Photo by Sarah Vieth, Ndutu, November 2011Climate change is slowly, steadily changing the ecology of the world’s most spectacular big game wilderness, the Serengeti. For a visitor, it’s nothing short of fantastic. For animals it’s terrifying. For the planet it’s just too complicated yet to say.
The roughly 7000 sq. miles of the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro wilderness is the greatest wildlife area on earth. Said with bias. And the necessary qualifiers are many, of course. But this is classic Africa that seems to get better to the casual visitor year after year.
Historically northern Tanzania’s rains begin towards the end of the year and last (with a noticeable but incomplete interruption in February) for 5-6 months. This year, and last year, they began much much earlier and ended a little earlier.
And, predictably, this sent the wildebeest circling faster. And all of us “experts” are thrilled and surprised. The wilde now seem to spend less time in the Mara in the northern reaches of the migratory route, and more time in the Serengeti. They don’t follow the rains, but they follow the grass the rain grows.
Rain patterns are critical to the great migration, as well as practically everything else in this ecosystem from fields of yellow bidens flowers to the nesting habits of pink-eyelided eagle owls. For all my life until now all of this explosion of life was pretty predictable. Getting harder, now.
I was astounded this morning, for example, to read a blog posted by Bill and Sarah Vieth from Evansville, Indiana, celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary in the Serengeti. They probably had no idea how remarkable was the photo Sarah took when they were in the Ndutu area, which I’ve taken the great liberty of reposting atop this blog.
So what’s so unusual about a lioness bringing back a wildebeest baby to its pride for a slightly late Thanksgiving?
There shouldn’t be baby wildebeest, now. Wildebeest are the predictors of the veld’s health and sustainability because their migration and foaling is … well, at least until now, predictable. Wildebeest babies in Ndutu are born in February. That’s what the books say. That’s what I saw for 35-36 of the last 40 years. This birth, following 8 months of gestation, is maybe two months early.
But alas, it all starts to match if you’re willing to believe that the rain clock in Equatorial Africa is changing. It syncs beautifully with last year’s early end to the rains.
Wildebeest rutting historically occurs as the rains end, and last year they ended early. In fact the news blog posted by the owner of Ndutu last May read: “Lake Ndutu was completely dry by the end of May! It’s the first time in all her years of being here that Aadje has seen the lake dry so soon after the end of the ‘wet season.”
Early December minus eight months equals early April. Remarkable, a shift of 6 weeks to 2 months.
Now, was this just a fluke?
I called Bill. Bill was kind enough to give me permission to post his wife’s photo, and went on at great lengths about what a great trip they just had. And he proved that photo wasn’t a fluke.
When Sarah and he were descending into Ngorongoro crater first thing one morning, they watched one, then two wildebeest births. He excitedly described to me the lurking hyaena and how one of the younguns didn’t make it. But proof positive how early the births are occurring!
Now it isn’t so hunky dory and simply just a shift in the clock. I saw a young wildebeest being born in April this year around Ndutu. In September in the far north of the Serengeti I saw baby wildebeest that couldn’t have been more than three months old. So clearly mother nature’s change of habit is causing some confusion with the wildebeest.
Like men, wilde may be resisting the idea of climate change. I excuse them. Their brains are smaller.
Rains began in the northern Serengeti with a vengeance this August, and while they’ve abated a bit right now, the center and southern part of the ecosystem is near flooded. What I think we’re experiencing is not just a shift to earlier rains, but an extension of the entire rainy season. I think we’ll soon all agree that it rains more and more than half the year on the Serengeti.
Or as one blog puts it, “Short Rains Aren’t so Short!”
That jives with rain patterns all around the planet near the equator. With global warming there is more moisture in the atmosphere. We’ve all heard about the 90-mile wide icebergs calving from the Antarctic. It floats towards Cape Town and melts. Seas rise, yes, but so does the atmosphere which in a warmer state can hold more and more water.
And it dumps conveniently on the equator. The Serengeti.
Wish it were just all that simple, but equatorial meteorology is far more complex than my Chicago television weatherman suggests. We have discernible seasons in the north and south of the world, but the equator doesn’t. Rains in equatorial northern Peru were devastating in the last few years, but hard to predict.
One week is a series of torrential storms; the next week seems like a drought. That’s the basic pattern as you move away from the equator, away from the Serengeti. That’s why the Somali refugee camp at Dadaab had thousands of refugees fleeing a drought 4 months ago, and thousands now fleeing floods.
But closer to the equator the complexity is less stark. Basically, it just rains more; it’s wetter.
So what does this mean to the animals?
Having lived there and visited constantly throughout my adult life, I can say with care that the animal populations are bigger, the viewing more dramatic as tension among predators and competition for food sources increases, but my worry is that it will all come crushing down some day.
You might call it the Animal Bubble.
Things are good for the animals, now. Probably will be for a few years, but just as wildebeest sex lives are getting screwed up (pun intended), massive ecological systems don’t like quick change. The response to quick change is usually to crash.
But right now, a month or more early, the wildebeest have massed at Ndutu and it’s pouring. And for now, they couldn’t do it better at DreamWorks.
I sit here watching a miserable cold rainy day waiting for snow. Birds (and “sunbirds”) living here in the Midwest have all but gone. But one remarkable bird in southern Africa defies this classic “going and coming” in a most spectacular way!
The southern carmine bee-eater is not only one of the grandest and most beautiful birds in existence, but it defies all notions about what bird migration means. Right now it’s heading south, but in hardly a few months it will head north further than where it started from! Then a few later, west, and finally, east! It zig-zags in a definite way, but why?
Conservationists tend to think of bird migrations as one-way reversibles. In other words, at one season they travel thata-way, and on the other season, they go thata-way backwards! Well that’s mostly true, and it seems to us that the birds are following the weather. We think, for example, that cardinals own fur coats but that little warblers would just freeze to death if they stayed.
Wrong. Temperature has absolutely nothing to do with where a bird wants to be. Birds follow their food. Reductions in temperatures reduce the food supply for many birds, like warblers eating bugs. But cardinals don’t eat bugs; they eat seeds and berries, and they’ve adapted to finding them even in the snow.
The carmine bee-eater’s there-again, back-again migration is linked in the same way. The bird is a specialist: it eats bees and other flying insects, and in southern Africa flying insects – particularly bees – are very much linked to when it rains. And the rain pattern in the southern part of the continent as I often explained is very complex.
And to make matters more extreme, the carmine nests in burrows of sand often on flat sand banks, digging a tunnel up to 6-feet long in which to lay its eggs. You can imagine this would not be an ideal strategy if it were raining.
So breeding occurs at the driest of times, along the great southern rivers like the Zambezi and Kavango, in August and September. There’s no drier time anywhere in southern Africa.
Eggs hatch, chicks emerge, rain comes, bees flourish all up and down the Zambezi as the ground bushes and native flowers in particular bloom presaging honey. But this doesn’t last long, because the rains grow intense, the temperatures rises, and many of the species of plant flower for a very short time and then just blossom out in bushels of thick green foliage.
So now in November the carmines move south. It’s probably started to rain south in South Africa by now, but down there many of the flowering trees like the jacaranda bloom before heavy rains, unlike the bushes along the Zambezi, and this attracts billions of bees.
One of the most beautiful sites on earth is the carmine bee-eater flying around a purple jacaranda tree! Its mostly crimson body blends into a deep teal head and underside, and with a sea-faring like deep black bill more normally associated with terns.
OK, so it’s spectacularly beautiful, but that’s not all. Its flight is magical. It’s in the class of birds that, true to name, eat bees and other flying insects. It plucks its prey right out of the air, nabbing that darn honeybee while it’s in flight.
This leads to all sorts of gymnastic swoops and backups, sometimes seeming to turn 180-degrees in midflight. And it seems to use its wings very little, a sort of effortless soaring that with a few facile flaps turns it upside and backwards, or sends it in exactly the opposite direction.
But one of the most amazing things about this bird is its migration. So right now it’s in South Africa with its new fledglings doing a job on the jacaranda. That only lasts a few months, and heavier rains and other factors bring much of South Africa out of bloom by February.
The fledglings are then fully grown. The birds actually maintain social groups even while migrating, and the young boy carmines have stayed with their mom and dad, and the girls have gone off to another group. And they get ready for the big migration as the flowers fall in South Africa.
They now travel long distances, sometimes right up to the equator. That’s nearly 2500 miles. I’ve seen them around Lake Victoria in February and March.
February is the lull in the single rainy season throughout most of East Africa. It’s actually more than a lull in Kenya, where it becomes completely dry, but I’ve only once seen a carmine north of Nairobi, and that was a single so obviously errant bird.
The lull in the heavy rains allows so many plants to bloom! In East Africa it isn’t just bushes but trees as well, and sometimes the many varieties of acacia will actually bloom a second time (most acacia bloom just before the rains begin in December and January).
So, lots of bees.
The rains end earlier in southern Africa than East Africa, so the carmines stick around in East Africa until like the wildebeest they’re forced to move because it gets bone dry. Wildebeest move north; carmines move south.
The carmines have 2-3 months now of little pickings, but there’s enough. Flying insects other than bees become their main diet, and there’s enough to build a new home and have new chicks.
In the end, the carmine has traveled as far as many of the longest distance warblers. It’s just not up and down, but a zig-zag through the remarkable ecology of this magical continent.
Photo by John Sullivan in the Maasai MaraRains in Africa bring rebirth unlike anywhere else on earth. I don’t mean things just start to grow again. I mean dead things come back to life!
Admittedly, most of these creatures are just fooling us to believe they’ve returned from the dark side. They aren’t really the same thing, but the children of things that died when the rains last ended. But there are a few true miracle creatures that defy all sorts of normal zoological physiologies.
They’re called “mudfish” and … well, for obvious reasons. See the main picture above, although that was taken at the end rather than beginning of the rains. It’s easier to find them like this, captured in wiggling pods as they tried to avoid the marabou stork’s gullet, but before they’ve hibernated for the dry season.
The narrow picture to the right is one of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s several priceless ancient African sculptures praising mudfish. This one is titled, “Rattle Staff: Hand Holding Mudfish (Ukhurhe)” and can be found in gallery 352. And it’s now — at this time of the year — that they reemerge.
They’re an important but small family of earth’s creatures widely referred to as lungfish. Up to 6′ long, they’re mean predators: They can bite off your finger. They breathe with lungs, not gills. They can walk on land. They’ve been on earth for 100 million years and are the direct descendents of the 450 million year old fossil creatures that first walked fish out of the sea.
AND they can live 100 years BUT they regularly die just as many years as they live.
Say what?
At the end of every dry season, they wallow as in the picture above, frantically trying to discourage predators as their home evaporates. Then one night, they wrap themselves in a self-made mucous cocoon and become desiccated with the mud. Almost all their bodily functions cease.
Unlike bears or caterpillars changing or a 17-year grubbly little cicada in a shell under my oak tree, these creatures actually come to a near complete halt.
Until the rains return.
Those of us who know where to look after the first big rains … we’ll find them! They don’t emerge necessarily altogether like they are above. Usually the water has to be a bit deeper to break their hard cocoon and release them, and at that point they’re wholly under water.
A whole bunch of things in Africa actually behaves like mudfish: Toads, true frogs, salamanders, and dozens of insects and smaller carp-like fish are born, live their cycle, mate and die in a single pool of water.
That’s the difference: those creatures die leaving eggs to carry on their species. But mudfish don’t die, exactly. They, well, come back!
This rebirthing quality gave mudfish a divine character with early Africans. Particularly in the more developed early west African societies mudfish was often considered sacred and often the guardian or guide for a royal personage from this world to the next.
In Benin it was associated with Oba, the king, who had achieved the power of life and death of his subjects because of his divine association with the mudfish. In later more modern times, mudfish were prayed to, and petitioned especially for acts of healing.
In the northern west we often chastise equatorial and sunbird people for not appreciating the “change of seasons.” Well, there’s no snow on the equator, but in the wildernesses still preserved where dams, irrigation and boreholes have not disrupted the normal seasons of rain, change here can be much more dramatic than a leaf turning red.
The meaning of water falling from the sky is much more profound. Things come back to life!
The Ethiopian dam, Gilgel Gibe III, will be 2000′ wide, 734′ high, hold a reservoir 81 sq. miles large, become Africa’s largest hydroelectric plant and some say the planet’s greatest ecological catastrophe. Save the wild, or turn on the lights?
For the mid-term at least (25 years), it will provide enough electricity for all of Ethiopia’s grand development plans with lots over to help neighbors Kenya and Uganda.
It will dam the Omo River above Kenya’s Lake Turkana. This is one of the most remote places in Africa. I floated the Omo as early as 1981, and the peoples who live along it have not changed much since. I often tell tourists that the “village” they want to see near their Mara camp is either hocus-pocos or a living museum, and that only in remote areas of Ethiopia and The Sudan can truly primitive people still be found.
The Omo disgorges into the giant desert Lake Turkana. About the size and shape of Lake Michigan, Turkana is a remnant of a prehistoric Nile river system, and no rivers flow out of it, now. It’s surrounded by harsh desert.
The Turkana people who live around it fish and farm seasonally, in a tight belt right around the lake itself, as rainfall is scarce. But the seasonal floods of the Omo are enough for some agriculture, and the lake is rich with fish: the world’s largest crocodiles live here. Peter Beard’s book Eyelids of the Morning shows a croc from here that is 28′ long.
Of course all of this is in jeopardy, now.
Leading the fight against the dam is the California-based International Rivers. They successfully spearheaded a drive that resulted last month in UNESCO and other UN agencies warning Ethiopia it could lose all sorts of funding if it continues with the project.
International Rivers claims that a half million traditional peoples along the Omo and into Lake Turkana will be catastrophically effected. It calls the Omo River the “umbilical chord” for Lake Turkana.
Seasonal farming based on the seasonal floods of the river (very much like the Nile), fishes, wildlife and plants are all doomed if the dam is built, IR claims. In addition to less fresh water in a desert desperately in need of it, the salinity of Lake Turkana will increase to toxic levels.
The dam itself is estimated to cost $1.55 billion. Another quarter billion will be needed for transmission lines.
Initially this was financed by the African Development Bank and the World Bank. But starting several years ago, the environmental impacts seemed so grave western agencies began bailing out of the project. The financing has been taken over by China.
The dam is about half completed, now, mostly with Ethiopian money spent and Chinese funds promised, and it cannot proceed without further cash, so it’s up to China, now. IR and several international organizations are now pressing China to end its participation.
Last month, an Ethiopian journalist who did little more than report all the above, was thrown in jail.
This is a high wire game.
If IR claims are even partially correct, it is Kenya that stands to be most impacted. Turkana’s life-giving water is one of the few reasons the area in Kenya’s far north has not succumbed to the current famine.
But Kenya just signed an agreement with Ethiopia to buy the electricity from the dam.
Africa needs electricity. And presuming for an instant that the Kenyan authorities understand the ramifications, and that there is a real possibility that their northern villagers will be critically compromised, they have still decided to support the project.
Africa needs electricity. Nairobi’s reservoirs have almost refilled with unusual rains. But power outages still occur. The city is growing like a morel. Industry is exploding. Africa needs electricity.
Do we stop the dam, save Turkana and condemn Kenya and Ethiopia to reduced development? Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, not your nicest character, nevertheless put it succinctly:
“The views of western critics are ironic as Ethiopian facilities are infinitely more environmentally and socially responsible than the projects in their countries, past and present,” he said.
Meles claims the western world is in a conspiracy “to condemn African peoples to extreme poverty.”
Africa needs electricity. Should we stop this, and then fund their nuclear power plants? Or massive solar or wind or other projects that can’t even get traction at home?
“They are concerned about butterflies’ lives, but not human diseases,” Meles says of us.
Numerous organizations have rallied around IR to defeat the dam. Even the palaeontologist Richard Leakey has pointed out that some of the world’s most treasured archaeological sites will be compromised.
Porcupines are common in East Africa, but more often we thought we saw only smaller ones that we presumed were juveniles, even though they always seemed to be alone. On closer inspection, they turned out not to be porkies, but giant crested rats! This week we learned how fascinating this creature is!
A famous East African scientist published a few days ago the remarkable story of this little creature, putting it on a pedestal of evolution well above many other animals.
I often explain on safari that if you reduce all goals in life to one, it’s defense – how to survive all the external efforts to destroy you. Africa has an amazing array of animal defenses from the sheer savageness of the honey badger to the heavy coat of the waterbuck that tastes so bad no one wants to get near it.
But this little creature, Lophiomys imhausi, has a defense that tops most others. Even at the first level, that its predators appear to get sick just looking at, scientists had trouble figuring out what was going on. But then, like the waterbuck, it was discovered that the creature’s hair was toxic to most of its predators.
The waterbuck secretes a musky oil. At first that’s what everyone thought the crested rat was doing, too, but it wasn’t. Its story is a remarkable lesson in extraordinary convergent evolution!
Little Porky chews a poisonous bark (that somehow doesn’t effect him), his saliva somehow reduces the soup in his mouth into a powerful poison, then he licks it onto his back.
And his back – those otherwise nondescript “crested hairs” – are made in such a unique way that they are specifically designed to absorb this specific concentrated poison.
And – critical to it being a successful radiated defense in natural selection – the poison doesn’t usually kill, just makes the predator very, very sick. So the predator not only won’t go near it, again, but can transmit this learned caution to siblings and offspring.
Imagine this. There were separate, ultimately converging evolutionary tracks: first, the ridiculously otherwise useless evolution of the hair structure; second, chewing of a plant but not for food so a craving by the creature to imaginatively but only partly consume something; third, (and I think most remarkably), the evolution of a poison in a plant where the creature lived that was just the right molecular structure that it wouldn’t kill but make very sick this creature’s predator; and fourth, the creature’s digestive system evolved to be immune to the poison in sync with its not wholly consuming it.
Wow. And there are probably many more lesser obvious biological evolutionary processes at work, too.
Consider that all these developments happened independent of one another, and essentially by chance. The only way any of this is comprehensible is to grasp the sense of time given this creature and its antecedents to create themselves.
That’s to me the greatest marvel of evolution: the backwards understanding of the length of time needed to let all these chances happen.
Of course there are evolutionary processes more complicated than this: what we call “malaria” is actually a sequential interaction of metamorphosing creatures (sort of caterpillar to butterfly types of life forms) that perfectly disrupt and destroy metabolic processes in humans.
But the crested rat is right out there to see! And in the panoply of seeable animals, this is pretty swift stuff!
I always knew not to mess with porky, so I never messed with Little Porky either (Jonathan’s petting not known), but I always presumed it was for the same reason: spines like the porkies. At a distance when light is shined on it (it’s a nocturnal creature), its crested back hairs erect just like porkies do.
But up close, which I’ve been able to do only once, the similarities are lost. They’re really hairs, not spines, and the overall creature is smaller. A porcupine can be 3 or 4 times larger when puffed up in defense.
Yet they both act the same way! Confronted, they turn towards you and raise those weapons on their back!
This amazing puzzle has been brought to us thanks to a famous scientists whose life has been dedicated to East Africa, Jonathan Kingdon. His library of books on Africa biology is large and includes field guides that guides like me have been using for years.
Kingdon told journalists that he kept crested rats as pets when he was a child growing up in East Africa. Finally, he decided, he had to figure out this incessant licking it always did, and simultaneously, why dogs that might see his pet would back away in horror, sometimes foaming up with saliva.
Now we know. One more little but absolutely amazing puzzle of life solved!
And thanks, too, for friend and client Mike Samars, for pointing me to this story.
This dark circular tale starts with a motive of greed so pure that death doesn’t matter, and it ends in a dither of hypocrisies that if not so morbid would be laughable. Yes, we are proud that the EPA is once again doing its job to protect us … but at what cost? At the cost of killing in Kenya?
A U.S. corporation which is banned from selling deadly pesticides in the U.S. continues to profit from the production of that pesticide on license abroad, and from the ultimate sale of that product to East Africans. There in East Africa, it’s killing lions and people.
In 2008 the moment the EPA was released from the strangle-hold of the Bush administration, it began a series of critical restrictions and outright bans on a whole range of dangerous products that had been under production for more than a decade.
One of these was the pesticide Carbofuran which had been first produced in 1992 to combat the infestation of Japanese beatles and other aphids that were specially attacking soybean crops.
It was a dangerous number of years until the EPA regained enough resources under the Obama administration to ban it outright in 2008.
Numerous reports of U.S. farm worker illnesses and deaths from Carbofuran had been documented. But because the EPA and other regulatory agencies had been so emasculated by the Bush Administration, federal documentation was almost nonexistent.
But state documentation was striking. In California alone more than 77 workers were documented with serious Carbofuran illnesses.
FMC Corporation was the main producer of Carbofuran by 2002. It had either filed for most of the patents or bought them from other companies.
As more and more states independently began to restrict the chemical’s use, FMC looked abroad. Even after the EPA formally banned the product in 2008 and the Supreme Court denied FMC’s appeals in 2009, FMC could continue selling the deadly powder abroad.
It did this directly, but that was bad PR and risked further law suits simply from workers who would be packaging it in the U.S. So instead it licensed the product to a number of willing partners, including China’s Jiangsu Hopery Chemical Co., and that’s the company that continues to sell it to East Africa on license from FMC. In Kenya its main distributor is now Juanco Ltd.
In 2009 reports began to service in Kenya of the awful power of the pesticide, and more importantly, that it was available over-the-counter and was obviously not being used to kill aphids on soy beans. There is very little soy bean production in Kenya.
Children died. What was apparent was that the pesticide had been so successfully marketed in Kenya by Jiangsu, and was so relatively cheap, that small farmers were using it for everything possible, even when it was not particularly effective.
But the misuse of Carbofuran in Kenya drew world attention when Wildlife Direct reported that Maasai near the Mara were using Carbofuran to kill lions.
(Irony upon irony, eh? A kid dying doesn’t make local headlines, but Sixty Minutes finds a story when it kills a lion.)
Maasai don’t grow many crops, and certainly no soybeans. But modernizing the tradition of young morani spearing lion that harass their cattle, it’s now easier to do the job with Carbofuran.
FMC Corporation tried to defend itself unsuccessfully. The ruse was outed. Finally, FMC agreed to buyback all the pesticide from individuals and store shelves in Kenya, while simultaneously exporting more product to neighboring Uganda and Tanzania where environmental authorities are far less aggressive than in Kenya.
It also established its licensing with Chinese companies and the Chinese companies found more Kenyan distributors, and very little Carbofuran was bought back, and lots more became available over the counter. Lots and lots more in neighboring Uganda and Tanzania, too.
Only a few weeks ago Wildlife Direct reported more lion kills in the Mara by Carbofuran and extended its claims to wildlife across the country, including many birds.
And now the tale may be twisting back onto itself.
Authorities in the U.S. are now testing Kenyan food imports into the U.S. for traces of Carbofuran, and if found, could ban Kenyan food imports. The U.S. is a huge market for Kenyan tea and coffee.
Americans like to think individual responsibility is all that matters. A video game might instigate a child to become a murderer, but it’s the parents’ responsibilities, not the government, to stop the child from viewing the poison.
But it’s OK to produce the poison in the first place. Just use it responsibly. It’s for aphids.
Ecotourism is dead. From the President of Tanzania, to the much more critical tourism market itself, feather beds and five gallons to flush a toilet have subsumed efficiency and sustainability. Requiescat in pace.
“Community Based Tourism Projects,” “Fair Trade,” “Shared Value Pricing,” and a ton of other phrases to champion a capitalist market in control of its morals, today those lovely little properties and projects are disappearing downwards faster than loose jeans on teen hips.
It all began when the king tried to pretend he really really cared about the slave weeding his rose garden. And it was challenged when the consumer got fed up with allocating her hard won vacation to another cause. And it was finished when the world global crisis left only the rich in the leisure travel market.
I can’t think of a single successful ecotourism property that has been built anywhere in Africa in the last five years, and most that were built prior to that are on the skids. Newly built properties, and the ones that are roaringly successful today are all spas and castles. And there are several reasons why this makes good business.
The foremost is that the mid- and down- travel leisure markets are rapidly shrinking, and by necessity, becoming more and more efficient in delivering their core product: vacations. Any type of exotic or what we used to call “adventure” travel is under heightened pressure just because of how hard it is to get to them and then use them, and these (especially in Africa) were the pillars of ecotourism.
The lower market tiers shrank as all travel shrank in the massive economic downturn, but they never recovered, as the upmarket did. There’s a lot of speculation as to why this is true and if it will ever return, but right now, it’s fact. The midmarket is AWOL.
And there’s another very important reason specific to Africa.
African wilderness is under siege. By development forces like mining and urban development.
Take forests, for example. In Kenya the loss of forests has so drastically impacted in real time the potable water of urban Kenyans that recently a sizable majority of voting Kenyans supported a pretty draconian move by the government to forcibly relocate nearly 40,000 people.
Take elephants. Concerted action by world conservationists to save the elephants began in the mid 1980s. It is a success story without a rival. Not only was a catastrophic slaughter stopped, but wildlife management efforts helped accelerate the recovery.
But to what avail, from the point of view of a young African trying to make a success in the world? To the avail that his farm is being mauled, that his county roads are being destroyed and that his children on a weekend country holiday are in danger?
Take the Serengeti highway, which is just one of many industrial projects currently being plowed through previous grand reserves in order to facilitate rapidly developing industry.
And take the relaxation of environmental standards, which kept the wildernesses healthy. This week Tanzania President Kikwete ridiculed the environmental community for trying to delay mining a 300 million ton soda ash deposit which lies adjacent the Serengeti and will likely at the very least destroy the flamingo populations living on Lake Natron.
“We cannot continue to mourn about our country being poor while our minerals are lying untapped and [while] … our neighbours, Kenya, are doing the same on the other side of the lake,” he said.
Which is true, and is the reason that the Kenyan side has no birds or animals.
“At times I wonder whether those who are opposing this move are really patriotic, because it seems as if they are agents of some people we don’t know,” Kikwete said. Bulls eye.
So with a shrinking wilderness and a shrinking market for it, what to do?
Build Up. As high and expensive as you can get. Be damned the resources consumed to build Versailles! Onwards and upwards! Four Posters! Plunge Pools! Solar Cosmetics!
The upmarket has by definition been primarily interested in comfort and style rather than context. It matters, but less with the upmarket, if the Serengeti road will disrupt the great wildebeest migration. So long as there is still a feather bed at the end of track that has a wildebeest or two, it will be just fine.
Bilila Lodge in the Serengeti is not so dissimilar to an Aman Resort Indonesia or a Canyon Ranch in Arizona. Bilila is a Kempinski property, one of the oldest, most successful European grand hotel chains that exists.
I just stayed at Bilila Kempinski and was truly astounded. The lodge is very remote and made even more so by a single access road that is 35 kilometers long. That’s one impressive driveway.
The public areas resemble any wonderful western spa or upmarket golf lodge, for example, with stylish architecture, spiraling staircases, giant lounge chairs, and lots of glass. The infinity pool is spectacular. Individual rooms are magnificent and huge with tasteful accouterments and the highest quality furniture.
But here’s what really got me: wifi worked better than in any upmarket hotel or lodge I’ve stayed at anywhere, in Nairobi or Dar. The wide-screen TVs had a whole arm’s length of channels, not the 7 or 8 limited ones found in Intercontinentals and Fairmonts in Africa.
Hot water was hot and always so. The air-conditioner not only worked, but well and softly, even when it shouldn’t have (when it was cool out). The telephone by the bed could ring my wife a half world away quicker than reverse when I was in any office in Africa.
The a la carte menus seemed right out of lower Manhattan, and the food was just as good. The boutique didn’t mess around with wood server spoons, but rather trendy canvas art whose price tags usually started at five figures.
Ecotourism is dead, because … it didn’t work. It relied on the generous spirit of middle class travelers willing to donote a little bit of their vacation to a better world order.
In the last month, South Sudan has asked neighbors and the international community for teachers to staff universities, for money and logistical help for demobilization, disarmament, and rehabilitation of combatants, for ideas on a new national anthem, for help with their financial sector and several hundred other large and small matters that require more or less immediate attention.
All of these requests did not surprise anyone.
One request did surprise me though– South Sudan also asked for $140 million to begin rehabilitating their game parks as a top investment priority.
North Sudan
When you think of Sudan, what comes to mind: inhospitable desert, war crimes, tense referendums, oil, refugees, weapons, etc….
Let me offer a few new associations for the soon-to-be-independent South Sudan—jungle, wetlands, teeming with wildlife, and a migration comparable to the Serengeti.
South Sudan is home to one the largest wetlands anywhere—the Sudd—or barrier, in Arabic.South Sudan
This massive wetland and the Sahelian swathes that border it have traditionally supported all manner of charismatic animals including elephants, lion, hippopotami, and crocodiles, as well as lesser known (at least to a laymen like me) fauna such as the Nile Lechwe (an endangered species of antelope), Tian, Reedbuck, over 400 species of migrating birds, and amazingly, a population of around 1.2 million White-Eared Kob.
The Boma Plateau, adjacent to the Ethiopian Highlands, also supports important populations of wildlife.
In 2007, the United States Agency for International Development and several other international donors worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society to conduct aerial surveys of Southern Sudan, essentially to confirm that the 30 years of intermittent fighting had indeed decimated animal populations.
Against all hope, they found many populations alive and well. Elephants, hippos, and other meaty animals had indeed suffered, but many had weathered the storm.
Elephants have dropped from somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 to around 6,000.
Zebra are all but gone, and Heartebeest numbers dropped about 95% in total. Many of the animals that survived did so by hiding out in the Sudd, where swampy conditions provided a measure of isolation.
South Sudan needs tourism revenue worse than most countries.
Currently, 98% of South Sudan’s revenue comes from oil. Production will peak in the very short term before beginning a 20-30 year decline after which the wells will simply dry up.
I would value expert opinions on the viability of a real tourism industry in S. Sudan; is there an adventure market that will relish the ‘untapped’ feel of a safari in South Sudan, will private companies invest long term in such an unstable environment, will oil extraction finish off the animals the war never managed to reach?
Most importantly, how can a country with so much human need spend the required sums on wildlife preservation?
In late 2010 National Geographic ran an interesting short piece on the relationship between the multitudes of identity groups in S. Sudan and the wildlife.
The author claims that history has forged a deep bond between people and wildlife in South Sudan.
For centuries, slavers and poachers, often the same people, came into modern day South Sudan to take away slaves and Ivory.
This linked the elephant and human populations groups together as victims in the minds of the tribes.
More recently, both people and animals took refuge in the deep bush or in the swampy Sudd wetlands to avoid the violence, once again creating a bond between human and animal, this time as fellow displaced persons.
This claim interests me quite a bit—that story resonates emotionally, and has certain logic to it, but my experience in Africa has been quite different.
In West Africa, people viewed wildlife as a nuisance, and from my brief experience in East Africa, it seemed like farmers and pastoralists felt the same way.
I came away with the impression that romanticizing wildlife was a privilege for those whose crops weren’t being eaten.
I digress.
To wrap up, whether or not South Sudan can preserve this habitat for tourists seems immaterial to me. It is one of the most important wildlife habitats on the continent.
Big projects capture the imagination. They attempt to solve big problems with eye-popping solutions. The Apollo missions, the Panama Canal, the Hoover Damn; these were projects that defined generations.
How about this for a big project– a wall of trees, 15 kilometers thick, stretching 8,000 km from Dakar to Djibouti, interlaced with water retention ponds and plants designed to improve soil quality.
Just as competition with the U.S.S.R. spurred the U.S. into high gear in the space race, the Great Green Wall project also has a nemesis—the Sahara Desert.
This sandy foe creeps south at approx 48 kilometers per year consuming farm and pasture land in a decades long war of attrition.
In some cases, such as Nigeria, the desert claims almost 1,400 square miles of land every year.
Many months ago on this blog I wrote about this very problem; desertification and other forms of environmental degradation have put Nigeria’s identity groups on a collision course, competing for ever scarcer environmental resources.
Take a look at this picture of Lake Chad.
The blue represents the actual lake, and the green demarcates the lake’s historical limits.
Lake Chad has shrunk by 95% in the last 50 years.
The consensus view among experts is that about 50% of the water loss was caused by desertification due to overgrazing, and the other 50% to long term climatic changes.
11 desert and Sahel countries–Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan—will collaborate to implement the massive Great Green Wall.
This will require unprecedented collaboration between 11 countries, with 11 environmental/agriculture ministries, teams of international scientists, and thousands of communities in the Sahel speaking a multitude of local languages.
I am skeptical but inspired.
Much like other big projects launched to solve big problems, the three gorges Dam or the Panama Canal for example; the devil will be in the details.
In addition to standard worries about corrupt contractors, the real worry here is simple free riding. Each country faces a threat from desertification, but the threat level varies, and the implementing capacity of each country varies even more.
The funding will mostly come from outside sources, including $119 million from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and several billion dollars from other international donors, but each participating country will be responsible for educating local communities and managing modern tree nurseries, as well as the logistics involved in continuously transporting saplings and other inputs to the Green Wall.
The projects supporters claim that the wall will “sequester 3.1. million tons of carbon”, reverse Sahel desertification, improve the climate in the semi-arid Sahel region, and offer income generating activities for communities that border the wall.
Detractors question this narrative: they note that the Sahara is not advancing per se, but rather over grazing and deforestation in the border regions have removed the roots that traditionally anchored the soil, leaving the soil vulnerable to wind and other elements.
And how will local communities benefit in the short term?
Even if an education campaign succeeded in connecting changing climate patterns and decreasing pastureland with the absence of trees, how local communities justify taking time from tending their own land, animals, or jobs to manage their section of the wall when the benefits will not be apparent for years?
I would be very interested to hear opinions on this project from conservationist or from people that have lived in Sahel communities.
Note: This has been tried before. In China most recently, and in U.S. back in the 1930s on a much smaller scale in the “Shelterbelt Project”.
East Africa is booming, so many of the stories of 2010 were terrifically good news. But there were the tragedies as well like the Kampala bombings. Below I try to put the year in perspective with my top ten stories for East Africa for 2010.
1. Populace democracy grows.
2. Terrorism grows, as does the battle against it.
3. Huge stop in the mercenary purchases of Coltan.
4. Momentum for peace in the runup to establishing a new South Sudan.
5. Tourism clashes with development, especially with the proposed Serengeti Highway.
6. New discoveries of fossil fuels produces new wealth and a new relationship with China.
7. Gay Rights grow public but loses ground.
8. Rhino poaching becomes corporate.
9. Hot air ballooning’s safety newly questioned in game parks.
10. Newest early man discoveries reconfirm sub-Saharan Africa as the birthplace of man.
#1: POPULACE DEMOCRACY GROWS
Theoretically, all the East African countries have operated as “democracies” except for the torrential years of Idi Amin in Uganda. But the quality of this democracy was never very good.
Tanzania was a one-party state for its first 20 years, and that same party continues to rule although more democratically today. Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi experienced one dictator after another, even while democratic elections at regional levels challenged the executive.
But the end of the Cold War destroyed the alliances these developing countries had with super powers. Purse strings were cut, and political cow-towing ended. All of them moved towards a truly more democratic culture.
And in 2010 huge leaps were made in all the countries towards more truly representative government. The most important example by far was the overwhelming passing of the new constitution in Kenya in a national referendum where more than 75% of registered voters participated.
And like the U.S. election which followed shortly thereafter, and like support for national health care in the U.S. and so many other issues (like no tax cuts for the rich), Kenyan politicians dragged their feet right up to the critical moment. They tried and tried, and ultimately failed, to dissuade Kenyans from their fundamental desire to eliminate tribalism in government and more fairly distribute the huge wealth being newly created.
I see this as People vs. Politicians, and in this wonderful case, the People won!
And there was some progress as well in Tanzania’s December election, with the opposition growing and its influence today moving that country towards a more democratic constitution.
(It was not so good in Rwanda or Uganda, where stiff-arm techniques and government manipulation of the electoral process undermined any attempt at real democracy.) But the huge leap forward in Kenya, and the little hop in Tanzania, made this the absolute top story of the year.
#2: TERRORISM GROWS
Four smaller bombings in Nairobi’s central business district over the year were eclipsed by two horrible simultaneous bombings in Kampala bars on July 11 while patrons were watching the world cup. Police display an unexploded suicide vest.
Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda in Somali, claimed responsibility. And throughout the year Shabaab grew increasingly visible along the Kenyan border as its power in Somali increased.
I’ve written for a long time about how the west has had its collective head in the sand as regards terrorism and Al-Qaeda in particular. Long ago I pointed out that the locus of Al-Qaeda terrorism had moved to the horn from Afghanistan, and this year proved it in spades.
The country with the most to lose and most to gain in this war on terror is Kenya, because of its long shared border with Somalia. And the year also marked a striking increase in the Kenyan government’s war on terror, and with considerable success.
With much more deftness and delicacy than us Kenya has stepped up the battle against Al-Shabaab while pursuing policies aimed at pacifying any overt threats to its security, by such brilliant moves as allowing Omar Bashir into the country and not arresting him (on an international U.N. warrant). As I said in a blog, Kenya Gets It, and the story is therefore a hopeful one.
The Dodd-Frank Act is our victory!The Congo Wars continue but are abating, and in large part because of a little known provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act which now makes it almost impossible for major corporations in the U.S. to buy the precious metal Coltan on the black market.
A black market which has funded perhaps Africa’s most horrible war for more than a generation. Hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – have been killed and raped, and more than 20,000 children conscripted into brutal wars, funded by purchases of Coltan and other precious metals by Intel, Sony and Apple.
It certainly wasn’t just this little legislative move. The U.N. peace-keeping force, fabulous diplomatic initiatives by Uganda and a real diplomatic vigilance by the U.S. all were instrumental. But the year ended with the least violence in the region in more than two decades.
#4: SOUTH SUDAN
I may be jumping the gun on this one, because the referendum to create a new country, the South Sudan, is not scheduled to occur before next month. But the runup to the referendum, including the registration process, while labored looks like it’s working.
Allied loosely with the Congo Wars, the civil war between the North and South Sudan had gone on for generations until a brokered peace deal five years ago included the ultimate end to the story: succession of the South into a new country.
The concept is rife with problems, most notably that the division line straddles important oil-producing areas. But in spite of all of this, and many other ups and downs along the way, it looks to me like there will be a South Sudan, and soon. And this year’s new U.N. presence in Juba, donor-construction of roads and airports, all points to the main global players in the controversy also thinking the same.
The creation of a new state out of a near failed one is not the be-all or end-all of the many problems of this massive and powerfully oil-rich area. But it is a giant leap forward.
#5: THE SERENGETI HIGHWAY & TOURISM
Last night NBC news aired a segment on the Serengeti Highway controversy, elevating an East African story into American prime time. Good.
But like so many reports of this controversy, the simplification ran amok. NBC’s reporter Engels claimed the motivation for the road was to facilitate rare earth metals like Coltan (see above) getting into Chinese hands more quickly.
While there may be something to this, it’s definitely not the main reason, which is much more general and harder therefore to fight. As I’ve often written, the highway as planned will be a real boon to the Maasai currently living to the east of the Serengeti, as much if not more than to the Chinese.
And as far as I know, Maasai don’t use Coltan.
Roads bring commerce and may be the single quickest way to develop a region. This region is sorely in need of development and recent Tanzania politics has aligned to the need for this regional development.
The highway is just one of many such issues which came to the fore throughout 2010 in Kenya and Tanzania. Concern that the west is just interested in East Africa as a vacation destination with no regards for the struggle for development, has governed quite a few local elections this year.
The whole concept of tourism may be changing as the debate progresses. I believe very deeply that the Serengeti highway as proposed would hinder rather than help development. But as I’ve pointed out, alternatives are in the works.
And the real story of which the highway story is only a part, is how dramatically different East Africans have begun to view tourists in 2010.
#6: NEW RESOURCE DISCOVERIES ALTER GEOPOLITICS
For years I and other African experts have referred to East Africa as “resource-poor.” Kenya, in particular, had nothing but potash. Boy, did that change this year!
Although only one proven reserve has been announced in Kenya, several have begun production in Uganda and we know many more are to come.
China has announced plans for a pipeline and oil port in northern Kenya at a cost of nearly $16 billion dollars, that’s more than twice the entire annual budget for the Kenya government! Deep earth techniques have matured, and China knows how to use them.
More gold has been found in Tanzania, new coal deposits in Uganda, more precious metals in Rwanda… East Africa is turning into the world’s rare earth commodities market.
A lot of these new discoveries are a result of technology improving: going deeper into the earth. But 2010 freed East Africa from the shackle of being “resource-poor” and that’s a very big deal.
#7: GAY RIGHTS ON THE HOOK
African societies have never embraced gay rights but as they rapidly develop, until now there was none of the gay bashing of the sort the rightest backlash produces in the U.S. U.S. Righties manipulating East Africa.
That changed this year, and in large part because of the meddling of U.S. rightest groups.
In what appears to now have been a concerted many year effort, support from U.S. righties is leading to a vote in Uganda’s parliament that would make homosexuality a capital offense, and would jail for long terms those who failed to out known gays.
This extreme is not African, it is American. Mostly an insidious attempt by those unable to evince such insanity in their own society to go to some more manipulative place. The story isn’t over as the vote has yet to occur, but it emerged and reached a crescendo this year.
#8: RHINO POACHING EXPLODES
Poaching is a constant problem in wildlife reserves worldwide and Africa in particular. Rhino are particularly vulnerable, and efforts to ensure safe, wild habitats have been decades in the making. Dagger from rhino horn.
This year, they seemed to come apart. It’s not clear if the economic downturn has something to do with this, but the poaching seems to have morphed this year from individual crimes to corporate business plans.
This leap in criminal sophistication must be explained by wealth opportunities that haven’t existed previously. And whether that was the depressing of financial goals caused by the economic downturn, increased wealth in the Horn of Africa where so much of the rhino horn is destined, or reduced law enforcement, we don’t yet know. But 2010 was the sad year that this poaching exploded.
#9: IS HOT AIR BALLOONING SAFE?
Hot air ballooning in Africa’s two great wildernesses of the Maasai Mara (Kenya) and the Serengeti (Tanzania) has been a staple of exciting options to visiting tourists for nearly 30 years. That might be changing. Is it Safe?
A terrible accident in the Serengeti in early October that killed two passengers and injured others opened a hornet’s nest of new questions.
After working on this story for some time I’ve personally concluded 2010 was the year I learned I should not step into a hot air balloon in East Africa, at least for the time being!
#10: EARLY MAN WONDERS
There were not quite as many spectacular discoveries or announcements about early man this year as in years previously, but one really did stand out as outstanding and you might wonder what it has to do with East Africa! Representation by Tomislan Maricic.
DNA testing of Neanderthal proved that early man from Africa didn’t wipe them out after all, but absorbed them into the ever-evolving homin species.
And that absorption, and not massacre, happened outside Africa to be sure. But it finally helps smooth out the story that began in Africa: It’s likely that Neanderthal were earlier migrants from Africa, and absorption was therefore easier, physiologically and biologically.
It’s a wonderful story, and fresh and exciting, unlike the only other major African early man announcement about Ardi which was really a much older story, anyway.
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HAPPY NEW YEAR to all my loyal readers, with a giant thank you from me for your attention but especially your wonderful comments throughout the year. See you next year!
The wondrous beauty of the interconnected wild.Here’s some good news: Pseudagrion massaicum is no longer on the threatened list! The damsel flies! More proof that the elephant population is exploding.
East Africa’s spectacular red-eyed damsel which has been on the IUCN threatened species list for more than ten years was finally removed last year and confirmed this year as holding its own.
Too many non sequitur? Not really. Damsel flies, and the Masai (sic) Damsel (Pseudagrion massaicum )in particular, has been closely associated to elephants for millennia. Unlike its larger dragon fly cousin which is considerably more powerful and prefers rivers and swamps to larvae about, the damsel can do with much less.
Like the wallows dug by elephant as the veld dries!
Elephant are masters at finding water when the rains end. Mostly they head to sand rivers where their excavations are too fragile and changing to attract damsels.
But swamp edges and bogs also can provide lengthened sources of water for elephant, usually with little more effort than the jumbo’s clumsy push through it. And these are perfect for the Maasai damsel.
Scientists had first incorrectly suspected that the increase in the elephant populations would decrease the damsel and dragonfly populations, whereas the inverse is the truth. Original observations of elephants “disturbing” large groups of damsels misled the scientists. And I’m sure many larvae and flying damsels do succumb to the swinging brunt of a two-foot wide elephant foot!
But Michael J. Samways and Paul B. C. Grant in a 2009 paper, Elephant impact on dragonflies, squashed that one. The more you observed disturbed damsels, the more there were disturbed damsels!
And unlike their larger cousins, once their year-long larvae life is over, they hunt as many terrestrial as flying insects. Another reason to be further from the raging water.
In fact, the Masai (sic) damsel is famous for creating traps for ants, rather than just pouncing on them. Much like an antwolf it digs out a small depression in the sand and then waits on the rim for the ant to slip in.
So these two creatures will apparently live and die, together. Elephant populations are exploding, and so homes for the beautiful damsels are exploding, too. Natural chivalry at its finest!
