “lists” the same species.

Ban East African Hunting

October 24, 2013October 24, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Sports hunting has long been characterized as a conservation tool. That is absolutely not the case in East Africa, where all trophy hunting should be outlawed.

Kenya banned all hunting in 1977, then later allowed some bird hunting. But the other nations of East Africa promote sports hunting.

This article shows why sports hunting throughout all of East Africa should be banned. I think it likely with time the ban should extend throughout all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Botswana recently banned hunting, and Zambia recently banned the hunting of cats. I think it inevitable even the big hunter destination of South Africa will finally also ban trophy hunting.

But right now the evidence is so compelling to end hunting in East Africa, that’s where this article focuses.

The power of the sports hunting industry and the gun manufacturing industry cannot be overstated as we approach this debate. Sports hunting, even big game hunting in Africa, is far less contentious than gun control in the United States, for example. But the industries and lobby of wealth organized to promote gun ownership has virtually fused itself with the issue of sports hunting.

Americans constitute the largest single group trophy hunting in Africa. So American institutions, money and lobbying are integral to this African debate. “Americans are by far the most keen to spend around $60,000 on trophy hunts in Africa,” writes Felicity Carus recently in London’s Guardian.

The balance of American money and power supporting hunting is woefully unfair, and it isn’t just the NRA. Sportsmen’s Alliance and the National Shooting Sports Foundation are both funded by multiple large foundations whose donors are kept secret. Journalists shy away from reporting negatively about these monoliths and politicians give them a wide bay.

My intention, here, is not to take on sports hunting per se, nor gun ownership. The issue of big game hunting in Africa specifically has reached a uniquely critical threshold. In Africa – right now – big game hunting is a threat to conservation and rural development.

I fervently believe there are philosophical and ethical arguments against many types of sports hunting. But that is actually secondary to the more compelling reasons today in Africa that big game hunting should be ended.

The main reason big game hunting should be immediately ended throughout almost all of Africa is corruption and bad policy. The same reasons that conservatives use to deplore even humanitarian aid to emerging nations is grossly evident in Africa’s management of sports hunting, today.

We’re reaching a critical point in Africa’s wildness. It’s a tipping point. The growth of African societies is exceptional, and basically good. Bigger human populations are developing at breakneck speed. It’s hard for an American to imagine how fast, for example, Kenya is developing.

Many of my clients are repeat visitors to Africa. It’s amazing to watch their jaws drop when they return after even as few as five years. Highways, factories, residential developments .. it’s an unending serious of hopeful and modern progress.

And at what cost? At the cost of the wild, of course. That’s not a surprise and it’s not new. But it is changing.

Only a decade or two ago, safari tourism was critical to the economic health of Kenya, vying with the production of coffee and tea for the top spot on Kenya’s GDP. Today, tourism overall in Kenya represents only 5.7% of GDP (2011) and arguably half that is non-animal, beach tourism.

And while it’s likely Kenya’s tourism is falling behind other sectors of its economy because of recent terrorist acts, neighboring and quite peaceful Tanzania’s trends are even more exaggerate.

Tourism as a part of the Tanzanian economy is expected to drop to 7.9 per cent by 2020 from 8 per cent recorded in 2010. Like Kenya, by the way, it is likely that the single biggest growth within tourism in Tanzania is the beach, not animals.

This emphatically doesn’t mean that safari tourism isn’t growing. What it means actually is that so many other sectors of the economy, like oil production, are growing much more rapidly.

Oil is more important than lions. It wasn’t in Teddy Roosevelt’s day.

So the threat to the wild is severe in Africa. While the U.S. continues to debate whether the keystone pipeline should be laid over our wild lands, there’s not a moment’s hesitation about a new dam project cutting a chunk out of Africa’s largest wildlife park or slicing away protected marine environments for deep-sea drilling.

It is not surprising, then, that in most of the protected wildlife reserves in Africa, animal populations are falling, often because those reserves are either being reduced in size or because the pressures on their periphery are growing so great.

Sports hunting in Teddy Roosevelt’s day hardly disturbed the ecosystem. The technology of guns was far more limited than today. Animals in rural areas at home and in Africa were truly pests, because there were so many. Most sportsmen (including TR) killed very much for the meat that was essential food for them.

But as societies developed, as Africa is developing today, hunting too quickly began to deplete animal numbers (bison, pigeons, wolves, etc.). Wild environments were protected, and most hunting banned within them. And where it isn’t completed banned, it’s heavily regulated.

The reason is terribly simple: there’s little contest between a hunter and a wild animal, and over time, wild animals lose the number’s game.

Africa has proved itself incapable of banning or regulating. Well managed (regulated) hunting is often considered a buffer against poaching, and so it was in Africa thirty years ago. The outskirts of protected areas were declared hunting preserves, and the symbiotic relationship with the protected area was a healthy one.

Along or within some protected areas in Africa hunting was used as the culling tool, as wildlife managers tried to establish a carrying capacity balance within an areas biodiversity. Hunters paid royally to kill “excess elephants” that lived at least part of their time in Kruger National Park in South Africa, for instance.

All of this worked, once. It doesn’t, now.

“Presently… the conservation role of hunting is limited by a series of problems,” according to two African and one French conservationists writing the definitive scientific paper against hunting published in Elsevier six years ago.

After meticulously detailing all the potential good that sports hunting in Africa could do, the authors take a fraction of the article to document how it sports hunting in Africa fails because of government mismanagement and corruption.

The list of corruptible acts linked to sports hunting in Africa would take a month of blogs to document. Whether it’s Loliondo in Tanzania, where land has been arbitrarily taken from both the Serengeti and Maasai farmers for Arab hunting, or ranches in South Africa recently unmasked as poaching rhinos, the list seems endless.

There are so many pressures on Africa’s wild, today, that it is nonsense to continue to allow a contentious one, sports hunting. The trophy hunting industry is tiny, in monetary terms, compared to overall tourism.

Its effect as explained in the Elsevier article is negative. So why continue it? Just so people can get a rush killing an animal? What other reason remains?

We are fighting the dam in The Selous, uranium and gold mining in the Serengeti, off-shore drilling in Lamu and highways through Nairobi National Park. There is absolutely little reason we shouldn’t also be fighting sports hunting, which provides even less benefit to Africa or its wilderness than mining natural resources or moving morning rush hours.

The time for Africa trophy hunting is over.

(Tomorrow, I discuss a very specific sports hunting issue that is now Africa’s hottest wildlife topic: should hunting lions be ended by listing them as an endangered species.

Stay tuned.)

Culling & Killing

October 22, 2013October 22, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hunting and culling are acceptable in certain cases to protect the lives and livelihoods of people. In Africa this is a complex and difficult topic.

In my series on hunting this week I argue that hunting is no longer a good conservation tool and that in most cases should be outlawed. But there are reasons beyond conservation that make hunting and culling reasonable in limited cases.

The obvious first one is to protect people and you may think it silly to even note this. But I do so to point out how easily the concept is abused.

In June a visitor near a trail head at the Denali Park headquarters shot and killed a moose that he claimed was charging his family. Although the Park Service decided it was a justified killing, it’s hard to imagine so.

Similarly and also because of Congress’ recent act to allow tourists to carry firearms into national parks, bears are now being killed.

Having been in Denali often, and often enjoyed the crowded visitors center, as well as a number of its well patrolled tracks, the authorities have a pretty good record at advising people how to remain out of harm’s way.

Until the Congressional law allowing firearms, it was not by shooting the animal that a tourist protected herself. Simply moving away from it has proved time and again the most effective defense. In fact there is every concern now that animals fired upon will grow increasingly aggressive.

So the specific cases in the foregoing represent abuse of an otherwise reasonable cause for killing an animal.

In Africa these human/animal conflicts are exponentially greater than here at home, and there are many more bigger and destructive animals.

It isn’t tourists being threatened in Africa, it’s farmers and school children. And as human population centers increase and necessarily compete with areas previously wild, these conflicts grow faster than even neutral policy makers are able to deal with.

There are no statistics in East Africa as kept by American parks or the State of Alaska. But everyone knows there are dozens of human/animal conflicts weekly just in the northern game area of Tanzania.

“The animals just cause problems. During the rainy season the lions and hyenas attack us all the time,” one Maasai farmer told London’s Guardian newspaper.

Because tourism, derived from these big animals now accounts for nearly 15% of Tanzania’s GDP, the acts of farmers to protect themselves, their livelihoods and families is technically illegal.

But in the same Guardian article, a Tanzanian field worker for one of the world’s most radical animal conservation organization, African People & Wildlife (APW), conceded “ “It’s not easy, there are lots of problems, but we must try to understand the villagers instead of just punishing them.”

So both Kenya and Tanzania have passed laws that compensate farmers and landholders who can document destruction by a wild animal. But documentation is difficult and corruption caps an absolute inability to effect this as workable policy.

APW is not yet up to my reasoning that given the lack of workable policy, villagers should be able to kill an animal that threatens them, but I think the mounting number of incidents in East Africa will ultimately make this policy.

Culling is a more delicate issue, and for years I felt it unnecessary, but now I don’t. It had been a standard practice throughout all of southern Africa until the mid 1990s when animal rights’ activists prevailed.

Culling was stopped throughout much of southern Africa when the most used and famous park, Kruger, banned culling in 1995. But then it was reinstated in 2008.

Arguments for culling are often flawed. Similar to those used to promote deer culling here at home, bad arguments are often proffered that extreme population densities of one species crowd out another.

Evidence of this doesn’t exist. I don’t subscribe to the notion of “invasive species” because there is no documented case of invasive species categorically pushing another species to extinction – not kudzu, not garlic mustard, not Asian carp or Japanese beetles … or any of the other similar species’ claims in Africa.

I see “invasive species” as the heroes of natural selection, and as best evidenced by the long-term results of the kudzu invasion, nothing bad really happens in the long-term. In fact, it’s usually a good outcome.

The initial invasion of kudzu produced visible declines in other plants, but after long-term studies many of those competing plants have returned, and researchers obsessed with the notion of “invasive species” had to result to chemical harms to the atmosphere, something much harder to refute but similarly much more oblique.

Many argue kudzu is now saving forests. After years of trying to insist kudzu was going to take over the world, southerners have come to grips with its advantages conceding the any destruction was insignificant.

See a documentary film produced at the University of Alabama.

An extreme theory of invasive species leads to the South African concept known as “Carrying Capacity” which claims to determine the most perfect balance among all species in an ecosystem, and then prunes and imports species to maintain this balance.

“Carrying Capacity” was the original reason used by Kruger park scientists to cull before giving in to to animal rights activists in 1995.

But it was something quite different that tipped the scales and allowed them to reverse their decision 13 years later. The compelling argument became “human-elephant conflict” according to parks’ studies.

To be fair, Kruger and South Africans still embrace “Carrying Capacity” which is, of course, allied to notions of controlling invasive species. Both arguments might be useful when managing a defined area natural wilderness. But neither is compelling when applied to larger areas or the wild as a whole at which point it becomes as destructive as the impetus for considering it.

Human/animal conflicts, though, are compelling enough. That’s when hunting and culling are justified.

Thursday, I’ll examine why sports hunting is no longer a viable conservation tool in Africa or here at home.

Muskox in Retrospect

June 11, 2013June 11, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The most important of many ecological stresses in Africa is human/animal conflict. In Alaska, it’s global warming. How scientists and citizens respond to these stresses reveals the vibrancy of our cultures.

Fairbanks is not exactly your most cosmopolitan town, and we all know that Alaska is truly the last frontier. Wide open spaces and the challenges of a frontier draw special classes of people.

They include military and commercial – particularly the commercial ones dedicated to the extraction of natural resources. But they are predominantly pioneers, which in my day when I thought I was one was called a hippy.

But shake off the labels and you get a collection of people in Alaska, now significantly more powerful and numerous than the original natives, who are immigrating away from development… by choice.

Development is considered by myself, and I think most of the world, and probably 99.9% of Africans, as not only good but imperative to earth’s survival. And I don’t mean splitting logs and plastering up your own log home.

I mean power lines, sewage systems, clean water treatment facilities, railways and airports to name a few of probably thousands of critical community responsibilities that the most basic government is entrusted with.

And yes, conserving the wilderness. At least until we’ve got something sustainable to replace it, which is right now beyond even reasonable scifi.

But I dare say most Alaskans don’t quite see it the way I do. And I understand why. In their own lifetimes, or at least those of their parents, the population of this 15th fastest growing state in the Union came out and staked a claim and not only survived, but maybe even became happy.

On their own, or at least at lot more on their own than my clients who live in the suburbs of New York.

So stipulated. You don’t need the EPA to be happy in Coldfoot.

But … unfortunately for the Alaskans, the New York suburbanites do need the EPA in Coldfoot in order to live happily in Ocean Beach, New Jersey. There is a connection between how well the wilderness is being cared for in Alaska, and to Hurricane Sandy.

And the Valdez oil spill absolutely sensitized a lot of residents of Valdez and Cordova and numerous other communities to the need for serious government regulation.

And today we went to the Large Animal Research Station at the University of Alaska and learned how 4300 muskox in Alaska are important to the retirees in Miami Beach.

It’s complicated, but bioindicators are often ambiguous if not totally confusing. I’ve often written how bird populations are one of the best bioindicators, anywhere. Because they can fly away, or fly back.

But so are the rarer animals on the fringes of our planet’s life systems, like the muskox. When we arrived here as custodians of the earth, working our way every day to become its master, the earth was moving on pretty well. At the end of the Ice Age, ecological change was of course happening, like global warming.

But 25,000 years ago it was happening at normal rate, about 4 ten-thousandths of a degree centigrade per decade. Today? About .13, or roughly 150 times as fast.

And the muskox knew this almost before scientists did, because its population crashed in the 1970s. No one really knew why, then, and careful remedial efforts have allowed a sort of gerrymandering of habitat and a control on what had been natural hunting. So they’re back. Not like they were, but they’re back, with great thanks to LARS.

But more important to LARS scientists is the retroview that they should have seen the muskox decline as a scream for help from the wilderness. They didn’t. Nobody did, not at first.

But the rapid change in temperatures, the warming, reduced food sources – especially lichens, the only food during the arctic winter.

There’s a big difference between the impact of a muskox decline in the arctic and New Jersey beaches wiped out in a single night. But it’s all the same, really.

Thanks, LARS!

alaskapipeline — On our way to our welcome dinner at a famous Fairbanks bar outside of town we stopped to look at the remarkable Alaskan pipeline. Built in 1970 it is 800-miles of complicated technology that has successfully withstood the arctic climate and numerous earthquakes.

Game Viewing in Zimbabwe

May 31, 2013June 11, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

After a relatively long period during which Zimbabwe’s national parks seemed to be recovering in spite of Robert Mugabe, tourists reported gunfire in the country’s main national park this week.

And — unfortunately — it was not the gun fire of a revolution. The shots came from hunting rifles.

Hwange National Park is Zimbabwe’s most precious big game wilderness. Located in the northwest of the country, it was one of Africa’s primary game reserves throughout the last century.

You need to be cautious when researching it, though, as is true of everything today in Zimbabwe. The link above to Wikipedia is quite dated, with Hwange’s biomass considerably smaller than the library reference suggests, and its ecology far more fragile.

“…the number of animals being snared for food by local people living on the boundary of the Park has increased dramatically,” reports one of Hwange’s most dedicated tourism operators. This because of severe food shortages throughout the country.

That’s only one of three major problems facing Hwange, today.

The second serious problem with Hwange is its very design. Wildlife filmmaker, Aaron Gekoski, documented this recently in his March production, “Grey Matters“.

When Hwange was created in 1928 it was understood there was not enough water for a real wildlife park. So the government built boreholes, water wells, throughout the park and has been pumping water for the wildlife ever since.

This isn’t unique. The same is done in Namibia’s main national park, Etosha, and in a variety of national and private reserves throughout southern Africa.

It works if maintained. But the last Zimbabwe resource that the current dictator cares about is its wildlife, and the boreholes have not been maintained. Fewer than half of the original ones are operating, and as a result, the animals are dying.

But Hwange’s greatest problem, reflected this week as tourists trying to find an elephant in Hwange instead heard it being shot, is the wholesale looting of its biomass, and not just by corrupt government officials, but by private hunting companies.

Soldiers regularly harvest ruminates indiscriminately, sometimes assisting villagers for their bushmeat. While subsistence hunting elicits some understanding from me, Zimbabwe soldiers are well paid.

And without any study or regards to biology or ecology, the government of Zimbabwe is trading animals for political favors.

Last year foreign wildlife investigators confirmed that the government of Zimbabwe had exported at least four small elephants to China. The act was little more than stupid cruelty by the seller and receiver. Four young elephant removed from their families have little chance of surviving, anywhere, much less in a Chinese zoo.

There was such worldwide outrage at this act last year, that the global treaty which governs the trade in international species of which China is a signatory, CITES, banned any further such transactions between Zimbabwe and China.

China is legendary at publicly accepting such restrictions while finding ways to work around them, or to simple illegally ignore them in practice. But the attention this focused on Zim’s dwindling elephant population provoked a real local vigilance that seems ready to expose any subsequent violation.

But while internationally Zimbabwe may be restrained, internally it’s gone bonkers.

One of Zimbabwe’s most important wildlife reserves is the Save Conservancy (pronounced Sav-hey), in the far southeast of the country that was once scheduled to become a part of a trans-national wilderness withn Mozambique and South Africa wildernesses.

Land grabbing has grown from sport to routine in Zimbabwe, and Save is being eaten away as the Mugabe regime parcels it out to its cronies.

And add to this devil’s den of looters professional hunting.

In the old, good days, Zimbabwe was a preferred destination of hunters, and its wilderness was one of the best managed in the world, with hunters and non-hunters in grand alliances that did much to preserve Africa’s game.

That’s changed. This week tourists in Hwange reported hearing gunfire, and not the kind which would excite us all that the regime was under assault. These were the shots from hunting rifles.

We don’t know if the elephants shot were by hunters from the regime, or hunters from abroad.

But the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force (ZATF), a proactive and somewhat subterranean wildlife NGO, insists that Zimbabwe professional hunters are now regularly harvesting animals technically illegally from national parks and private reserves, with the tacit approval of the Mugabe government:

Arnold Payne, Ken & Tikki Drummond, all of Impala African Safaris, have been named as the principal thieves.

Worse, ZATF says, “It is suspected that some of the hunters … are US citizens.”

The old adage, three strikes and you’re out, is dangerously close to being true in Zimbabwe’s big game wildernesses: subsistence hunting forced by food shortages, an ecological design of national parks that can’t withstand neglect, and now wholesale looting of the biomass.

Hwange and its other sister wildernesses in Zimbabwe which for so many years were the treasures of Africa now teeter on the brink of annihilation.

Spears & Signatures

April 18, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

A major fight if not an actual civil war is about to erupt in northern Tanzania, as Maasai prepare to battle government authorities in Loliondo, according to a BBC report this morning.

The dispute is over a Tanzania government decision to evict 30,000 Maasai from traditional grazing lands near the Serengeti National Park so that the area can be leased to a Dubai Hunting Company.

The story was first reported globally by the Christian Science Monitor earlier this month and went viral, mobilizing Maasai throughout the area.

The company, the Ortello Business Corporation (OBC), is a gigantic, jet-setter hunting company that has set up a mini city in northern Tanzania each mid-year for the last 20, for high profile hunting clients including Prince Andrew and most of the royal families of the Emirates and Jordan.

When I move near the area while still in the Serengeti National Park, my Tanzania cell phone beeps then displays the message, “Welcome to the Emirates.” They even bring cell towers.

The Arab operators of the area get free, undisputed access into and out of Tanzania. They have built a private airstrip on which modified 747s land direct from Dubai. Private security disallows anyone – including Tanzanian officials – from crossing their perimeter.

Until now, the under-the-table operation which has undoubtedly made many Tanzanian politicians very rich, has been slow to gain public attention. The Maasai have been battling the operation for years, although until now it’s been seen as the classic hunting/non-hunting battle over wilderness lands.

That changed dramatically when the government announced last year that it was adding about 580 sq. miles to an area still not fully surveyed but presumed to be around the same size. The doubling of the area is particularly aggravating to conservationists, because it would be a closed portal between the hunting area directly into the protected Serengeti National Park.

But more importantly to the Maasai, it means up to 30,000 will be evicted. Some claim as many as 48,000. The evictions more than 20 years ago that first set up the hunting block did not provoke a Maasai outcry.

That was probably because the Maasai were not as educated, not linked into social media and were at the time in their own battles with other Maasai just across the border in Kenya in internecine land disputes.

Until this incident, the controversy was confined mostly to photography safari tourists accidentally entering the Arab-held lands. Tourists at the prestigious &Beyond Klein’s Camp, for instance, would occasionally come across shot animals.

Community Based Tourism companies, including Dorobo, Hoopoe and Kibo Safaris that attempted to establish ventures with the Maasai often ran afoul of the Arabs.

But today it’s quite different. “There is no government in the world that can just let an area so important to conservation to be wasted away by overgrazing,” Khamis Kagasheki, the Minister of Tourism told the press last month.

The public nature of the government’s battle with activist Maasai is new. It seems to me they think they’ll win, either in the arena of public opinion, or against the Maasai spears.

The government is still reeling from the defeat to build the Serengeti Highway.

The characterization of the government action as enhancing conservation by protecting land that is currently being misused (over grazed) I see an indication the government feels that hunting is no longer as anathema to the public as it was just a while ago.

The activist NGO, avaaz, is promoting a world-wide petition with 2 million signatures to convince President Kikwete to nullify the decision. But based on public ministerial statements over the last month, the government will not be moved this time.

Maasai evictions from wilderness lands are not new. Likely the reason for the greatest spectacle on earth, the Great Wildebeest Migration, is that nearly 20,000 Maasai were evicted from the Moru Kopjes in 1972 that is now an essential wildebeest corridor within the Serengeti National Park.

I personally had a very educated and articulate Maasai friend killed in a battle with Tanzanian rangers two decades ago. So battle with the Maasai is not new, either.

But there’s something much different this time. Perhaps global awareness, perhaps the power of the social media – I’m not sure. But I am sure that if the government persists…

..the Maasai will fight.

On Safari: Tarangire at its Best

April 5, 2013April 6, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tarangire proved as exciting as I expected, and we dodged the heavy rain, and as a result we achieved the optimum experience of the year for this wilderness.

You can go on safari virtually at any time of the year to East Africa and with good planning have the most memorable trip of your life. But if you’re willing to gamble a bit – which my clients don’t realize I’m always doing with their trip – then you can bingo out marvelously, and that’s what happened to us in Tarangire.

I like traveling during the rains, and I try to do so just before the heavy and debilitating rains start, and that’s the gamble. And in fact this year heavy rains have started .. early, and so stay tuned to see how the rest of the trip might unfold.

But what it means for Tarangire is that the most beautiful landscapes in Africa have been created. The great sand rivers flow, the white tissue paper flowers explode in the beautiful grasses next to the yellow hibiscus and purple mini-dahlias and the landscapes in the sky are overwhelming: sculpted by a storm forming over there and giant cumulus over there.

And, most importantly, the animals are at their supreme. Everybody’s fat and sassy. So we saw the four grand lion brothers with big bellies and magnificently washed black manes. We watched a male leopard stretch out his own belly in the morning sun. And of course for Tarangire, we watched and watched and watched elephants playing and fighting and vying for position.

We’ve been here hardly a full day and our elephant count is approaching a thousand. At this time of the year when fewer tourists come and the veld is fulsome with food, there are many playful babies and many great bulls fighting to mate.

And Tarangire is anomalous, magnificently wonderful for its sheer numbers of ele but they become so dense particularly now that their normal behaviors begin to break down.

Families mix readily. Teenagers form gangs and often wander far from the family, and I often wonder how they matriculate properly. With normal behaviors young males are kicked out of the family between 10 – 12 years old, and they must immediately associate with an older male that teaches them how to behave.

This was discovered sadly several decades ago when authorities in the Pilanesberg reserve in South Africa imported a score of young male ele who hadn’t been matriculated by older males. They killed quite a few of the other animals before they were corralled in and scientists began to study what had happened.

And that was when it was learned how important the mentoring of a younger male by an older male is. But in Tarangire the groups are so dense and the age groups often segregate together that I just wonder if there’s been any science about mentoring in conditions like these.

The roughly 3700 ele in the “northern sector” of the park are mostly resident. And we saw nearly fifty hardly fifty yards from the park entrance as they were mingling about staff quarters. These are wholly habituated animals that rarely leave the park, much less this small area.

But as we moved south to our camp, we saw the truly wild and magnificent wilderness elephant. On two occasions (since we were using the same tracks) a tailless female stopped us and really threatened us.

My clients behaved wonderfully. Not a whisper was said, and when she asked us to back up, we did slowly. But we persisted within her area of irritation, and eventually each time she let us pass.

But altogether we’ve seen nearly a thousand, playing in relatively deep pools at the side of Silale swamp, wallowing in mud, mounting in courtship, trumpeting playfully and in the expected aggression that is generated by so many animals living so closely together.

As you’ve read in other blogs, I think there are too many elephant in East Africa. And the sad part of the story were all the dead forests growing further and further from the main transit passes in the south. Trees killed by elephants: forests turning into savannah.

And of course the growing human/elephant conflict, perhaps the single greatest issue in the natural history world of East Africa today.

But like any gamble, the gamble nature is presently taking sustaining so many elephants is exciting to behold. We only hope the outcome is not a loss, but a win. And frankly, I don’t know either how to call how it will be, or how it could come to be.

But we experienced it, because we gambled with the weather and so far won.

Techtonic in Nature

March 28, 2013March 28, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Separate but Equal: A chilling phrase used throughout history to justify such barbaric ideas as apartheid and reenforce the power of the status quo has now been applied to African wilderness in an attempt to save lions. It’s more naive than offensive.

Sorry to be such a drag on your week, but when the world’s greatest carnivore scientists conclude that the only way to maintain healthy populations of wild lions is to fence them, somebody’s got to remind them that then they’re no longer wild.

One of the greatest field researchers ever, Dr. Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota, led a team of 46 researchers that published this succinct and piercing recommendation earlier this month.

Lion populations have been declining for some time, and the study confirmed many earlier studies and reports that the decline is directly linked to lion/human population conflicts.

(There are, by the way, too many big cats in zoos.)

The March publication in Ecology Letters Online will become the definitive treatise on lion declines. Its cram-packed data is perfectly if masterfully compiled leading to a vastly understated conclusion that is tectonic in nature:

Fences.

The study acknowledges “fencing has so far only been widely employed in a few African countries because of aesthetic objections, financial costs and the impracticality of enclosing large-scale migratory ungulate populations.”

Presuming the local African has serious “aesthetic objections” to fencing strikes me if not racist patently patronizing, so let’s move on:

Packer et al conclude that it would cost $2000 per square km to preserve lion at about half their potential densities in the wild unfenced, as compared to about $500 per square km to sustain populations at 80% of their “wild” potential fenced.

This means it would cost about $30 million to fence Tanzania’s largest reserve, The Selous, and then an additional $22 million annually to manage that fencing.

In a cash strapped and aid-dependent economy, these numbers are mind boggling. I don’t doubt their veracity but when compared with the needs of human villages in the same areas in which lions now thrive, there is no chance this will be embraced locally.

That defaults the solution to foreign donors.

How do lions rank in the following list of priorities?

Water, Food, Electricity, Sanitation, Health, Education not to mention anti-poverty.

Finally, it isn’t just wildebeest or elephant migrations that are essential to the wild as we know it. It’s less dramatic and more subtle elephant and buffalo migrations, which need massive corridors to maintain healthy populations.

You might, indeed, fence lions and wildebeest and zebra. In fact Botswana did so, and it crashed their wilderness in the mid 1980s, leaving today a nice place to visit but hardly the wild that existed back then, with possibly a third of the animal populations deciminated.

But you can’t fence elephants, and buffalo are problematic. So are we talking about a “wild ecosystem” for lions that excludes anything over, say, two tons? Is this not as dramatic an alteration in what the “wild is” as one without lion?

An equally powerful if nuanced conclusion from this study is that social policies by governments like Tanzania and Mozambique which have struggled to allow indigenous populations to coexist with the wild, is a bad idea … (at least for the animals):

“Negative conservation impacts of human land use can often be [read: “should be”] minimized by restricting conflicting activities to separate areas rather than by encouraging their co-existence.”

A third of the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro ecosystem is the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which allows traditional Maasai to continue living and using the land. Similar policies exist in Mozambique and Uganda on wide tracts of wilderness.

These are not recent policies generated in any way as a response to human/wildlife conflicts. Rather, they were policies forced by the reality that humans with a right to ownership of the “wilderness” have been living there for eons.

Adopting Packer et al’s policy in this regards heralds back to the Trail of Tears, the justification at the time for which was much more noble than protecting a wild beast.

As Packer said with not but a bit of irritation to the New York Times:

“Let’s get real, here.” (Although in quite a different connotation.)

Packer is an outstanding scientist. But he’s a rather poor humanist, and with this study, either nihilistic or simply frustrated. By the way, he’s likely right, too.

What this means simply is that the wild is ending. Zoos are as capable of guarding a species’ survival as the wild can. Biodiversity on typical macro levels is in grave danger, and that may indeed bode ill for the world.

But the wild is ending. And ending the wild cannot be stopped if mankind doesn’t rev up into high gear, first, its own human development.

And that, Johnny, is the real story. There is no separate but equal. There is only togetherness.

The only possible solution to fixing lions’ lives is to fix people’s lives, if not first at least at the same time.

On Safari: East versus South

March 21, 2013March 21, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Six weeks in sub-Saharan Africa has confirmed my long-held views on where the best game viewing is and why, how seriously threatened the wilderness is by remarkably fast and unregulated economic growth, and how youthful optimism about Africa’s future mostly discounts its precious wilderness.

WildRhino — Wild rhino in the Okavango Delta.

My first stint of the year began in Cape Town, included Johannesburg, multiple places in Botswana including the Okavango Delta, Victoria Falls and Zambia, Nairobi, and ended as I guided my first “great migration safari” in northern Tanzania.

The ability to contrast East and southern Africa so immediately corroborates my long-held view that East Africa provides better game viewing for the typical safari traveler.

This might seem strange when I also tell you that in a single day on Chief’s Island in Botswana we saw the Big Five (lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and buffalo) and that seeing the Big Five in East Africa is no longer guaranteed no matter how many days you have on safari.

That’s because rhino is so rare, today, in East Africa. (Caution: captive or contained rhino, as found in fenced places like Nakuru National Park, Solio and elsewhere in

AdoptedBushBuck — We saw this bushbuck unnaturally traveling with a baboon family in Lake Manyara. Its possible adoption by the baboons is an example of East Africa's stressed wilderness.

Laikipia including Lewa Downs, doesn’t count. Those are fun to visit, but they aren’t true wildernesses, anymore.)

But therein lies the important distinction between East and southern African game viewing. The south’s wilderness has been managed much better over the last century. Kruger National Park in South Africa is likely the best managed wilderness on earth.

ManyGiraffe — Groups of up to 20 giraffe in East Africa are common. Much smaller numbers in southern Africa.

For more than a century, Kruger and similar southern African wilderenesses have sustained rich and varied biomasses. Although currently suspended throughout much of southern Africa including Kruger, culling had been and in many places still is an instrument of aggressive pruning that aimed to insure the most diverse biomass possible.

Culling has never occurred in East Africa, and likely because of its cost rather than any moral inhibition. Similarly, the south routinely reintroduces or just moves around various species from one wilderness to another in an attempt to achieve balance.

Anti-poaching is far better funded and managed in the south. All decisions about park management, its borders and its sustenance (including the still controversial actions of creating unnatural watering holes from aquifers) has come from officials that are far better trained and paid in the south than in the East.

So in a relatively short time in Botswana visiting two different areas in the Okavango Delta and Moremi we saw a balanced variety of several dozen types of larger mammals including a dozen elephant families and large numbers of buffalo and several prides of lion.

In Botswana’s Chobe balance has gone to the wind. Chobe is almost all elephants: too many, and at the exclusion of much of the rest of its historical biomass. It’s heart-breaking for me to return to areas along the Chobe River that were oncebeautiful forests and are, today, grasslands. The elephant population has destroyed much of Chobe’s former wilderness. It is, in fact, more like East Africa than southern Africa.

Which is why so many people love Chobe. There are so many elephants in so many endearing behaviors and from time to time dangerously so, that Chobe like so much of East Africa provides the thrills often missing from a more balanced and rich biomass.

whitWatchleopard — We see about the same number of leopard in east and southern Africa.

One implication in the above is that East Africa (and Chobe) are worse wildernesses, because the biomass is less rich, because they have either been poorly or not managed.

This remains to be seen. I think the scientific consensus points in this direction, but it’s been pointing in that direction for an awfully long time and we have yet to experience “the crash” scientists have been predicting for such out-of-balance wilderness.

Scientists might pale at the biocount of these wildernesses, but tourists are thrilled: On my great migration safari of 11 days in northern Tanzania, we saw 61 lions, 2 leopards, 5 rhino, and I don’t know maybe 500 elephant and a quarter million wildebeest? And perhaps several hundred thousand zebra, a hundred giraffe, and – very important by the way – fewer tourists than in Botswana.

This last observation, that my safari clients in East Africa encountered fewer other tourists did my safari clients in Botswana, is not the norm. Most East African tourists on the lodge circuit will definitely encounter more tourists than a similarly budgeted trip in southern Africa.

But I don’t like the lodge circuit, and the safaris I guide are expensive. This lets me remove my game viewing from heavily used tourist areas into the East African wildernesses that are truly less used than virtually any wilderness in the south.

The unmanaged, some say chaotic, out-of-balance wildernesses of Chobe and much of East Africa result in greater numbers of larger animals at the expensive of many smaller ones that have gone extinct.

Theoretically, this situation is not sustainable. And this tension of nature trying to preserve itself is likely the reason for the much greater drama usually experienced on an East African safari.

It’s certainly a bitter sweet reminder that urgent action to preserve these great East African wildernesses has been grossly neglected. But as crass as it may seem, it also provides at least for the moment (and perhaps at the cost of the future), the “greatest wildlife spectacles on earth.”

On Safari : Still Too Many Ele

March 7, 2013March 7, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tarangire National Park is the perfect place to demonstrate there are too many elephants in the wild right now, and it didn’t fail to confirm the theory this time! We had exceptional game viewing based from a new, luxury lodge called ChemChem.

Our day and a half of game viewing in Tarangire probably encountered 500 or more elephant, but it’s so difficult to estimate. In one panorama I challenged everyone in the group to count the elephants we saw, and the numbers ranged from 120 to 180.

Traditional elephant behavior breaks down in Tarangire because there are so many elephants. Families don’t separate themselves from one another but often travel, forage and frolic in the river together.

We saw week-old babies and octogenarians. We saw good tusks and many bad tusks or little tusks. We saw many babies and watching the rest of the family protect these little guys is absolutely wonderful.

And protecting them is so hard to do! Especially when they get down to the river and insist on rolling well beyond when mother thinks it’s time to leave.

We stayed at a new lodge outside the park for our first several days in Tarangire, before moving into the park and staying at a great place inside. The lodge is called ChemChem and it’s the dream of several French investors and old African hands.

Placed between Tarangire and Manyara, the ChemChem property extends all the way to the shores of Lake Manyara, and the activities my group enjoyed were really fantastic.

They included a walk where we got remarkably close to impala, giraffe and zebra. I don’t allow walking if there are predators or elephants around, and ChemChem assured me there weren’t.

A fabulous bush breakfast, Maasai sundowner chorus and sundowner along the lake are all a standard part of the ChemChem fare.

We’ve had some very heavy rains. According to the folks here, it’s just the rebeginning of the rainy season which starts in November/December and continues straight through May, with a noticeable letup in February. Well, the letup is over.

It was wonderfully exciting to go to sleep in ChemChem’s marvelous tents to the performance of lightning, thunder and tumultuous rain. I’m of course glad for this, because it means the migration in Serengeti (if the rain continues that far) will start to concentrate.

On our first game drive towards our second camp in Tarangire, Swala, we encountered again numerous elephant, lion mating, leopard, hartebeest and I’m sure I’m forgetting lots more. It’s been a wonderful two days so far, with another to go, in Tanzania’s elephant park, Tarangire.

Africa Answerman

Sharing the beauty of African life today. Adventurer. Conservationist. Owner of Explorers World Travel.

Category: Wildlife Management