Wildlife Vet, Author, Storyteller

Sunbirds in East Africa

2012-01-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

We were back in Kenya just before Christmas and spent time with many of our old friends. One of the delights was the chance to walk in their amazing gardens, where it is almost more difficult to stop plants from growing than it is to cultivate. We found this out many years ago when the sticks planted to support tomato plants grew at about the same rate as those delicious salad suppliers or, when fried, part of a complete breakfast.

Over the years I have had a passion for photographing birds and here I’m going to add a few of sunbirds, the crown jewels that flit about and dip a beak into any bright flower, or the myriad of feeders that some folks hang out. Although sunbirds are not related to the other crown jewels —the humming birds of the Americas—they do fill more or less the same niche.

This is a male bronze sunbird, aka "bronzy". They are usually found at fairly high altitudes. I have seen them most often at anything from 8500 to 7000 feet.

The female bronze sunbird has more defintion than the females of many species.

And this tiny fellow is a collared sunbird, photographed near Gilgil in an orchard. He is one of the smallest members of the family.

This is a male double-collared. He is drinking from the outside of the flower, where there must be some nectar, or else he has speared his beak through the petals. Does anyone know?

And this is the female of the species.

One major difference between hummingbirds and sunbirds is that the latter do not hover, but this one —the variable sunbird— nearly makes it.

This golden-winged sunbird was feeding on aloes near Naro Moru in Kenya. He was one of may that appeared early every morning, having flown down from altitudes of about 9000 feet up the slopes of Mt. Kenya. All I had to do was sit still in amlong the aloes and take my chances.

Double-collared sunbirds also live at fairly high altitudes. This one was in a garden near Timau, at about 8000 feet.

This red-chested sunbird was one of eight species of bird that were in what was almost a feeding frenzy in an Erythrina tree in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park.

The aptly-named Scarlet-chested sunbird was another one that came to that tree.

My final one for today is a picture of a moment I was lucky enough to capture in the life of a a green-headed sunbird male in a garden near Gilgil. He looks as if he is practising for an audition to The Muppets. Gonzo maybe?

More on Rhino Horn and Poaching

2012-01-18T14:18:00.002-07:00

My blog of Nov 29 about rhino poaching was written before I went with my family to Kenya. While there, and since I got back, more disturbing news has been reported.

The use of rhino horn as part of Traditional Chinese Medicine is ancient, nobody knows how ancient, and as I have blogged before the situation continues to be a nightmare for conservationists. I used one example of many in The Trouble With Lions when I quoted Judy Mills who, in a TRAFFIC report found that 60 percent of South Korea’s doctors believe that rhino horn is an effective medicine and 79 percent believe it to be essential for a wide variety of ailments.

Yet another South-East Asian country seems to have joined the “hunt” for rhino in South Africa. For some reason the finger-nail-like substance has gained an entirely false reputation as a cure for cancer. Vietnamese hunters, have arrived in South Africa and in one report titled mules hunting rhino -check it out- are seen to be active, with a video report by Dan Rather even appearing on the planetsave.com website.

Recent African twists in the ugly saga come from three countries. First, two places in Kenya, where Mugie Ranch, on the Laikipia plains west of Mount Kenya have given up their attempts to keep black rhino because of the steady decline of their original number of about 30 head as poachers took them out one at a time. The Kenya Wildlife Service moved in a translocated them all (apart from the one they lost during the drugging). In some ways sadder was the poaching of a single hand-raised rhino at Sweetwaters Conservancy. I last saw him three years ago when I could scratch his neck as he contentedly chewed on a stick of sugar cane. Now some callous sod has taken him out.

Are these two still there? - I took the photo in South Africa about 15 years ago.

Then there is Namibia, where officials in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, and where has been apparently granted a Vietnamese man a hunting permit for the trophy hunt of a rhino on the Otjiwa Safari Lodge.

The same article in the Namibian Sun quoted the Deputy Minister of Environment and Tourism, Uahekua Herunga, as saying that the government should also look into “legalizing” a trade in rhino horn. Presumably he is suggesting some sort of “farming” for horn. What next?

In many ways more chilling than either of the things going in these two countries is the news from South Africa. I have mentioned before that one of my former students told me about two vets who have been implicated in poaching. Now I’ve learned more about them. In an article published on line they are named as Karel Toet and Manie du Plessis (and their wives) They are suspected of involvement with a rhino horn syndicate headed by Out of Africa Adventurous Safari’s Dawie Groenewald. The veterinarians (and other “Groenewald gang” members) will face charges of assault, fraud, corruption, malicious damage to property, illegal possession of firearms and ammunition, and contravention of the National Environmental Biodiversity Act when they return to court in April 2012.

If you think that is bad news and a slap in the face for wildlife vets, there is more. One of South Africa’s most prominent wildlife vets is Dr. Douw Grobler. He is a former head of the game capture unit in the Kruger National Park and was arraigned in Pretoria North Magistrates Court. No charges were laid but he is suspected of supplying veterinary drugs to a controversial game farmer and hunter named Hugo Ras, who has several previous convitions related to nature conservation transgressions and was arrested last August.

The case was postponed to February 28th and Grobler was released on R5,000 (USD $618) bail. You can read the full story here.

Of course Grobler may have been falsely accused, but the picture is not pretty and certainly puts all wildlife vets in Africa under a spotlight.

Chauvet Cave movie - Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2012-01-09T06:50:00.003-07:00

Linkhttp://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/On Saturday we went to the movies. We had chosen to go and see the story of France’s Chauvet caves, discovered in 1994 by three men. There are several web pages about these extraordinary findings, and one can find the fantastic drawings on some of them. The movie, directed by Werner Herzog, is called Cave of Forgotten Dreams and for those who don’t know about them these caves are absolutely extraordinary. The art work has been dated to be in the region of twenty-five to thirty-two thousand years old. This is at least twice as old as any other ever found, the other famous ones being the Lascaux caves, also in France. Of the many images, two in particular catch my imagination.There are two rhinos fighting, their horns crossed like a couple of fencers squaring up.

My own work with rhinos has shown me direct evidence of these behemoths fighting, especially when in the grip of sexual foreplay. The whole process can last up to an hour before any kind of mounting. Both of my cases were in white rhino, animals that had been brought up form South Africa in the late 1960s. Of course at that time we had to state that they came from Lesotho because Kenya and South Africa were not diplomatically linked, Apartheid being the political climate in the latter.The first case was a cow that had been picked up a bull, on the end of his horn, and slammed into a big pepper tree. I was district veterinary officer in the town of Meru, east of Mount Kenya and when Peter Jenkins, the chief park warden in Meru National Park called me I headed out as soon as I could.

I really had no idea what was wrong and decided on a shotgun treatment, a big does of antibiotic and multivitamins. The challenge was how to get them into her. In the end I simply drove a long needle into the muscles on the backside and was astonished when she stood there eating the hay that her minders had given her.

Rhino are not the brightest start on the planet and it was only about half way through the treatment that she noticed my attentions. She began to walk away, and so my injections ended up being given “on the run”My efforts did no good and when she died two days later Peter told me that she had a broken rib and a ruptured liver. It is amazing that she lived as long as she did., but the astonishing thing to look back upon is the power in the bull’s neck. The cow must have weighed close to 1500 kg!

A year later I had to treat another cow that had also been attacked during foreplay. In this case the damage was limted to her hind end, but was so severe that she had not been able to pass stool or urine for 3 days. After evacuating her rectum I administered a 4-gallon enema - and have evidence of the event in the photo that my wife took. This time the treatment, which also included antibiotics, was a success.

The other image is the multi-legged bison. The artist drew eight legs, some of them paler than the others, and in forward positions with bent joints. Everyone, including me, thinks that the images are made to look as if the bison is running.

I have taken this an extra step in my imagination. If you, as a child of about six or eight, are in the cave with your dad and suddenly hear the sound of running bison in the background, followed almost at once by the sight of a flare being waved in front of the animal on cave wall, the legs will come in and out of focus, just as if the animal is running. Are you holding on tight to your dad’s knee?

There are lots of other stunning images and the movie producers have done a good job of telling the story. The last set of pictures are not inside the caves, but are a spooky postscript about a nearby nuclear plant. I won’t tell you any more. Go and see the movie.If you get even half a chance to see the movie – Go for it!

Of Moose and Men - final edits

2012-01-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

Of Moose and Men- final edits.

It's the second day of the New Year and a spectacular sunrise to greet us.Also the day that I have completed my final edit of the new book Of Moose and Men. The subtitle has been chosen and appears as A Wildlife Vet’s Pursuit of the World’s Largest Deer.I’ve been working off an “advanced reading copy” which lacks the colour plates and an index, but they will come, along with appropriate quotes and so on. I can share a couple of things. The first is my opening quote, that comes from a speech made by Sit James Barrie at the St. Andrews University convocation in 1922. He said:

“It is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.”

The second is some of the material about the taming, not quite domestication, of moose through the ages. This comes near the end of the book after I have discussed many of my own experiences with them, and a bunch of other stuff about their lives, their antlers (and the role of these in moose sex) and the carnage they cause on the roads.The first written records of tamed moose in North America come from the early 1600s when French priests reported that there were moose in captivity in New France, but it seems highly likely that Aboriginal people had tamed them long before that because those same priests and later European explorers commented on how easy moose were to train, and many authors and raconteurs mention how remarkably tame a moose can become.

This photo, by Ernest Brown, will be in the book courtesy of the Provincial Archives of Alberta. It is simply titled “Moose in harness.” Unfortunately the photographer provided only a brief caption to the image: “Moose Yoked.” No other information about the location or history of this photo has been found.In 1770 Samuel Hearne, who was the first European to reach the Arctic Ocean by a mainland route across North America, noted that moose “are also the easiest to tame and domesticate of any of the deer kind.” He went further in describing the details. “I have repeatedly seen them at Churchill as tame as sheep, and even more so; for they would follow their keeper any distance from home, and at his call return with him, without the least trouble, or even offering to deviate from the path.” The deviation, or lack of it, is not constant. In 1910 a man named D.E. Lantz, who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey, gave a pithy account of this when he wrote the following about a pair of moose that had been trained to pull a buggy, “which they did with great steadiness and swiftness, subject, however, to the inconvenience that, when they once took it into their heads to cool themselves in a neighbouring river or lake, no effort could prevent them.”Also in 1910, author, explorer, and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote that that moose were “much more tractable and valuable than reindeer . . . they are docile, easily trained, exceedingly swift, and, being natural trotters, are well suited for light travel.”There are several even earlier accounts of tamed moose, especially ones that were shipped to Europe, to men like England’s King George III and to dukes who could no doubt afford the considerable costs involved. Many of these animals, however, died soon after arrival or even while on board ship.The year 1770 crops up again in this context because the first bull moose to make it alive to England was sent that year by Guy Carleton, Governor General of Canada, to the Second Duke of Richmond, who later imported two more. The duke must have acted quickly after the animal arrived in order to engage an artist, because that first one is the subject of a work, also dated 1770, by one of the great animal painters of all time: George Stubbs, best known for his wonderful pictures of horses.

The photo of this famous painting, which will appear in the colour section of the book, was kindly shared by the folks at the The Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, my alma mater. The animal had only his first set of antlers, and those at bottom left were included to show what a mature set would look like.© The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2011There are fewer records or claims of moose being used as saddle animals and some of these may be more fancy than fact. Among others these accounts include descriptions of attempts to use moose for postal delivery and as cavalry mounts in Sweden. An urban myth has it that either King Karl XI of Sweden, or his successor Karl XII, even went so far as to invade Russia with moose-mounted hussars in the late 17th or very early 18th century. This story seemed to be too good to be true and the dangers of the Internet soon showed themselves as some entries appeared to confirm it, while others made no mention. I did some digging and received this email from my colleague and friend Dr. Bengt Roken.

There is no documentation to be found in the historic literature about moose used by the ancient military. Not even their use for postal deliveries is true. During the 19th century a number of moose calves were reared and got tame and some of them could pull a sledge or carry a rider. One farmer, Darelli, published his experiences with a pair of hand-reared moose and speculated about the possible use of trained moose as superior to horses in the cavalry. From his speculations most of the tales about moose cavalries have evolved.

Hope these tidbits tickle your fancy.

Kenya National Parks in Trouble

2011-12-28T12:40:00.005-07:00

Link
I’m back in harness, although not yet pulling any heavy weights as I have just completed the first week of my post knee-replacement surgery. Of course this gives me plenty of opportunity to catch up on reading and to think about the trip that my family and I completed just before Christmas. We took our daughter, her husband and their two daughters to Kenya for three weeks and combined visits to a long list of old friends with trips to several game parks.

Like many visits it was mostly great, but there was one very sad thing we found out and another that I learned as soon as we got home. Both concern the destruction of game parks by massive and indiscriminate grazing of livestock.

One of our oldest friends had not long returned from a trip to Meru Game Park, a place that is dear to me for many reasons. I have written about it and its future in both of my Africa books because it was there that I launched my career as a wildlife veterinarian when I treated my first white rhino.

I even managed to scan a section of the old map of this park in Wrestling With Rhinos and share it here - or had intnded to until I discovered that my entire blog program has suffered some sort of major health attack, or maybe it has bene hacked. I had other pictures I wanted to share, but they too would not upload.

Nigel and his wife had not only visited the park’s most western areas, but had gone all the way to the Tana River and been at first confused and then horrified at what they saw. The first impression was that the maze of footprints they had seen were those of cattle, but when they came across a massive herd of about a thousand buffalo they felt better.

The situation was temporary. As they approached the river, and left the more heavily patrolled and “popular” areas of the park near the very upmarket lodge Elsa’s Kopje, which lies within a long stone’s throw of George Adamson’s old camp, they realized that things were in bad way. Much of the bush had been cut with pangas and laid on the ground, where goats had consumed all the greenery. Many of the vehicle tracks were littered with brush and the huge fig tree at Adamson’s Falls had been shorn of almost all of its greenery. Nigel took a different route out of the park through the Ura gate and the destruction changed not one whit. The eastern half of the park was completely overrun with domestic livestock.

This is simply an escalation of the situation that warden Mark Jenkins had faced in the last days of his tenancy as the park warden. In The Trouble With Lions I predicted that Meru might not last as a park. Is this the beginning of the end?

I had hoped that this might be an isolated case, but I was quite wrong. Among the pile of magazines waiting for us at home was the October-December 2011 issue of Swara, the public face of the East African Wildlife Society. There are numerous conservation articles in its 68 pages, but the first thing I read was a long four-column letter from Dave Mckelvie about an experience he had in the Masai Mara that almost matched that of Nigel in Meru. The local Masai herdsmen are taking their cattle into the reserve at night. He confirmed this by leaving camp one night and seeing “hundreds and hundreds of LED torches twinkling in the dark.” As Dave further wrote:

“The migration will come to the Marsh [the area Dave visited] expecting a feast and will leave disappointed and be pushed out by cattle. The tourists will be and are completely in the dark and oblivious to the devastation this overgrazing will bring.”

In both cases the human population explosion continues to exert relentless pressure on the whole of East Africa. Traffic is an utter shambles in Nairobi, more and more people crowd into less and less free space and national parks are bound to feel the pressure. Sad but true.

Rhino poaching

2011-11-09T08:50:00.006-07:00

More on rhino horn and the poaching issue

Last week we stopped over with an old friend and veterinary colleague who has worked in South Africa. We were amazed to hear that she had done a one-week locum in a veterinary practice when the principals had needed a stand-in because they were in the process of exporting 13 white rhino to China. She was horrified to learn that they were doing no such thing and had been caught in the act of darting and dehorning rhino. One of them committed suicide soon after his arrest. Apparently they were part of a large gang who have been involved in the rhino poaching “business” for quite some time and were somehow linked to the Thai man, Chumlong Lemtongthai who is in custody in South Africa. At his arrest the Thai kingpin reportedly had an outstanding order for 50 horns. That demand is still there. He was due to return to court yesterday for a further bail hearing, but I cannot find anything new on this matter. I have alreadv posted once about this and the original story appeared on the BBC wesbite

The latest figures (October 30th this year) are that over 600 rhino have been killed in South Africa in the last two years, just for their horns. The killing, which has been going on for centuries, had declined somewhat and an average of “only” 36 rhinos were poached in the five years up to 2005.

These two were slaughtered in Pilansberg NP and the stark photo was taken by Steve Dell, who is a field ecologist in the park.

A truly ugly new component is reported by Declan Hofmeyr of Madikwe Game Reserve, which lies on the extreme west of South Africa, close to the border with Botswana. During a recent arrest in the Kruger a Chinese hand grenade was seized from one of the poachers. That is bad enough, but it seems as if carcasses are also being booby trapped with Chinese munitions as a revenge tactic against rangers who killed some poachers last year.

The myth persists in many countries of the orient that rhino horn is the essential ingredient for many medical purposes. The most recent claim seems to be that is it a cure-all for cancer. If that is the case, why not harvest finger-nails from beauty salons, because the stuff is of the same make-up. Trouble is, rhino horn fetches about $35,000 US dollars per kg on the Oriental market. That’s a lot of incentive for the poachers.

The perpetrators are not only using simple old techniques of shooting with rifles, but have gone into the use of helicopters, night vision goggles and darting. It is not just South Africa. A few rhino have been poached in Kenya and no doubt other countries are being targeted. There was even a recent case in Tanzania in which a ranger was shot at with a poison-tipped arrow. His jacket saved him as the deadly Acokanthera poison, for which there is no antidote, failed to enter his blood stream.

Such is the demand for rhino horn that museums in the UK are being raided and horns from mounted specimens have been stolen. In a recent report one gang lost out when they stole what were actually latex horns from an exhibit.

The whole issue is clouded by other factors. It has long been known that the only way rhino can be protected is in heavily guarded refugia. High profile reserves like the Kruger National Park are employing military forces to guard their rhino, as are some of the private preserves in Kenya. They can afford to, but smaller operators are in a bind.

Another South African correspondent wrote to me just a couple of days ago. He has been intimately involved with the commercial game ranching industry in South Africa for many years, and understands that in the Africa of today’s world, wildlife has to pay its way. This is part of his email:

"The current rhino poaching and the moratorium on export/trade in the horn just illustrates the fact “that if it pays it stays”. Rhino horn is after all a renewable product and can be cropped I think every three years. What is now happening is that Game ranchers cannot afford the cost of protection as they cannot realise any income , the price of rhino’s has fallen and there will be fewer kept. The situation currently is though that the population growth is still exceeding the poaching rate."

There seem to be two separate movements on this subject. One is an attempt get a total ban on all rhino horn (and elephant tusk) trading world-wide. This has been spearheaded out of Kenya and the folks who started the petition are seeking a million signatures. If you feel this is an option, then got to this site.

The other idea, which has been touted before, is summarized in an online BBC article of Oct 30th this year by Pumza Fihlani titled Could legalising rhino horn trade stop poaching?

She states that “Some game farms in South Africa have resorted to de-horning rhinos before poachers get to them.” She may not know that this has been tried before, mainly in Zimbabwe. It failed. The poachers went ahead and killed rhino anyway.

A bulleted box derived from WWF and Campfire Zimbabwe data on that same BBC site gives one a picture
• 80% Africa's rhino population is found in southern Africa
• There are 4,500 black rhino in southern Africa
• The black rhino population has decreased by 95% since the 1980s
• There are 20,000 white rhino in South Africa alone
• About 80% of Africa's rhinos are found on state-owned land and the rest on private property.

According to Fihlani “South Africa has commissioned a study into whether legalising trade in rhino horn could in fact help to bring down poaching, the Department of Environmental Affairs announced recently.”

She correctly goes on to say that while many countries are desperate for answers to the poaching problem - and many agree that a lot more can be done to save rhinos, critics says South Africa's idea might be too unconventional and untested to get the supports it needs.

There were plenty of comments on Fihlani‘s page, with ideas like contaminating horns to make them undesirable in the TCM trade, shooting poachers on sight, harvesting horns every three years and genetic modification of rhino to be hornless among them.

On a final note, some artificial insemination trials have started and moderate success has been achieved. It is exciting from the scientific point of view, but will never really impact overall rhino populations.

Meanwhile, I’m off with family to visit old stamping grounds in Kenya and hope to see lots of rhino and other species in the private game preserves of Solio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solio_Ranch) which was Kenya’s first private game reserve, and into which I moved quite a number of rhino on the 1970s. I wrote about it in my book The Trouble With Lions. Let’s hope we see sights like these. The older female of these two rhino was one of the last ones I worked on before we came to Canada

We also plan to visit Ol Pejetaas well as the Masai Mara. It will be fun to show my grand daughters where their mother was born and what it is about Africa that is so compelling. I will not have a computer with me, so no blogs until just before Christmas.

Family visit and great scenery

2011-11-04T07:05:00.009-06:00

Great trip south and west to visit family in Spokane, Washington. As we headed out we realized we would see a real cross-section of the prairies and the scenery through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at a time when fall colours and migrating birds would be major features.

And so it proved. First up, a small group of a couple of hundred Canada geese roosting on sand banks in the South Saskatchewan River near Outlook during their midday break. They had likely been out feeding on grain or pulse crop stubble since early morning and would head off for another feast late in the afternoon. Soon they will head south.

Then a slightly larger mass of snow geese zooming around as they settle on a typical prairie slough near Rosetown. Although the numbers are beyond my ability to count, and I’m merely guessing at a couple of thousand in this picture, this was as nothing compared to other twenty and thirty hectare sloughs that we saw covered in what must have been tens of thousands of the birds.

A couple of hours later we were in the foothill country and I could not resist snapping picture of three things that are such an integral part of the Alberta scene. First, an oil derrick backed by the snow-capped ranges of the Rockies, and then, a few kilometres further south, the extension of those ranges, but a large ranch in the foreground, with groups of Angus cattle.

Then we were up through the Crow’s Nest Pass and a complete change of scenery. The Elk River near the town of Fernie is backed by more snowy tops and the contrasting colours of the spruce and yellow autumn show put up by hundreds of tamarack larch, with bare-boned poplars in the foreground along the river banks and willows on the sandy shores.

Down into the US at the Kinsgate border crossing and we were soon seeing vistas near Spokane.

Our bonus? Visiting over the Halloween weekend and watching the grandchildren, dressed respectively as an orc and a vampire, getting ready to head out on their evening “trick or treat” expedition.

Grand daughter’s birthday

2011-10-30T10:38:00.003-06:00

Visiting Spokane and enjoying time with two of our grand children (and their parents) who have recently moved here. The youngest has a birthday in a week’s time and so we had a sort of Mad Hatters tea party this afternoon. Not really an unbirthday party, but more of a slightly early one (just a week early). We shard the pizza she had chosen, and then came a gift unwrapping that involved the usual tearfest of coloured paper and then a slow examination of the goodies within.

We made it a double session as her brother was also due some bits and pieces.

We had made some of the gifts and these seemed to go down pretty well. Gabriella got the dolls crib with a sliding side that I put together in the woodwork shop. The mattress and blanket were also made to measure by Jo, my talented wife, so the thing was ready to roll. Here it is, with a knitted Teddy bear lying down for a nap. The one side can be lifted up or kept down. If you look closely you can see the pins, strings attached, that are inserted when the side is in the “up” position.

For Mathew I made a chair from walnut and Jo made the cushion for it. I also made him a wooden sword. Here it is. At least it was mostly wooden. The blade was cut down from an old piece of 2 x4 lumber. The handle came from a broom handle and the guard started life as the lid of a peanut butter jar. Mathew is going on his Halloween circuit as an orc, so the sword will be part of the outfit. He is deeply embedded in all things Tolkein and Lord of the Rings, so we have an order for a chess set from the stories. Don’t know if such a thing even exists, so now I have to dive into Google and see what is out there

Sewer piple nest boxes

2011-10-19T04:15:00.003-06:00

Autumn, fall colours, migration of birds, with geese in their thousands honking and hooting overhead. Most of them are snow geese and in the early morning they seem to pour over in an almost continuous stream.

At a more home-based level I have been cleaning out the nest boxes from around our little plot. Most are for mountain bluebirds and tree swallows, and are very easy to make. One sees them all across the prairies. Often made of plywood nailed together they are usually fixed to fence posts, two boxes about 30 metres apart, and then another two a couple of hundred metres down the road. They have to cleaned out afresh before every nesting season. Ours are a bit different and have the potential to be much longer lasting than plywood.

Here’s how.

I take length of 4-inch (10 cm) sewer pipe, black by preference, and cut it into 15-inch (37 cm) lengths. Near one end I drill a 1.5-inch (3.75 cm) hole with a spade bit. The size is critical. Starlings cannot enter and the “boxes” are used only by those bluebirds and tree swallows. Then I put a cap on the thing, drill one small hole near the base and I’m ready to roll.

I walk round the garden and among the poplar tree searching for old stumps that are about 3 or 4 feet tall. I have even cut off dead trees at about this height and trimmed them so that the top is the right diameter. Here is one that has been in use for three years. The fact that it is not upright doesn’t seem to bother the tenants. Sometimes I use fence posts. I slip the pipe on to the stump and run in a single screw in the small hole near its base to secure it to the post or stump.

For my first efforts I made a mistake. I used white pipe and realized at once that this would not do, as the plastic glared in the sun. The solution? I roughed up the outside with a coarse file and then slapped on a couple of coats of grey exterior plaint. Before the second coat was dry I rolled the tubes in wood shavings gleaned from the sawdust collector in my woodwork shop.

When I do the rounds, either in the fall or spring, I can quickly see if the birds have found the nesting sites to their liking. It is simple. The used tubes are filled with little twigs – juts like the one in this picture. To clean them, it is simply a matter of undoing the one screw, lifting off the “box” and giving it a good shake. Now it’s ready for the new season. I’ll be making some more this winter as they have been a great success.

Of Men and Moose

2011-10-10T14:53:00.003-06:00

I now have the front cover for my new book to share with everyone. It is due out in the spring – probably May 1.

You might ask how I got this picture. The story is told in full in the book, but here is a summary. The animal had been immobilized (obviously) and in order to get accurate data I had designed a sling made of old webbing material that had once been used to make visual i.d. collars for moose. We borrowed a scale from the vet college and using this technique we were able to gather data on weights of over 40 moose and tabulate them according to sex and age. Using a variety of body measurements we were able to get reasonably accurate data that would give others, who lacked a scale, a good indication of the weight of the moose by simply measuring head length, spinal length, heart girth and so on. From those data they could use an equation we developed to give a reasonable estimate of the animal’s weight.

Another way of viewing this is to link to my Youtube video. This was shot in the snow, and the book cover was not set at that time, so I selected a dramtic one that was unforunately too grainy to use in print as it came from a Super 8 footage clip.Here is the link.

Fire in the house

2011-10-02T10:51:00.004-06:00

A week ago today we had a bit of a disaster. A small pan containing wax was on the stove. The wax was to be used to seal a huge batch of tomato chutney that was ready to be added to the preserves we have been able to make from a marvelous garden this year.

As we sat and read after lunch the pan spilled over and the wax ignited. About 45 seconds later I had sprayed the entire stove area with a fire extinguisher. The fire was out, but the oven and microwave were not in good shape.

The Fire Department boss basically kicked us out of the house when the professional cleaning crew came in. This was because the ultra-fine dust from the extinguisher had coated everything and invaded the rest of the house. This is toxic stuff and the crew used masks for their work.

We headed north for four nights and stayed in a friend’s cabin at Little Bear lake, about 320 km northeast of Saskatoon, in the heart of beautiful aspen parkland country. This put us out of Internet and cell phone contact, which was, in some ways, a blessing.

When we got back we discovered that we have no clothes, no kitchen appliances (large or small) and only three rooms that we could occupy. The cleaners had use hepafilter machines to remove all traces of the extinguisher dust and they tell me that all electronic stuff is done for. Toaster, kettle, coffee machine, printer, etc etc. All must be replaced. The clothes have gone to be washed or dry-cleaned and we have no word on when we will get them back. I may not have any usable wool socks if they put them through a dryer, and I only use wool socks. Any food packets that had been opened are also dumped, so our larder looks a bit like mother Hubbard's.

On the bright side, the weather has been amazing. At the lake the temperatures were consistently above 20 degrees during the afternoons, and there was lots of sunshine. The canoeing was serene. The Northern Lights had a small show one evening and when we got home Oncidium orchids that have been blooming in series since about February have gone absolutely nuts, as if to welcome us. Gorgeous!

The bottom line? Don’t snooze when making wax for preserves. Don’t let your kitchen catch fire, but if it does, make sure that you have a handy fire extinguisher. Fire extinguisher dust is nasty, but no home would be a lot nastier.

The Word On The Street in Saskatoon

2011-09-25T06:50:00.004-06:00

LinkJust back from a wonderful three-day break canoeing and fishing in Meadow Lake Provincial park, in Saskatchewan’s northwest. With all the kids back in school, and the official summer season over, we almost had the entire park to ourselves.

The weather was fantastic, with daytime highs in the mid 20s and nights above freezing, and we had our campground entirely to ourselves. We encountered black bears twice, in both cases when we were driving.
This group of a mother and cubs was feeding on low-bush cranberries right by the road. They all looked fat and sassy.

The canoeing was great. The waters were calm, and the fall colours were just getting going.

Now I have a bigger task. Today is the city’s first ever participation in The Word On The Street Festival and I have been drafted at the last minute to act as an MC for one of the afternoon sessions. We have a stellar line-up, with 32 readings and activities in three performance venues. Our headliners are Yann Martell and Sandra Birdsell, but we have lots of other authors, and a major attraction will be Netty the talking car.

The Word On The Street is a free Community Festival that celebrates reading and advocates literacy. It takes place across Canada on the last Sunday in September each year and this year Saskatoon joins established venues Toronto, Halifax, Kitchener and Vancouver as well a newbie Lethbridge as we bring together talented writers from our city, our province and beyond.

You can find out lots more about the day at our website You can also see a short clip that was made by the students at the Evan Hardy High School media school during last year’s preview event They will be with us again this year and we look forward to seeing what they can come up with.

Talking books on TV

2011-09-09T16:52:00.003-06:00

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For a change I'm uploading a video of a TV show I did with Saskatoon author and host Wes Funk who hosts a show about books and writing. It is called Lit Happens and is shown on the local Shaw TV station. Wes and I talk about two of my books. Mainly about The Trouble With Lions, but also about Of Moose and Men. I'm stil struggling with a possible subtitle of the latter. Right now I favour A Glasgow Vet's Journey With The Moose, The Whole Moose and Nearly Nothing but The Moose. Hope you enjoy the video. You can find it here on Youtube.

Book talk on TV

2011-09-09T16:22:00.003-06:00

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For a change I'm uploading a video of a TV show I did with Saskatoon author and host Wes Funk who hosts a show about books and writing. It is called Lit Happens and is shown on the local TV station at Shaw. Wes and I talk about two of my books. Mainly about The Trouble With Lions, but also about Of Moose and Men. I'm stil struggling with a possible subtitle of the latter. Right now I favour A Glasgow Vet's Journey With The Moose, The Whole Moose and Nearly Nothing but The Moose. Hope you enjoy the video.

Of Moose and Men and Tony Bubenik

2011-08-30T11:22:00.005-06:00

I thought I would share with you a little of the material from my new book Of Moose and Men. The subtitle is not yet firm, but may well end up as something like The Moose, The Whole Moose, and Nearly Nothing But the Moose.

One character whom I met several times through the years, and who was highly regarded among deer biologists around the world was Tony Bubenik. I fist met him in Prince Alberta in 1978, and then several subsequent times, including when he stayed in our home.

He was never backward in coming forward with new ideas or extending discussions. Not all his ideas proved to be correct, but he was the first to acknowledge it when they did not pan out, and to the end of his life at age eighty-two he kept abreast of developments and technology.

His output included something over three hundred articles and contributions in numerous books. He was also fluent in six or seven languages (accounts differ, probably because of differing definitions of fluency) and wrote in thirteen.
To top it all off, Tony was an accomplished artist, and we have two large watercolour crayon works of his. This one shows a scene which he witnessed when walking in the bush. He told me that the look of surprise on the animal's face was exactly what he saw. The sketches that illustrate the story I have below were also his, made from Super8 movie clips shot by his biologist wife Mary.

Tony’s early life was not easy. He first suffered persecution from the Nazis in his native Czechoslovakia (as it was then) and then dealt with the Communist takeover after World War II, when he was forced to work as a labourer. He came to Canada in 1970 and was soon recognized as one of the most innovative thinkers in the field of deer biology.

Because he was fascinated by the role of antlers in deer society Tony carried out a series of experiments related to the pre-flight displays that occur just before and during the rutting season. He loaned me a copy of Mary’s footage and his son George kindly allowed me to use the sketches for the book.

For the moose study he built a dummy head to which he could attach antlers of various sizes. Even with only two legs, as the sketches showed from these and other experiments, the wild animals reacted to them. He found a bull that had taken up residence near a pond in Ontario and proceeded with his study.
First, he put on a tiny set of antlers that matched those of a sixteen-month-old spiker and walked out from behind his hiding place when the wild bull appeared. The movie shows the bull lifting his head briefly from the water, taking one glance at the intruder, who was showing the correct behaviour in moving lateral to and not facing the dominant animal, and ignoring him. This was much as expected.

Next, as his experiment escalated, Tony exchanged the spikes for a set of super antlers, far bigger than those of the resident. This time, when the bull saw him, he again took a look, but he did not hang around. He simply retired from the scene and ghosted into the spruce trees.

Then Tony showed his true scientific inquisitiveness. He put on the last set of antlers, a set that he had constructed to match those of his subject as nearly as possible. This time he was neither ignored nor avoided.

As Tony’s drawing from the film clip shows, the bull came round the side of the pond and began the ritualized threat that precedes a serious fight among bull moose of equal rank. He dropped his head so that the massive palms would show to maximum effect and rocked his head from side to side, showing off his “stuff.” He walked forward with his forelegs spread wide and locked as if they were stilts, like Frankenstein figures in early horror films.

Not surprisingly Mary’s filming technique suffered a bit at this point as she began to retreat behind a tree. Tony dropped the dummy head, having no wish to take his proof to its inevitable conclusion.

The dummies were so convincing that, as Tony wrote:

“On two occasions moose cows offered themselves for copulation even though a short while earlier they were courted by a bull of lower rank antlers.”

Iberian lynx conservation and white rhino

2011-08-22T11:40:00.008-06:00

There have been several reports in the scientific literature and on websites (I first saw one by Rebecca Morelle on the BBC site) about the dire situation facing one of the world’s most endangered cats. This is the Iberian lynx, that lives in Spain and has been under intense pressure from farmers and the general impact of humans for a long time. This beautiful cat is about the size of a cocker spaniel and has the ear tufts of the caracal or African lynx. I found this picture (one of many) on this site through Google.

My only picture of a similar sized cat is of Africa’s serval, which has longer legs, but the same sort of body size. This one was taken in Kenya’s Meru National Park in the early 1970s.

There are thought to be only about 250 Iberian lynx left in the wild and there are those who have suggested that this puts them at risk because of low genetic diversity and inbreeding. The story is typical of the roller coaster for many species of wildlife. In the 1960s there were an estimated 3000 of the cats, but by 2005 the numbers were down to about 150. One major factor in the decline has been the reduction of the main food source, the rabbit. A successful and active captive breeding program has brought them back up to today’s numbers, but they are now only found in two isolated pockets in the south of Spain.

However, a recent report on the BBC website cites the authors of a scientific article by Dr. Love Dalen and others in the journal Molecular Ecology which suggests that the cat’s survival may not be doomed by its tiny population size.

The research suggests that the lynx has had little genetic variability over the last 50,000 years, and this has not hampered its long-term survival. The authors go further and imply that the information should offer hope to conservationists who are trying to reverse what seems to be a path to extinction.

Dr. Dalen, from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, is quoted as saying that "This indicates that some species can do fairly well at low population sizes, even for a very long period of time."

While most geneticists argue that there is a vital place for the use of genetic profiling in the conservation management of wild species there are examples of very successful recovery of almost terminal situations when genetic diversity has been severely limited.

As I wrote in my book The Trouble With Lions:

“The white rhino qualifies as one the really impressive examples of conservation in action. The southern race, which once occupied an area in parts of what are now South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola and Botswana, had all but died out by the year 1900.

A 1904 estimate had only 10 animals left in the country, all of them in the Umfulozi area of Zululand. Mainly through the efforts of one man, B. Vaughan-Kirby, who was the first game conservator in that part of the country, the species was brought back from the brink. In 1916 he reported 20 animals alive.

From that nadir the numbers climbed slowly to something short of five hundred when in 1952 Ian Player, oldest brother of champion golfer Gary, got involved in the very earliest translocation efforts and movement of the animals to many parts of Africa, and indeed to zoos overseas.

Between 1961 and 1972 white rhino had been moved to an impressive 38 new locations in South Africa and eight other African countries, including Kenya, where they went to Meru National Park and became my patients when I lived in the area for ten years. Over and above these destinations rhino also moved to 17 different countries, including Canada, the UK, and the USA.”

This pair of white rhino came to Meru in the late 1960s fror what was euphemitically called "Lesotho" (this was the days of apartheid and no credit could be given to South Africa in Kenya).

Let’s hope that with a population of 250 and a long history of limited genetic diversity, that the Iberian lynx can make a comeback like the southern white rhino has done.

Moose sounds - moans and grunts

2011-08-14T21:44:00.005-06:00

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In the past week I have learned a whole lot more about moose calls. I had known that during the rut bulls make a noise that has been variously described as a grunt, a hiccup and even, somewhat bizarrely, as sounding like “a human being in the throes of seasickness.” This last description was made by Frederick Selous, the famous hunter of African big game who came to Canada in the early 1900s.
I wonder if this bull, painted by the late Tony Bubenik, was grunting.

I also knew that cow moose make a moaning call during the rut and had believed it to be a protest to courting bulls, especially youngsters.

Then a BBC Nature story written by Ella Davies appeared about a second reason for the moan. Davies had interviewed Dr Terry Bowyer, who used to work in Alaska before moving to Idaho State University. What Bowyer showed, after many hours of observation, was that the moan has a second surprising purpose. His paper was recently published on line in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology. He and his team showed that the moan is used as a tool to attract bigger bulls if a small male approaches. When that happens females moan more and this triggers aggression in larger males.
In fact, As Terry said in the interview

“Male aggression was more common when females gave protest moans than when they did not, indicating that this vocalization incited male-male aggression. Protest moans allow females to exert some female choice in a mating system where males restrict choice of mates through male-male combat.”

In this regard it echoes shades of human behaviour and clearly shows that there is a considerable element of female choice during the rut. When I chatted to Dr. Bowyer he told me that one of his colleagues, who read the manuscript, said to him, “This is not unique to moose, I have seen it in bars in Wisconsin.” I replied,” Not just Wisconsin, I saw it during my student days in Glasgow.” Of course we both acknowledged that this comparison is an oversimplification. As Terry said in that same BBC interview,

“Human females have far more opportunities for mate choice than do female moose because of differences in mating systems.”

The grunt of the rutting bull and the moan of the cow are not the only sounds that moose make.

As we sat over a beer during our recent writer’s retreat at the Sage Hill Writing Experience naturalist and long-time moose watcher Roy Ness of Whitehorse told me of two encounters with moose during which he heard more than just the moans of a cow.
In mid-September 1983, at the height of the rut, “I was in what's locally called the Teslin Burn,” he said.

“I was camped at the end of Grayling Lake, south of Teslin Lake, an area of regrowth that had the highest moose density in the Yukon.”
As he sat on a three-metre tall knoll at the end of the lake in the gathering autumn dusk he listened as a cow accompanied by her calf came to the shore from quite a distance away."

As I read Roy’s subsequent emailed graphic description of the next ninety minutes I got goose bumps.

“I was sitting there as it got dark and I heard the cow call. It started high and went down the register for about 10 seconds, closely repeated several times, each shorter than the last, until it ended in a couple of short grunts. She would call every five or ten minutes, each time getting closer and each time getting answering grunts from a bull at the far end of the lake.”

There was no moon that night and by the time the animals arrived in the meadow just below the knoll only the stars gave any light. It must have been magic.
“Even though they were only a few meters away,” he wrote, “I could barely discern their shapes. She continued to call for about an hour while her calf seemed to be playing—fits of running about then standing still for a while.”

I called him and as we chatted about his experience he told me that the cow suddenly became aware of him, although there was no wind to speak of. At that point “she let out the loudest sound I've ever heard escape the lungs of any animal. It was a lion’s roar with a deep loud belch mixed in. I nearly jumped out of my clothes.”
The cow took off at a great rate, down the meadow and through the willows, crashing though the bushes and letting out the same call as she went.
I wonder if the cow and bull ever got together, as happened in this picture taken in Prince Alberta National Park by Gerhard Stuewe.

This alarm call is made by both sexes.

On another occasion, in early June Roy watched a cow and her small calf feeding in some willows. “I could not see them a lot of the time,” he said during our conversation, “and they certainly could not see each other all the time. However, they both let out a series of high-pitched calls, almost like squeaks, as they stayed in touch. I couldn’t tell which was the calf, and which the mother.”

Vince Crichton from Manitoba is Canada’s senior moose biologist and has witnessed and videotaped a play fight encounter between two young bulls during which they both made sounds that closely resembled the moan of the cow during the rut. He told me “ If I had not seen them and heard their moaning I would have said it was cows – quite amazing – have video of this and I was about 20 feet from them.”

Sarus crane conservation

2011-08-08T13:33:00.007-06:00

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Amidst al the doom and gloom about wildlife and the dwindling numbers of so many species, form fogs the world over, to rhino, lions and South American primates, it is nice to find a story that has a more positive message.

According to the Thai Society for the Conservation of Wild Animals the Sarus crane in Thailand had been extinct for at least twenty years. The government Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning (ONEP) goes further and states that it disappeared from its natural habitat in Thailand 50 years ago.

Efforts by conservation groups, including the Eastern Sarus Crane Reintroduction Project, under the Zoological Park Organization(ZPO), with the Royal Patronage of H. M. the King of Thailand have made the all-important start to reversing the situation.

The ZPO has successfully bred sarus cranes through artificial insemination and ten chicks have been prodcued. A story in the Bangkok English newspaper of 2nd August quotes ZPO director Pimook Simaroj as saying that the chicks have been released into the wild and in a related story The Sarus Crane Reintroduction Project Thailand have posted a Youtube video that shows a radio collar device being fitted to one of the birds before release. The ZPO and the Thai Department of Natural Parks, Wildlife, and Plant Conservation (DNP) plan to release more cranes.

If the survival rate is satisfactory, the DNP will discuss with related authorities to withdraw sarus crane out of the extinction, but as Nisakorn Kositratna, ONEP's secretary-general said “it may take more time before the cranes can be taken off the extinction list.” That's because the freed cranes were bred in captivity and a species can be removed from the list only after it successfully breeds in nature and its wild population grows.

In neighbouring Cambodia a new Sarus Crane reserve was created on 6 Jan this year, although it did take 5 years for the consultative and bureaucratic process to be completed. According to a report on the website

“In March 2010 the site held over 270 Sarus Cranes, more than 30% of the global population”

The sarus crane, in all its grey glory and red head, is indeed majestic. I got this picture of a pair when I traveled in India a twenty-five years ago. It is the tallest of the cranes at about 150 cm and was originally given the romantic name of Antigone antigone by Karl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy.

Quite why he chose the double barrel is a bit of a mystery, but I speculate that it was because the bird was believed to be truly monogamous. Not just monogamous, but also according to myth, so faithful that if one partner died the other would pine way and die. If I am right this was a reference to Oedipus’s daughter and heroine of Sophocles’s play who was unable to control her emotions on the death of her brother Polyneices and Linnaeus is bound to have had a classical education.

The name was later changed to Grus antigone to more neatly, but very prosaically, fit it into the crane family in general, a group that includes the very common Sandhill crane, the Whooping crane that nests in northern Canada and is even more endangered than the sarus, and several others.

These birds once ranged across southeast Asia, as far west as parts of India and Sri Lanka and even into northern Australia and are generally divided into subspecies according to the area in which they live.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed for this beautiful bird and the efforts of the dedicated people who are trying to keep it, and its habitat, in a viable state.

Sage Hill and Writing

2011-08-01T07:04:00.011-06:00

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Getting over the highs and lows of my ten days at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, which took place at St. Michaels Retreat in Lumsden, in Saskatchewan’s beautiful Qu’apelle Valley.

The Highs?

1. Meeting an amazing array of writers, about fifty of them, from all across Canada. Nine were faculty, working in poetry, fiction and non-fiction. You can see their mug shots and bits about them on the Sage Hill website.

2. Watching Philip Adams conduct, compére, entertain and organize everyone. While not as tough as herding cats, his job required him to sleep little, laugh a lot, drive to and from the aiport at crazy hours and keep us all on track.

3. Listening to everyone read from their work. On three evenings about a dozen of the “students” had five minutes to read something. Each was introduced by the person who read before them. On three other evenings faculty had the chance to read for a longer period, up to half an hour.

4. Camaraderie and friendly chats over a glass or two of whatever takes your fancy.

5. Good food, amazingly good for institutional grub. Hats off to the team in the kitchen.

The Lows?

1. First up, the fact that I found out that my camera had been stolen on the way to the retreat. It almost certainly happened at a Subway stop in the town of Davidson. Not only my little point-and-shoot digital, but the specialized and expensive 400 mm lens that I use for bird photography. I have quite a number, like this one of a hammerkop who looks as if his eyes were bigger than his stomach at this spot on my website.

The one below, of a kildeer in our driveway with her newly hatched chick, is the last one I took with the big lens. With neither piece of equipment to use I cannot give any new photos here.

2. My bum knee – I won’t bore you, except to say “think twice (or many more times) before you go for a full knee replacement.”

There was a joint class for “beginners’, but from the quality and tone of their readings they were far from neophytes. There was a poetry colloquium. There were sessions on creative writing and on mystery.

I was in the smallest group, who were all working on non-fiction stories. Here we are. From left to right, Jean Crozier, Me, Myrna Guymer, Ted Barris, Ayelet Tsabari and Evonne Garnet.
We were led by award-winning military historian Ted Barris.

Ted has not only won awards for his books, but he had to leave early in order to attend a ceremony for veterans. As he said himself, “I am not a veteran,” but his work has highlighted many veterans issues and he has told their stories from both world wars, Korea and other conflicts. His commendation read, in part:

"Ted Barris has made such exemplary contributions by generously giving of himself and so both benefiting veterans and making manifest the principle that Canada’s obligation to all who have served in the cause of Peace and Freedom, must not be forgotten.”

Jean Crozier, Evonne Garnett and Ayelet Tsabari were my class-mates. One other person, Myrna Guymer, started with us but had to leave at very short notice on the second day when she received news that a tornado had ripped through her home town and knocked everything, including her own home, sideways. With her husband unwell and awaiting surgery she felt she had no choice but to head home.

Jean is working on the tricky subject of widowhood, her own and the same for others. Her initial idea had been to document her life with her late husband, whose photography she so admires, but Ted persuaded her that the subject may have a much wider scope.

Evonne has, as Ted put it in his blog written on the 26th, “the greatest and worst story to tell.” "She is struggling with her mother’s story of growing up in a household where rape, paedophilia and abuse were the norm." Her mother kept a meticulous journal of everything she suffered and Evonne’s challenge will be to find a way to use it. Ted quotes Evonne when she writes “with only the aid of her (her mother’s) journals and her faith, she broke free of the abuse cycle to find a measure of peace and freedom.”

Ayelet is working on what she delightfully calls “a suite of essays” that Ted stated “explores her own travels as a woman apparently unable to settle in one place”. Ayelet read from her darkly comical story about her time in the Israeli militry and being subjected to a lie detector test on suspicion of gun theft.

Ted has also steered me in a new direction and urged my to write about bears, and drop the “porcupine” segment of my planned book. He reckons there is enough about bears, particularly polar bears, to make an important book. I’m still wrestling with that as I last worked in the Arctic in the mid-1980s, but with lots of research and interviews I might be able to tackle it. I suppose that I did this with Of Moose and Men, with interviews and emails to over 80 people world-wide.

Of Moose and Men

2011-07-17T07:07:00.010-06:00

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UNDERSTAND JOB OFFER SASKATOON STOP ON SAFARI IN RWANDA TRANSLOCATING ELEPHANTS STOP WILL MAKE CONTACT ASAP ON RETURN TO KENYA STOP HAIGH.

It was 1975, and I was working in Rwanda on an elephant project. The team had taken a brief break and come to Kigali, the capital, in mid-April 1975 and had not long come off the phone with my wife Jo, who was at our home in Kenya. After the normal greetings she said, “A man called Nielsen called from Saskatoon in Canada. They have offered you the job at the vet college.”

She read out the long number, which I tried to memorize, and then I realized that with the nine-hour time difference it would be 4 a.m. in Saskatoon. Not a good time to call. Conversely, by the time Nielsen would be in his office it would be 1 a.m. in Kigali, and I would not be able to use a phone, as the post office would be closed. In those pre-Internet, pre-fax days, a telegram was the only solution to my problem. And I was intent on getting my response to him as quickly as I could.

In the half-dark of a crowded post office jam-packed with Rwandans and three other “Europeans” (as any white person was called), I struggled to compose the telegram.
Eventually I got to the front of the queue, where I found that I could hardly see the clerk behind the grime-covered glass sheet. I bent down and spoke through the grate.
“I’d like to send this cable to Canada,” I said to him, only to receive a blank stare. I had forgotten that I was in a francophone country. I switched to French, which was also a mistake, as I ran out of vocabulary after the initial, “Je veux.” I changed gears again to Swahili, which allowed us to understand one another.

Dr. Nielsen was offering me a post as a zoo and wildlife veterinarian at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine. I had applied several months earlier and been waiting to hear for some time.

It was this opportunity that has led to my 36 years in Canada and the writing of Of Moose and Men. Moose are the first free-ranging species on which I carried out research work and they have fascinated me ever since. Here is the first moose that I ever worked on and his new collar. The book is now in the editing stage with publisher ECW Pressof Toronto, so I’m moving on to the next phase. Tomorrow, Monday I head to Saskatchewan’s Quapelle Valley and the Sage Hill Writing Experience (see more here) to start work on anew project that I’m calling, for now, From Polar Bears to Porcupines. Let’s see if that title holds up after 10 days of work, but meanwhile, here is one of the pictures I would likely include.

I'm not sure how good the Internet contact will be at the retreat, but if it works I will certainly keep you posted.

Rhino poaching

2011-07-13T10:55:00.005-06:00

www.eawildlife.orgLink
Several recent reports in websites and magazines might give one the impression that rhino poaching is a recent phenomenon, but the truth is that it never really went away. However, it has gone high-tech and there has indeed been a surge, most notably in South Africa, where it has been thought that the two African species were perhaps somewhat less vulnerable that in other areas of the continent. You can follow the ugly story by starting at the BBC website here, which has links back to previous accounts. Swara, the fine magazine of the East African Wildlife Society also has an account in their April-June 2011 issue. If this and other African conservation things interest you then try a subscription or visit their website here.

The modern high-tech version of the practice involves night vision goggles, helicopters and drugging. Indeed two South African veterinarians were charged in relation to a poaching ring last year.

There is one potentially good news element to all this, and that is that a Thai man named Chumlong Lemtongthai who has been implicated at the head of one poaching ring and is called a rhino horn ‘kingpin’ was recently arrested in South Africa. He will appear in court on July 15. I hope he doesn’t get away with as much as a Malaysian man on whom the prosecutors reportedly had enough to put him behind bars for mare than a lifetime. He plea-bargained his way into a paltry sentence of less than three years.

What those who have followed the sorry saga closely are well aware of is that rhino horn has been a target of poachers for well over a hundred years. There were once armed gangs scouring Sudan and other countries in that region to supply white rhino horn to buyers.

At least the print media now have it right, rhino horn is not a commodity to help old men get it up. The principal use is in the Orient, or even among oriental people who believe that it is a medical necessity for many ailments. Over 70% of Korean doctors believe it is essential. Secondary uses are as decorative items. This photo was taken by Jimmy Suttie in Korea and show rhino horn for sale in a pharmacy. Look at the very bottom where there are two short pieces.

Current market prices for horn are over $60,000 per kilo. That is about $10,000 more than the price of gold!

With all the high-tech equipment it is becoming increasingly difficult to prevent the poaching. Sadly it goes back to the basic statement by Kenya ex-game wardens Peter Jenkins and Ian Parker, among others, that the only way to ensure rhino survival is to keep them in heavily guarded refugia. That would be hellishly expensive.

Rhino poaching

2011-07-13T10:55:00.001-06:00

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Rhino poaching.

Several recent reports in websites and magazines might give one the impression that rhino poaching is a recent phenomenon, but the truth is that it never really went away. However, it has gone high-tech and there has indeed been a surge, most notably in South Africa, where it has been thought that the two African species were perhaps somewhat less vulnerable that in other areas of the continent. You can follow the ugly story by starting at the BBC website here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14114327, which has links back to previous accounts. Swara, the magazine of the East African Wildlife Society also has an account in their April-June 2011 issue. If this and other African conservation things interest you then try a subscription or visit their website here at www.eawildlife.org

The modern high-tech version of the practice involves night vision goggles, helicopters and drugging. Indeed two South African veterinarians were charged in relation to a poaching ring last year.

There is one potentially good news element to all this, and that is that a Thai man named Chumlong Lemtongthai who has been implicated at the head of one poaching ring and is called a rhino horn ‘kingpin’ was recently arrested in South Africa. He will appear in court on July 15. I hope he doesn’t get away with as much as a Malaysian man on whom the prosecutors reportedly had enough to put him behind bars for mare than a lifetime. He plea-bargained his way into a paltry sentence of less than three years.

What those who have followed the sorry saga closely are well aware of is that rhino horn has been a target of poachers for well over a hundred years. There were once armed gangs scouring Sudan and other countries in that region to supply white rhino horn to buyers,

At least the print media now have it right, rhino horn is not a commodity to help old men get it up. The principal use is in the Orient, or even among oriental people who believe that it is a medical necessity for many ailments. Over 70% of Korean doctors believe it is essential. Secondary uses are as decorative items. This photo was taken by Jimmy Suttie in Korea and show rhino horn for sale in a pharmacy. Look at the very bottom where there are two short pieces.

Current market prices for horn are over $60,000 per kilo. That is about $10,000 more than the price of gold!

With all the high-tech equipment it is becoming increasingly difficult to prevent the poaching. Sadly it goes back to the basic statement by Kenya ex-game wardens Peter Jenkins and Ian Parker, among others, that the only way to ensure rhino survival is to keep them in heavily guarded refugia. That would be hellishly expensive.

Of Moose and Men

2011-07-11T06:55:00.003-06:00

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Just signed a contract with Jack David of ECW Press for my new book and things are moving ahead towards a spring launch. Very exciting!

The title is fixed at Of Moose and Men. The subtitle is still under discussion. Watch this space!

Here is a brief outline of what it is about.

The book provides a wealth of information about moose from all corners of the world. It covers not only my personal experiences with both tame and wild moose but also an overview of moose biology, including their specialized diet and the relationship between sex and antlers, where size really does matter. It also covers the history of moose on earth and the marked fluctuations in populations that have occurred over time. There are chapters on moose diseases (not too technical), moose and traffic, moose as a resource, and the use of live moose in several ways that range from transport to clothing, as dairy animals and as pets.

Here is a section from my acknowledgements that shows the sort of coverage that I did in researching it.

In order to do as thorough job as possible, one of my self-imposed tasks was to try and gain an understanding of the status of moose in the early twenty-first century, and to that end I contacted biologists from just about every range country, US state, and Canadian province where moose exist. I read as many volumes as I could of the Proceedings of the North American Moose Workshop, not just the publications from the workshops I was lucky enough to attend. These workshop proceedings morphed into the journal Alces, whose front-cover mandate reads: “A Journal Devoted to The Biology and Management of Moose.” I owe the contributors and editors sincere thanks for their hard work. I also consulted several books that contained useful information. When those attempts failed, I went, with some care, to the Internet. In the end I was able to obtain information on fifty-five regions—including five separate ones in Russia, which I think is excusable because there are nine time zones involved.

This is not the place to list all those who gave me valuable information, but they are of course listed in the acknowledgements.

Of Moose and Men

2011-07-11T06:45:00.003-06:00

Travel in Uganda

2011-07-01T13:06:00.008-06:00

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A couple of days ago I got a letter out of the blue from Derek, a Washington father worried about his son who is off to Uganda. Food was a major concern. We exchanged a coupe of mails and here is what came out of it.

Jerry, do you have any Uganda guidelines you have sent out about what to eat and what not to eat for westerners who don't want to get sick or distressed stomachs? .... some kind of "DON'T EAT THIS IN UGANDA".

Immediately after my son gets back to the USA from this 3 week trip, he plans an extremely rigorous climb of a very high mountain in Wyoming and I am worried that he might get sick from eating strange foods and drinks in Uganda and have difficulty in Wyoming or even in Uganda.

Now it seems that I have to go too because my wife wants to make sure it is a safe trip.

So, we fly there July 1 and go away into bush driving from Kampala on the 7th and return to the USA around the 23rd or so.

You would know best what is safe there.

I asked Derek how he had tracked me down and he said that he had read my book The Trouble With Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa and found me on Google.

Here is some of what I wrote back.

On food, we ate almost anything and did well. Wonderful fruit everywhere.

When Derek and Seth get to Uganda one of the most spectacular things they will see are the wonderful fruit and veg stalls alongside the roads. Common fruits in the right season include mangoes, avacado, watermelons and jackfruit. In some parts of the country delicious pineapples are abundant.
Here they are piled in Kampala ready for distribution.
These ones are set in a customised frame in the town of Mbarara.vThey are so much better than the ones in our local supermarkets that we have given up buying them here.

I also gave them a few food tips.

“If you are lucky enough to stop at a roadside stall that sells grilled green bananas (matooke), tasty (very tasty) chapatis and a variety of meats you should make sure the meat is cooked through. My favourite is "chicken-on-a-stick." It's delicious but the vendors, usually young people, will mob the vehicle with several sticks each. Choose one person and ignore the others. Then go back to the charcoal brazier and insist that the chosen piece of meat be cut to the bone to show if it is cooked through. If not (likely) then it should be put back on the heat and carefully watched. Once done it can be thoroughly enjoyed.”

“French fries are called chips. On potatoes in general, if you ask for potatoes you will get sweet potatoes. If you want potatoes as we know them ask for Irish.”

Another thing that I was asked for was an emergency medical supplies list advisable for self drives in the extreme back country. Of course I could not do much here as I am not a physician, but I did reply briefly as follows:

“On meds, you should seek advice from a physician. We only had one surprise in 8 years. We had all the usual things, antibiotics, antihistamines, ointments, headache stuff, diarrhea stuff, band aids, etc., etc. We did not have laxatives. As you may have read in my book The Trouble With Lions one very uncomfortable student said to my wife "I would do anything for a fleet enema right now." She had not passed stool for 3 days!

On a final note the family will travel connected. Here is what Derek wrote
“I am thinking of getting a USB data modem from *both* of the two cell carriers in that country, and then plugging them both into my router, which will default over to the best connection at all times, unless you feel that one carrier is so clearly superior to the other that there isn't a need for that.

I'll want a good connection to data so I can GPS drive with Google Earth data displayed on the laptop.”

Here is my reply.

“I'm sure that the Internet over a laptop has improved a lot in the two years since I was there. Good luck with it. Here, Jen Curragh is on the phone with her family in Manitoba and we are in the middle of Queen Elizabeth NP at least 40 km from the nearest town. The cell phone service is way superior to ours here and much, much cheaper. For one thing you don't pay extra for incoming calls or texting, which we do here. I consider this an absolute rip-off and have written to our local provider to tell them. Got me nowhere of course.”

Folks in UG use texting a massive amount.

One funny story about cell phones.
I delivered a lecture at the vet college & asked a colleague whether it would be okay to ask the audience to urn off their phones. "No way," he said. "They go to church to hear a message from God, but if the phone rings they take that message right away!'

So, if you plan to travel in that part of the world make sure you are fully vaccinated, make sure you have good mosquito nets and make sure you get started on malaria prophylaxis before you travel. As for food, if you are sensible it will be the least of your worries and you will no doubt have some very pleasant surprises.

Serengeti road

2011-06-25T17:07:00.004-06:00

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Good news from my posts of June 15 & 16 about the Serengeti and the proposed tarmac road.
In a nutshell, the project has been canceled!
Yeah!

Humour in Storytelling

2011-06-21T08:14:00.009-06:00

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I’m posting this as a storyteller and member of the national storytellers association http://www.sc-cc.com/ rather than any one of my other alter egos. Last Sunday I was one of nine members of the Saskatoon Storytellers Guild (we are on Facebook) who joined moderator and workshop leader Kevin Mackenzie (find him here)in a 3-hour session on humour. After a relaxation exercise we all told brief anecdotes about a memory of something in an early part of our lives, or in my case, in my grandson's five-year old life.

This was about the time that he caught his first fish. We were camped by Namekus Lake in Prince Albert National Park and were out in our canoes. Mathew had cast his own line while his dad, Charles, paddled along about twenty metres from me as we worked our way a hundred metres or so out from the shore. Suddenly I heard Charlie say, “Son, you’ve got one on.” Pretty soon the fish was alongside the canoe as the lad acted on the advice to keep his rod tip up and wind away on the reel.

As Charles brought the pickerel (walleye) into the boat the boy exclaimed, “So that what this is all about.”

We turned back towards camp in order to show the rest to the family the spoils of the excursion and Charles said, “Would you like to put your line back in again?”

He sort of sighed and said, “No Dad, my nerves are having party, I don’t think I could handle it.”

We all shared similar little vignettes and then got to the meat of the workshop. This was to watch Elna Baker perform a set at what was called the Rejection Show, a stand-up comic storytelling session in New York. It’s must-see for anyone, just as a great piece of humour. As an exercise it is amazing.Kevin had himself been at a workshop given by Doug Stevenson and from that session he developed a list of twelve techniques that work in humour.

There may be more, but these are the ones we tried to identify. Self effacement; hyperbole (which can be over or understatement); juxtaposition of illogical ideas; creating a context and then breaking it; the use of similes, which can be ridiculous; metaphors (which are like similes☺; tongue ties; triple or “rule of three”; idioms; false assumptions, double entendre (which does not need to be naughty); and puns. We had no trouble finding ten of the twelve.

Our last exercise was to work in pairs and try the techniques in our own stories. I used a brief extract from my new book Of Moose and Men from a chapter titled Sex and Antlers in which I demonstrate that size really does matter. This picture comes from the book.

My work partner, who also works as a face artist, clown and a country newspaper reporter, was Danica Lorer who told me story in which she advised that one should never give one’s seven-year old the car keys. You can find out more about her here

It was a well-spent afternoon.

I have deliberately not given you think link to Elna’s piece up to this point, because you would have moved away and then lost your train of thought as you laughed. Now is the time, here is the URL. You can also look her up on Google and find other pieces. Enjoy!

Elephants as bushmeat

2011-06-18T09:48:00.011-06:00

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In a BBC science and nature report of June 15th author Victoria Gill recounts how the forest elephants of Africa face extinction. Her piece is titled Elephants Face Same Extinction Fate as Woolly Mammoth and you can find it here.

Quoting Professor Adrian Lister of the UK's Natural History Museum she relates how wooly mammoths that once roamed in their millions in the UK and across northern Europe and North America were squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. Professor Lister says that forest elephants are suffering from the same "double whammy" that claimed the woolly mammoths - habitat loss and hunting.

"Today both of those sides of the pinch are caused by humans."

Gill suggests that history may be repeating itself. This is because as the dense rain forests of central Africa are being opened up raided by logging companies who supply the needs and greed of wealthy people from Europe, North America and the Orient.

I took this picture in Cameroon in 1997. The truck was one of six that I saw in a two–hour drive from the coast to our work station when I was involved in an elephant research project with the Wildlife Conservation Society team in the mid-1990s.I have told the full story in The Trouble With Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa. Each load was worth about $100,000 to the suppliers. Of course the trees were being felled by men who did the grunt work and needed to eat.

The logging led to habitat loss in several ways. First, and most obvious, was the destruction of many hardwood trees. Second, the damage to the surrounding bush as heavy machinery smashed everything in its path. Third, and least obvious was the curtailment of elephant movement, which has become worse over time as the number of roads has increased and the number of elephants has declined.

The team leader in Cameroon was Buddy Powell who had started to examine how elephants affect their environment and spread trees around when they eat the fruit and then pass the seeds that germinate in another area of the forest.The plant diversity is amazing and when I asked Buddy about numbers he told me that there were likely as many as 300 species of plant in a ten metre radius of where we stood. As the elephant’s range is restricted and their numbers dwindle so the plant diversity will decrease.

Gill only touches on a part of the problem when she writes about the ivory trade. Although she is right when she says that the

“trade - fuelled by civil unrest and organised crime in some central African countries - supports the poaching.”

What she has missed is the other vital element.

In the January to March issues of Swara, the magazine arm of the East African Wildlife Society Dr. Dan Stiles has documented a bigger problem. His title says a lot: First Ivory, now meat: Elephants face second threat to survival. Unfortunately the article does not seem to be on line, but the magazine’s editor does state that the full report will be published this year by IUCN.

What it boils down to is that the loggers need to eat and that is the central problem for all the species that dwell in the forests.

During our walks though the forest I would hear a shotgun blast about once an hour and it was no surprise to see spent shells like this one planted on a bush.

I encountered a roadside bushmeat stall where a variety of species were for sale. They included birds, cane rats, monkeys and duikers.

Karl Amman, the Kenya-based wildlife photographer who permitted me to use some of his pictures in my book The Trouble With Lions has documented the bushmeat trade in startling detail. You can find many more pictures at his website.

Although the bushmeat hunters take anything they can Stiles quotes Amman stating that

“Elephant meat is worth much more than ivory.”

So much so, that this remarkable picture on the BBC site shows a shop somewhere in Africa where ammunition for elephant hunting is graphically advertised on the outside wall.

So, as all species, animal and plant, in the forests of central Africa are hammered, the elephant, which gives the greatest return on investment is taking a big hit.

Serengeti Highway

2011-06-16T09:18:00.006-06:00

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In my post of June 15 I alluded to the simmering controversy about the building of a new highway through the heart of the Serengeti. Now comes a front page article by Geoffrey York in the Globe And Mail of June 14 that offers a balanced view of the issues.
You can view the article and the lively discussion that follows here and also see better versions of the maps that I have photographed and attached.

For the conservationists it is a simply matter of the desecration of a pristine environment where the greatest animal migration on earth still occurs. Of course the wildebeest gets the biggest mention and also both of the photos. A brief mention of other species is made, but everyone tend to forget that zebras are also an integral part of the events and that the predators that act as camp followers also move around with the great herds.

For the protagonists of the road it is really quite simple and boils down to two issues. The first is that the land was originally occupied by humans but they were kicked out by colonial governments when the park was formed. It began as a small game reserve, mainly to protect over-hunted lions in 1921 and was finally established in 1951. The second issue is that the people to the west of the park are almost cut off from easy commercial activity because all trucks have to skirt a long way to the south before heading to the commercial centre of Dar es Salaam.

There are other issues that are relevant.

The people in the region are living on less than a dollar a day. The human population has ballooned since 1951. According to Guardian.co.uk website statistics in 1950 there were just over 7 millions people in what was then Tanganyika. Now there are over 46 million, an increase of 504%. They need to eat. It is impossible to imagine that poaching will not increase as road access becomes easier.

A quick look at the map and the proposed route for the new highway shows that it cuts right across the path of the migration as the animals head north into Kenya and the Masai Mara, the county’s major tourist magnet. Nobody knows how that will affect the movement of the animals, but I’ll bet that the Kenyans are concerned.

The second thing that gets little mention is the potential for a huge number of traffic accidents. In my new book Of Moose and Men I have quoted statistics from Sweden about vehicle x moose accidents. They have long been a major problem and in 2010 there were 7227 reported to police. What, you may ask, has this got to do with the Serengeti?

There are about 350,000 moose in Sweden, and they do not engage in mass migration. There are said to be about over a million wildebeest, and another 250,000 zebra in the Serengeti/Mara system. One environmental study quoted by York has it that trucks will be traveling down the highway at a rate of one every thirty seconds. When I round the African figures to 1.5 million animals that is about four times as many accidents-in-waiting on a single road in the Serengeti as on all the roads in Sweden. I think that spells carnage. Carnage for the animals, carnage for the trucks and other vehicles.

I hope I’m wrong.

Snares and poachers

2011-06-15T05:44:00.007-06:00

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In my post of June 10 I wrote about the real situation in Kenya’s Masai Mara and the decline in wildlife numbers. I also referred to poaching and the numbers of poachers caught on a regular basis. Poaching is so widespread in Africa that one hardly knows where to start, but I did refer to the experiences of one park warden in the Serengeti. This was Myles Turner, who was there for 16 years and documented his work in his fascinating 1987 book titled My Serengeti Years: The Memoirs of an African Game Warden. I suggested that his book might just as easily have been subtitled The Poaching Wars.

One of the major tools for poachers is the snare. Here are a few examples of ones I have seen in various places. In Namibia’s Etosha National Park there is even a sort of “rouges gallery” in the park offices where this display case shows various types of snare that have been found over the years.

When I worked on an elephant project in Rwanda in the 1970s we found that 27% of the animals had injuries related to snares. There was one that had a cable deeply embedded in the creatures leg, while several animals had lost part or all of their trunks because they are ever curious and made the mistake of picking up snares meant for buffalo and the like.

When I was with veterinary students in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park we never failed to see animals damaged by snares, or find snares, usually at waterholes. We were able to free this warthog after immobilizing him, but I do wonder how he got on.

We found a collection of wire snares including the nasty tin can lid type that is designed to ride up an animal’s leg if it is unfortunate enough to stand upon the thing. Just have a look at the picture and imagine what will happen.

It is easy enough to condemn the poachers, but the issue is not that simple. "Poacher" is a term used by landowners to describe people who might otherwise be known as hunters. If you have no source of protein, virtually no income, and a family to feed, and a wild animal hangs out near your home, what are you to do? This is not the same as the commercial, crime syndicate type of poaching that has led to the decimation of rhino and tiger populations, to mention but two of hundreds of species.

The news about a major highway that will cut through the heart of the Serengeti has been simmering for quite a while, but now seems to have surfaced in major print media. More on this when I drop by again.

Two truths about the Masai Mara

2011-06-10T16:35:00.007-06:00

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My first trip to the Serengeti / Mara region of East Africa was in 1966. I have been back a few times and of course enjoyed every minute of it while being sadly aware of what is happening there. My wife still dines out on the story of waking in the middle of the night to the sounds of something large and noisy just outside our tent. When I peeked out (there was no way she was going to) and told her we had been joined by a large herd of cape buffalo she was not impressed. She was even less impressed with having to navigate the dozens of fresh patties in the morning.

There has been an interesting contrast in two recent reports about the fabled Masai Mara region. There can surely be nobody reading this blog who has not heard of the Mara and especially the migration of the wildbeest. I’ll further bet that all readers have seen at least five nature program on TV about the area, the crocs on the Mara river, their ambush of wildebeest and zebra and so on and so on.

The article in the Toronto Globe and mail of June 8th written by Robin Esrock of the OLN/CITY-TV series World Travels is yet another in the long string that perpetuates the beauty and wonder of a trip to this fabled spot. His piece, which you can read here is titled Catch Africa’s Great Migration – in great luxury.

I imagine that Esrock had a wonderful time but one must note that as a travel writer he probably has a vested interest. He, like so many of the TV producers who make those magic films, has somehow avoided the flip side of the coin. Perhaps nobody told him it even exists. Perhaps this was his first trip to the Mara.

For a much more discouraging, but entirely accurate perspective it is worth looking at Matt Walker’s report of June 2nd that appeared on the BBC website.

This one it titled Wildlife Crash in the Mara region of Kenya, Africa. Walker cites recent work that appeared in the prestigious Journal of Zoology. The key message is that wildlife populations have crashed in the past three decades. He quotes Dr. Jospeh Ogutu who has led research into the situation and the most worrying statement is that

“The status of Masai Mara as a prime conservation area and premier tourist draw card in Kenya may soon be in jeopardy.”

Ogutu’s team concluded that the Mara has lost two-thirds of its wildlife since 1977. Even the wildebeest migration now only has 64% of the numbers that existed in the early 1980s. As if that is not bad enough, the non-migrating wildebeest numbers have dropped by 97%.

There are two main reasons and both are related to human activity and particularly the growth of the human population. The cattle density has increased three-fold while the density of sheep and goats, which are usually herded together, has increased seven-fold. Both of these domestic species compete for grazing with the wild animals and of course also displace them.
In this picture, taken twenty years ago, a herd of cattle in the background grazes near a Masai manyatta while wildebeest dot the foreground.

That’s bad enough, but Ogutu also stated that

“over 1500 poachers have been arrested within the Mara conservancy between 2001 and 2010, with more than 17,300 snares collected by rangers in the same period.”

Walker reports that “the African buffalo are all but gone.”

Despite these worrying numbers I will be back in November, when my granddaughters will join us and their parents on a Kenya trip.

We may be lucky and see topi bulls sparring like this but the teeming herds of a hundred years ago, or the huge numbers I first saw 45 years ago will mean little to them.

We can at least be fairly sure that my wife and the next two generations will not have to worry about buffalo patties near the tent. Of course cow patties look pretty much the same.

New book

2011-06-04T06:58:00.006-06:00

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I’ve been “off air” for just over a year as I worked hard on my new manuscript and found that I could not devote enough time to it and do a decent job with my blogging. The manuscript is now in the hands of a publisher and so I cannot do anything with it for now, so I’m going to try & get back on track. Meanwhile fingers crossed.

Here is the cover that I propose, but of course that may change. It is a single frame converted to digital from a Super8 movie that I shot in the late 1970s, so is a bit grainy.

The image also appears as part of a Youtube video that I posted a few weeks ago. You can find it on my web site under the video link or go straight to it. Here is the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qugw7JA1cJw

I will continue to post about conservation issues, with an emphasis on Africa, but there are other things that catch my eye.

Northern White Rhino – a last ditch try.

2010-05-09T07:23:00.006-06:00

Linkhttp://www.olpejetaconservancy.org/, http://www.easternarc.org/html/eawl.html
Good news, or a desperate move? That is the question that we can surely ask about the move of four of the world’s rarest mammals to Kenya from the Czech Republic. The answer is both.

The January-March issue of Swara, the Nairobi-published magazine arm of the East African Wildlife Society that bills itself as “The Voice of Conservation in East Africa” has two stories about the Northern White Rhino. One of these is by Kes Hillman, who, with her husband spent 22 years in Garamba National Park in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo working on a variety of conservation issues, with a huge focus on the few remaining white rhino there, the last place on earth where they were known to exist.

I have no pictures of this race of rhino, but they look very much like the Southern race, with which I have had a fair amount of experience. Here is a picture taken in Kenya’s Nakuru National Park.

While the article implies that the poaching of rhino in the region was worst from the 1960s, rhino poaching in Africa has a much longer history than that. In the very early 20th century armed gangs were sent out by colonial Europeans to shoot as many rhino as possible, simply to harvest horns for the dagger handle market in Yemen or the oriental medicine trade. By the1960s there were thought to be about 1300 animals in Garamba. Then came civil wars in Congo and the Amin regime in neighbouring Uganda which wiped out all the rhino, both black and white, in that country. When Douglas Adams, he of the five volumes in the trilogy The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy visited Garamba the 1980s there were 22 northerns left. In 2008 when The Trouble With Lions was published, the number was down to three. In her article, titled “Could Ol Pejeta Be A New Start For the World’s Rarest? Kes Hillman tells of the inevitable end of that remnant.

The other article by Berry White is titled World’s Rarest Mammals Fly To Sanctuary In Kenya. In it she recounts how four white rhino were moved from a wintery, snow covered Dvur Kralove zoo to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy near my old home town under the shadow of Mount Kenya. In a well coordinated move that involved training of the rhino, specially designed crates, trucking, aircraft and a great deal of TLC, four animals, a female named Najin and her nine-year old calf Fatu, together with males Sudan and Suni made the journey. Naturally the Ol Pejeta’s Conservancy’s web site carries the story and gives more details.

This is really the last chance for this species of rhino. From the thousands that ranged across northern Africa in the days when the only records were in cave paintings, to the demise of all wild ones anywhere, we are left with eight captive ones, four of which are either too old or uninterested in breeding and live in two zoos. Will Najin or Fatu be the mothers of a new generation? Let’s hope we see a photo like this one (a Southern) in a forthcoming issue of Swara or on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy web site.

New Saskatchewan Literary Award

2010-05-07T05:22:00.005-06:00

Link http://www.skwriter.com/
We have had an exciting development tin the literary world of Saskatchewan. On May 3 the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg announced the launching of the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. This new literary award will recognize Saskatchewan writers who have written a substantial body of literary work. The award will be made annually and is for the sum of ten thousand dollars, which makes it the largest such award in any province in Canada.

Each ward recipient will also receive a signed limited edition copy of a watercolour by renowned Saskatchewan artist Dorothy Knowles. Dorothy has gifted the original to the Guild.

Henry & Cheryl Kloppenburg are Saskatchewan folks, through and through. They are generous supporters of the arts, both nationally and provincially, and have supported writing and the SWG for almost 20 years through their gifts to the SWG’s Grain Magazine. Here they are, flanked by the Guild’s past-president, Bob Calder and me, next to the painting.

The great Canadian man of letters, the late Roberson Davies, admonished a cure-all of “massive daily doses of art, music and literature. On Saturday evening at his book launch Yann Martel was the latest of many authors to state that without reading one cannot be a writer. Both make the point that reading is a vital part of our culture, so this award is for those who have given us the chance to read and enjoy good writing.

Yann Martel book launch

2010-05-03T08:54:00.006-06:00

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Saturday night was book night. I attended the “at home” (Saskatoon) launch of Yann Martel’s new novel Beatrice and Virgil. and of course purchased this copy that you see resting on my Mac. Beatrice and Virgil are the main characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and hell features throughout those famous works. No wonder Yann chose them in a story about the Holocaust. Even the “howl” in howler monkey fits the theme.

Martel studied philosophy at university and when one learns this one realizes why his work has so many layers and depths to it. Even the names of the animals in the story have significance. Not just the donkey and the howler monkey, that are the names in the title, but the dog and cat, which are respectively named Erasmus and Mendelssohn. Erasmus was the remarkable humanist and theologian who lived during the Reformation and was, as Yann put it, very practical. The Mendelssohn he used was neither of the great composers Felix or his sister Fanny, but their grandfather Moses who was a prominent German Jew during the 18th century’s “Age of Enlightenment” during which reason and common sense were held to be the primary source and legitimacy for authority.

As most know the book is a novel about the Holocaust, and when he was questioned as to why he wrote a novel about those horrible events he replied that non-fiction needs to become stories in order to survive. There are all kinds of stories in film plays and book about the Second World War and the Vietnam War, but few, beyond the TV series M.A.S.H., about the Korean War, which is maybe why it has faded in the collective memory.

Yann also told us that the novel he is now working on is features three chimpanzees in Portugal. With the two published books and one in the works, he has covered a gamut of the animal kingdom, especially the great apes. Apart from its famous tiger Life of Pi has an orangutan, the new one chimps. Someone else is writing about bonobos. What next? Will a silverback feature in number four?

Images from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderius_Erasmus and commons.wikimedia.org

Tortoise taboo

2010-04-30T07:12:00.007-06:00

Linkhttp://www.wcs.org/, http://www.jerryhaigh.com/book/

Walking in the rain forests of Cameroon was a new experience for me in several ways. It had either just rained, or was about to rain all the time, that is if it wasn’t actually raining. This was 1996 and I was working on a forest elephant project for the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Korup forest on the west side of the country. As I recounted in chapter 10 of my book The Trouble With Lions I learned from our tracker, James Ako, that the hunting and eating of a tortoise was taboo. He did not explain why, and I forgot to ask.

Now I know at least one explanation.

It comes in a 1967 collection of folk tales from Ghana titled Tales of an Ashanti Father that I have just added to my little libray. The author, or maybe she should be called collector, of these tales was Peggy Appiah. In a story called The Hunter and the Tortoise, which I have shortened here, she tells how a hunter went into the forest with his gun and was enchanted by a tortoise playing an accordion. He challenged the animal and gave it the chance of returning to his village with him or being shot. “How can I not agree seeing you have the gun?” replied the tortoise.

As he bent to pick him up the tortoise warned the hunter “I am a creature of the forest and not of the town. If you take me to your home you will have only yourself to blame.”

At home the hunter rushed to the chief to tell of his find, and the skeptical chief told him that if he was lying he would be executed, but if he was telling the truth he would be richly rewarded. As you can guess, the tortoise merely sat and looked stupid when the hunter tried to exhibit him.

As the hunter’s head rolled in the dust the tortoise sang out

"Trouble does not look for man,
It is man who looks for trouble."

The upshot was that the chief decreed that that the tortoise be taken back to the forest where it was happiest. He also stated "From now on the hunting or capturing of tortoises in the forest will be taboo to my people. Anyone who is found interfering with them will be executed."

Of course the happy (sort of) ending was that the hunter, who had spoken the truth, was given a grand funeral and the tortoise was returned to his forest clearing.

Like many written folk tales this one is now in suspended animation for those reading this account, and of course I have cut it by about 70%. The conversations, the efforts of the hunter to get the tortoise to perform and the scene setting are up to the reader to convert back to the oral, but for me, it is nice to get an explanation after fifteen years. It also gives me another tale to tell that is linked to animal work in far-off places.

Creative Non-Fiction award

2010-04-27T04:35:00.004-06:00

Linkhttp://www.paulnicklen.com/, http://www.creativenonfictioncollective.com/index2.php/
Just back from the annual gathering of the Creative Non-Fiction Collective’s meeting at the Banff Centre in Alberta. It’s a fabulous venue for artists of every stripe and we had an invigorating get-together.

One of our events is the Saturday evening social when we select the winner of the CN-FC Reader’s Choice award. Nominators have about two minutes to read a selected passage and then a secret ballot decides the outcome.

The worthy winner was Susan Olding for her essays from Pathologies
(Freehand). The other nominees were

Wade Davis for The Wayfarers (Anansi)
Sharron Proulx-Turner for her essay from Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood
(McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Paul Nicklen for Polar Obsession (Focal Point)
Shawna Lemay for Calm Things (Palimpsest)
Kaitlin Fontana for “The Flight Album” (in The Walrus)
Eufemia Fantetti for “Alphabet Autobiografica" (in Event)

As this blog is mainly about wild things and conservation it will come as no surprise that Polar Obsession caught my ear and eye. Of course one must avoid clichés when possible – like the plague as it were - but this book is more about photographs than text. The text is only used to explain the photos, and these are certainly worth the standard thousand words. Indeed some are worth at least twice as much. It is difficult to choose one passage of four or five paragraphs to read in the space of about two minutes, and I struggled between the account of how Nicklen got the photos of the massed narwhals in Arctic waters and his encounter with the southern ocean’s top predator of penguins, the leopard seal.

I cannot quote at length, even from what I read, but this was what I started with. It came after a brief introduction about how Nicklen had entered the water and stood his ground when challenged by a huge alpha female seal weighing about 500 kg. The seal had offered him a live penguin to eat, but of course he had ignored her, and the bird had escaped.

“I am always reluctant to anthropomorphize an animal’s behaviour, but I could swear that she flashed me a look of disgust as she sped past me to snatch the escaping penguin. I believe that she was trying to feed me penguins because she realized that I was an absolutely useless predator in her ocean, and my ineptness at securing a meal agitated her.”

For lovers of adventure stories about wild things and wild places, or would-be wildlife photographers, this is one to add to the collection.

Africa's ancient board game

2010-04-22T21:51:00.012-06:00

Linkhttp://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14186/bao, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8635258.stm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala

The photo posting on the BBC website today flashed me back to Africa and the game of Kiothi that is played in the Meru region of Kenya north and east of Mt. Kenya. The BBC story is set in the Southern Sudan where the game is called aweet. Kiothi is the Meru name of the game known widely in East Africa, especially Zanzibar and Tanzania as Bao, but with plenty of local names and variations. A wider name is Mancala, which is described on a Wikipedia page. Good players can see moves way ahead, and the game proceeds at lightning speed. The clicking almost sounds like a rapidly played game of Mahjong.

The Most boards have four rows of eight or ten hollowed out depressions in which seeds, stones or whatever is available are placed before the start and then moved according to a strict set of rules. Here the eldest son and daughter of one of the rangers in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda are playing. Others boards have two rows of ten, and I have seen sets in which there were two rows of seven. Some have single larger hollows at each end, others don’t.

I have the board and seeds of the Meru version and also the rules that were translated from the Kimeru language by the late Len Lemoine who was a schoolteacher in the area in the 1960s. Len even told me that he had seen the game being played in the West Indies. Given the history of that part of the world this is no big surprise.

It is not just on wooden boards that the game is played. I have watched men (exclusively men) playing near a watercourse at Laisamis, in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District. They simply fisted out depressions in the sand, picked up some pebbles and went at it.

There are older, no doubt much older and once permanent, places where tournaments may have been played on huge rocks that have had rows of hollows ground into their surfaces. The ones I have seen are located north and east of Mt. Kenya, two of them on the iconic flat-topped mountain called Ololokwe (seen here beyond and to the right of a nest-filled acacia) and one to the east of the town of Meru near what is now a small village surrounded by smallholder tea plots but was once in the middle of the forest that covered the Nyambeni hills. It was here that I took the photo of my wife Jo and Patrick Mugambi playing a mock game as a crowd of children looked on. Another ancient site must have been somewhere in the Ankole kingdom of Uganda. At the heart of that kingdom I found this old rock with Bao indents ground into it - eight by five by the look of it, with no end depressions. Who knows how old this one is or what the rules were, or maybe are?

The rules are too long to quote fully here, but here are one or two titbits. If any one has a hankering to make a board they can email me for the rules that I can send as a pdf. I suspect that the Meru Kiothi rules will only work properly for the board with two rows, as opposed to four. Those who want other rules can no doubt find some at one of the websites or even books devoted to the game

This picture, taken at home, shows our board that was made forty years ago by a craftsman in Meru. In the hollows are the marble-sized seeds of the Caesalpinia tree (Njothi in Kimeru) with which the game is played in that part of Kenya. Caesalpinia is a genus of prickly, scrambling shrubs with bi-pinnate leaves and vicious recurved spines. These seeds must be some of the hardiest around because they float well and can remain viable after spending two, or more, years afloat.
The board has ten hollows on each side, with larger indents, known as bomas into which captured stones are placed. The object is simple, to capture more stones (representing cattle) than one’s opponent. But not that simple. Some tribes rate a one-warrior victory as equivalent to two normal victories; some rate it as worth ten victories by any other margin.

The game can only be played by two people at a time. In Kiothi each player is given 30 warriors (seeds that look like acorns – or stones or what have you.) They are placed in the six right hand bomas on each side – five warriors to a boma.

The order of play (who goes first) can be determined by various means but the toss of a coin is as good a way to decide as any. The first player may move any of the warriors in any of his bomas, provided that he moves always to the right depositing one warrior in each of the cups beginning with the cup immediately to the right of the one from which he has taken the warriors and provided the last warrior does not land in a boma that is already occupied by one or more warriors

To begin the game, each player is permitted to take the five men form each of two of his bomas and place them in any of the cup – on either side of the board. For the rest of the rules, drop me a line. They may look simple, but only a simpleton woud take on an expereinced native player for money.

Zebra stripes and leopard spots

2010-04-20T09:55:00.011-06:00

Linkhttp://www.sherborne.org/, http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/, http://www.livescience.com/, http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/

One of my favourite pastimes is storytelling. When we visit my granddaughters one of the first stories they ask for is How The Zebra Got His Stripes and here is a condensed (very condensed) version.

A long time ago, when zebra was pure white, a brave young zebra decide the challenge baboon for access to water, which the latter had claimed for his own. After a long and terrible fight baboon began to get the upper hand and pushed zebra into a fire. The pain was so severe that the zebra jumped up and lashed out, kicking the baboon clear across the river where he landed on some rocks. The upshot, the zebra was scarred for all time, but the baboon ended up with a bare backside after damaging itself upon landing.

It is no surprise that folklore about other animals, particularly leopards and serval cats, tell how they got their markings after ending up involved with fire. Here are a couple of pictures that you might enjoy. The smaller serval cat was a bottle-raised animal that lived in Kenya's Meru National Park around the home of chief Warden Peter Jenkins and his family in the late 1960s. I have stories about Peter in both of my books.

Another fun component of storytelling is trying to find ways of linking these ancient and entertaining interpretations of the things that people saw around them to modern scientific explanations of how things work and for me it has always been a challenge to do that with these “burn” stories.

Like the mythical American cavalry of the old Hollywood Westerns, or the more modern arrival of the marines (satirized so brilliantly by Tom Lehrer) science has come to the rescue.

In a posting of April 7th headlined Study Reveals How Creatures Get Spots vs. Stripes
LiveScience managing editor Jeanna Bryner takes us into recent information about fruit flies and their markings, and links us back to her own older post about leopards and their spots.

“Biologists have long wondered how leopards and other mammals acquired their distinct and uniform coat patterns. In 1952, British mathematician Alan Turing developed an equation to explain how simple chemical reactions produce the spots, stripes, and swirls that decorate a variety of mammals.”

By a strange coincidence I have a weak link with Turing, as he was at the same school as me (although of an earlier generation). He has been dubbed by many in the field "the father of modern computing" and is known to have had a huge influence upon the ENIGMA machine that let the Allies break to German codes of WWII. Here is a photo of Turing that I found on line. I could have chosen any one of hundreds, as a Google search for them got me to 49 pages. A second family link to Turing ties in with the fact that my daughter is heavily involved with computing, artificial intelligence and the world of robots. For the folks in her world Turing is an icon.

Anyway, back to leopards, zebras and the spot/stripe question.

Turing's mathematical model could not account for the evolution of markings as the leopard matures from spotted cub to rosette-dappled adult.

As a Bryner relates a team of scientists from Taiwan’s National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung and England’s Oxford University “modified Turing's model and ran it through computers, concluding that substances called “morphogens”, chemicals secreted by pigment cells in the coat, diffused through the coat and led to the development of the distinctive patterns seen in adults.”

A really positive clue came from more recent work with a species of fruit fly, which are much easier, cheaper and safer to study than big cats. In this case the wing spots, which are the natural pattern, were converted into stripes by means of gene manipulation and understanding of the location of the morphogen-linked gene. "We can make custom flies," said Sean Carroll, a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the senior author of the report published this week in Nature and referred to by Bryner.

Of course none of this explains the weird story of the quagga, an almost mythical beast that actually existed in the most southern regions of South Africa and was exterminated in the late 1800s. The quagga was a form of zebra that only had stripes on the front half of its body, the rear half being self-coloured. The last known one died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883.

When I was in South Africa in the early 90s there were several groups exploring the possibility of doing a sort of Jurassic Park experiment to try and re-create the quagga from DNA in old hides. I later heard that they had abandoned the effort when they discovered that it was just a type of zebra.

In another LiveScience posting titled How A Zebra Lost Its Stripes an analysis by a team of German and US scientists show that the quagga diverged from plains zebra in Africa during the last Ice Age. It then developed the colour markings that made it look as if it might have come from a Dr. Doolittle story.

Or maybe it was another white zebra that got into a fight with a baboon but only got burnt on the front half of its body. It's just a question of what you choose to believe.

Bushmeat in the USA

2010-04-15T13:07:00.007-06:00

Linkhttp://wdin.blogspot.com/, http://news.discovery.com/animals/bushmeat-diseases-entering-new-york.html

Talk about serendipity!

Tonight I have a gig with the Saskatoon Nature Society and my topic is The Trouble WIth Lions: A symbol for Africa's wildlife. As I indicated I am using the lion only as a symbol and I have added an extra subtitle in my opening slide which is (and other continents).
I took this picture in Cameroon in 1997. In it you can see several species for sale as bushmeat. The three at bottom left are smoked monkeys of some kind, but the treatment has rendered them beyond identification, or at least field i.d.
This morning, when I opened up my email I found a letter from my main listServ source on wildlife issues which is theWildlife Disease News Digest, put together by Dr. Cris Marsh of the USDA. One of the links in that document reads Bushmeat Diseases Entering New York and so of course I opened it, as I have been following the bushmeat situation for many years now and my last post about it, of nine, was on Jan 11th. This concerned the trail of the Liberian woman who was convicted last year of trying to smuggle 720 pounds of baboon and warthog meat. She had used the innovative defense that the meat was for religious purposes and claimed the right to freedom of religious expression.

In the online Discovery News of yesterday it was reporter Jennifer Viegas who summarized the newer events and the finding by colleagues in the Wildlife Conservation Society of a virus called simian foamy virus in three primate species: two mangabey monkeys and a chimpanzee. This photo of a sooty mangabey was taken by Nick Gordon and was available n the Arkive image web site. For those familiar with the AIDS story, it was from these very same species that the disease has crossed into humans on at least seven occasions in the last hundred years.

Viegas goes on to report that Inspection and health officials have seized hundreds of samples of wildlife and wildlife products coming through luggage and mail parcels through main entry points for both people and goods into New York City and the United States. Samples have been taken from at least 14 species, including great apes, monkeys, rodents, and bats.

She also states that officials of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service say that more than one billion individual animals were imported into the United States from 2000 to 2004, along with over 11 million pounds of bushmeat and other animal products. That’s one billion animals – 1000,000,000!

Is this the forerunner of a coming plague?

Chinese in Africa

2010-04-09T10:47:00.006-06:00

Link
In my last blog about rhino poaching and the Chinese in Africa I forgot one thing. I had not recalled the situation with dogs in Isiolo, the market town that is seen as the gateway to Kenya's Northern Frontier District. I only rememberd it when I went to an Ethiopian restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to pick up a delcious take-out meal that of course included njeera, the soft bread that is unique to that culture.

We quickly found out that the family business was run by folks who had spent quite some time in Kenya and we had a laugh about the fatc that they met a white guy who spoke fluent swahili in South Dakota, of all places!

Then we switched to the presence of the Chinese in Africa, and specifically in Ethiopia. To quote the owner "The Chinese are everywhere in our country." I told him about the wildlife along the new highway that the Chinese are building from Isiolo to Addis and he said that there are no stray dogs any more in Ethiopia. This reminded me that dogs now fetch a price in Isiolo, and strays are simply not seen.

It's just a question of taste

Rhino poaching

2010-04-02T07:56:00.012-06:00

Linkhttp://wdin.blogspot.com/, http://www.creativenonfictioncollective.com/index2.php/
The rhino poaching story that I posted a few days back came from personal sources in South Africa.

This headline in the Los Angeles Times of March 20th tells the same story, but from a more international point of view.

SURGE IN RHINO POACHING DEVASTATES AFRICAN POPULATIONS

Robyn Dixon reported that

“Organized gangs decimate Zimbabwe herds and may wipe out South Africa's endangered black rhinos within a decade. Ranchers trying to save the animals find heartbreak amid carcasses shorn of horns.”

Dixon has used the very personal account of game rangers to show how this has affected them personally and then proceeds to examine the wider issues. She writes

“A report last year by the World Wildlife Fund, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and wildlife-trade monitoring network TRAFFIC said poaching had reached a 15-year high, pushing the animals close to extinction. About 1,500 rhino horns were traded illegally in the last three years, despite a long-standing ban on international trade.”

If the past is anything to go by the efforts of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the other wildlife monitoring agencies will have no effect whatever. Even the recent vote from the meeting of CITES will be a toothless gesture.
The CITES folks approved of a move by Kenya and agreed to focus on increasing law enforcement, training of guards, better border surveillance, enhanced rhino monitoring and awareness campaigns in consumer countries.
Commenting afterwards, Forestry and Wildlife Minister Dr Noah Wekesa who is leading the Kenyan delegation said, “This is a milestone in global rhino conservation. It renews commitment and collaboration by all governments to end this illegal trade in rhino parts."

Of course these are entirely laudable goals, but if the past signals the future it will achieve nothing.

Dixon also brings out the probable role of China in all of this. She writes:

"China's recent thrust into Africa in a rush for resources is a major factor in the illegal rhino horn and ivory trade, analysts believe, because China remains the largest market. Rhino horn, made of keratin, the same substance that forms fingernails, hooves, feathers and hair, has long been used in Chinese medicinal tonics."

I saw another example of this sort of thing last year in Kenya. The Chinese are building a major new highway into and through Kenya’s Northern Frontier District. It will link the frontier town of Isiolo with Addis Ababa in Ethiopia across hundreds of kilometers of inhospitable semi-arid desert populated by nomadic tribes people and scattered wildlife. Isiolo, which was once a shanty-town with a few corrugated tin roofed stores, a government station and a mission hospital has become a bustling market town where an AK47 can be had for a hundred dollars or so. From reliable witnesses I learned that wildlife sightings, including elephants, once common along the highway, have become a thing of history and myth. All concerned link the presence of Chinese road builders with the decline in wildlife.

Lioness kills cub thief

2010-03-26T15:12:00.004-06:00

Linkhttp://gorillacd.org/

As readers of this blog know well I am interested in the human x wildlife conflict, in all its forms, but particularly in Africa, my birth continent. In The Trouble With Lions I had chapters headed Lions In Trouble and Lions As Trouble. There is a third category that I had not thought of until today, when I received an email from the folks who run the Official Web site of the Virunga National Park, DR Congo, which most often posts material about the gorillas of that troubled region.

A soldier in Congo's Virunga National Park has been killed a lioness, after reportedly trying to steal 2 of her cubs. Another soldier was injured in the incident.

Surely a tragedy for the men’s families, but WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

It occurs to me that there is a fair chance that these men came under the influence of an organized crime group. We know, from several reports, that organized crime in the wildlife field is on the upsurge world-wide. What price would some oriental billionaire with more money than he knows what to do with, and no semblance of a conscience, pay for a couple of ultimate status symbols? Of course the soldiers would have been offered a reward for their "work". A pittance for the crime boss, maybe a decent sum for the soldiers.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a chapter title that would cover this incident?

Uganda's Kasubi Tombs

2010-03-18T09:57:00.007-06:00

Linkhttp://www.creativenonfictioncollective.com/index2.php/
The widely reported story about the destruction by fire of one of Uganda’s UNESCO Heritage sites in Kampala lacked one thing. This was any photos of the remarkable structures at the Kasubi tombs before the fire. One such report came on the BBC web site here and showed the fire itself and a crowd scene. For those who know the place, the fiery skeleton of the main building seen in the BBC report is easy to discern. Here are a few pictures taken during one of many visits that my veterinary students and I made in the years that we went to Africa to study the wildlife x human x livestock interface and took time out for some cultural enlightenment.

During the visits we walked up a long path, which gave one a great view of the huge thatched building, about 40 metres wide.

Under the awning, with its intricate woven thatch, one sat in front of the pictures of the last four kings, with spears and other memorabilia on show, and listened to the guides tell us about the history of the people and the site.
The tombs, built in the 19th century, are where the last four kings of Buganda were buried. Buganda, founded in about 1500 AD is the largest of the four kingdoms of what is now Uganda and once controlled a big swatch of land from Lake Victoria to the Kagera River that begins its journey to the lake in Rwanda. Kampala lies right in the middle of the Buganda region. Indeed, the tomb site and the king’s palace are in the heart of the city.

The kingdoms were abolished in 1966 and it was only when President Museveni allowed their reinstatement as cultural institutions with no political power in 1993 that they came to the fore again. King Ronald Mutebi is the current king. His role is largely ceremonial but it would seem as if he, or his advisers, have been flexing their muscles and there have been some confrontations with Museveni’s government. Last year there were riots after the government blocked Ronald from visiting part of his kingdom.

The latest riots occurred after protesters prevented Museveni, who is an Ankole from Western Uganda, from visiting the tombs where the fire was destroying the above-ground structures, which were made entirely from vegetable materials and would have made a natural fuel for a rapid burn. Sad.

Rhino poaching

2010-03-12T06:20:00.010-07:00

Linkhttp://www.traffic.org/
It seems as if rhino poaching is on the upswing again, and has taken a new twist. Two separate reports from colleagues in South Africa relate how poachers, thought to be Asians, are using helicopters to poach rhino in both national and private game parks. Two white rhino were recently shot from the air in Madikwe, where I worked in 1997 and a black rhino was recently found, minus its horns, in Pilansberg. In this case .303 bullet casings were found at the scene and a helicopter was spotted by an alert ranger. When it was searched upon landing at a local airport nothing was found. It is not too hard to imagine that dumping of horns and munitions could have been readily done on the way to the landing site for later retrieval. GPS has it uses.

As I wrote in The Trouble WIth Lions rhino poaching for horn has been going on a long time, and at one time, a hundred years or so ago, armed gangs were sent out to collect them in droves.

It is difficult to imagine how this trade will cease mainly because of the insatiable desire for rhino horn in Yemen and the Orient. Here is what I wrote about the traditional medicine beliefs and trade in the latter:

Two detailed reports from the early 1990s that were prepared for the Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce (more easily known as TRAFFIC) show how rhino horn is both used and sold in Korea and Taiwan. In 1993 author Judy Mills found that 60% of South Korea’s doctors believe that horn is an effective medicine and 79% believe it to be essential for a wide variety of ailments. In Taiwan Kristin Nowell and her colleagues, both of whom were locals who could conduct interviews as “patients” or “consumers” and thus obtain information unbiased by the doctors' or dealers'concerns about detection of potentially illegal activities reported that the medical community recognizes differences between rhino horn from Asia, and that from Africa. The former is about ten times as expensive, averaging over $60,000 per kilogram. They estimated that at least 10,000 kg of rhino horn were held in the thousands of licensed and unlicensed pharmacies during their study. Almost all of this was from African rhinos, and the total retail value, in 1992 was in excess of US$70 million. The most expensive items, far in excess of unprocessed Asian horn, were the antique carvings, becoming ever more valuable as pressure is brought to bear against the use or ownership of rhino horn for any purpose at all.

If rhino horn was that valuable in the 1990s, I cannot even guess what is is now worth if poachers are using helicopters. Depending on the machine helicopter time comes in at around $1000 per hour, and then there is the little matter of purchase price and the need for highly trained pilots.

The Golden Temple at Vellore

2010-03-06T05:27:00.006-07:00

Linkhttp://www.sripuram.org/
One of the most extraordinary places we visited on our trip to India was the Golden temple at Vellore. This is located within a few kilometers of the Vellore Christian Medical College and a group of classmates from the 1958/59 admissions year, who had gathered for a class reunion, decided to check it out. I was along as a “significant other.”

The first thing we discovered was that there is a very strict embargo on cameras and cell phones. Everything has to be checked it, along with shoes, which is normal in Hindu temples. The photos that accompany this piece are scanned from the brochure that we picked up at the start of our visit and suffer accordingly. Nonetheless they give a tiny taste of what we saw, a mere dry biscuit before the eye feast. You can see more images, and much more detail, on the temple web site, to which this story is linked.

The aerial view shows a six-sided star-shaped covered walk-way, and one has to go right round it, up a single arm at centre right and round the circle to get to the temple proper, which stands in the middle. The grainy picture gives no real idea of scale, but one can get a rough idea. Each leg of the star is about 100 metres long, so one has to walk 900 metres around the area just to reach the temple entrance.

At each point there are sales stalls and all along on both sides there are posters in four languages telling one about the place. I could not help wondering about the opulence that we could see everywhere, with the central temple a mass of gold that must have cost millions, in any currency.

This opulence contrasts sharply with the widespread poverty throughout the countryside. The brochure gives one the real picture. An active fund-raising campaign has supported all the building and maintenance of well-equipped hospital, health clinics in the surrounding area, water distribution, a school, the development of micro industries, a reforestation program and other good works.

By the time we had joined the many hundreds of worshippers and tourist (99% of whom were Indians) at the actual worship site we understood. One of the signs summed it up – “A temple is a place of community, bringing people together.” The brochure explains it more clearly.

By sheer good fortune we had arrived as the sun was setting. A large water body – called a tank in India, surrounds the temple itself. The lights had come on and the reflection of the building was breathtaking. Everything is sight was covered in gold leaf. The pillars (16 of them), the ceiling, the walls, everything. There are said to be seven or eight tons of gilt. One of our colleagues, who had been to Amritsar, told us that the temple is three or four times the size of that famous Sikh shrine. Just as we thought we had reached the exit we were held up by the start of a prayer service, or Puja, and for 45 minutes we sat quietly as the priest went through his rituals to the accompaniment of chanting and the continuous ringing of a bell above our heads. Those of use who had paid the "expensive" (about $5.00) Rs 250 were on the inner ring of the circle and so we were allowed near the holy sanctum after the service and received a blessing as we left.

The set-up was not entirely ancient and spiritual. On the way out we had to pass through a series of stall where all sorts of religious items and knick-knacks were on sale to deal with the secular. The modern management of the tourist line-up – some attribute it to the Disney Corporation – has not escaped the attention of the Indians. Of course it's a great way to raise funds.

Galle Literary Festival, Sri Lanka

2010-03-01T05:09:00.013-07:00

Link
http://www.galleliteraryfestival.com/
One real advantage of going away on a relaxed holiday is that one gets to do plenty of reading. Furthermore if one is doing the tourist thing and moving from one location to another one gets to pick up all sorts of stuff along the way. Many hotels have shelves in odd corners that allow a “leave one, take one” option. While in India & Sri Lanka on my most recent trip I read about ten books. More or less. I started and abandoned one after about four paragraphs. After a few pages I discovered that I had read a couple before, but several were brand new. An absolute gem was Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and was listed by the British Sunday Telegraph as a Book of the Year. Critic James Naughtie of the Sunday Telegraph wrote that it was “One of the most moving stories I’d stumbled across for many a year.” I fully agree.

In most hotels we found that crime or police novels of various types were the most common currency. PD James, Patricia Cornwell, even a couple of very worn Agatha Christies in their old Penguin editions. These reliable holiday reads appeared in several languages other than English, most commonly German and Dutch, the latter more so in Sri Lanka, where there is a strong link back to the Netherlands. A “new to me” delight was Terry Pratchett’s Mort. It was the fourth of his Disk World novels. For those who know his work, I am sure I’m preaching to the choir. A comment on the Google site uses the phrase “profoundly irreverent novels” about his work. His imagination is simply stunning. Who else could have thought up the idea of the shrouded and scythe-armed figure of DEATH taking on an apprentice named Mortimer (Mort for short)?

There were also a few Ian Rankin novels. A new one, to me at least, was Doors Open, the story of an art heist set in the Edinburgh that Rankin paints so vividly. Naturally there were some Inspector Rebus stories.

Ian Rankin turned up in quite a different way. In Galle (pronounced without the ‘e’ like the bladder), which lies almost at the southernmost tip of Sri Lanka I browsed the shelves in an attractive art and curio shop in this ancient fortress city. My eye was at once caught by several copies of the very smartly prepared program of the 2010 Galle Literary Festival. The event, which we had just missed, ran from Jan 28th to Feb 2nd, and had many similarities to Saskatchewan’s own Moose Jaw Festival of Words.

One of the sessions was called Life Sentences. The intriguing blurb under this heading stated “Ian Rankin tells us how his most famous detective, John Rebus, came to be, and finally to retire.”

The Festival, in its fourth year, was the brain-child of one man, Geoffrey Dobbs, but as he states in his welcome it would not happen without generous sponsors and a big team of volunteers. -Apart from managing a really nice hotel called The Sun House, Geoffrey wears a very different hat. He is chairman of the Ceylon Elephant Polo Association. There’s an entertaining report about the 2007 tournament played at the Galle fort that you can find as a pdf here http://www.dcelephantpolo.com/Artices/EquestrioDubai.pdf or in HTML format here

There were lots of other well-known and not-so-well known authors. There were sessions for children in several age groups and useful guides on accommodation, restaurants, whale watching and so on.

We took up the whale-watching option a few days after the conference. Until you have been sixty metres from a blue whale it is hard to recognize how enormous they are, and we only saw the so-called pigmy blue whale, a mere 25 metres long! Researchers think that they spend their entire lives off the coast of the island, making this one of the very best places to see the world's largest ever creature.

India and Sri Lanka

2010-02-22T07:47:00.003-07:00

Link

Sitting at the computer in Heathrow Airport, waiting for the flight home. We've had an interesting trip. Lots of photos to share, but no way of posting them from here. Among them, an amazing golden temple in India, said to be 3 or 4 times the size of the famous one at Amritsar, several of Indian elephants, both domesticated and wild, blue whales close up, and some bird encounters. The last of these was in Yalle National park in Sri Lanka where we watched a medley of birds fishing vigorously in a small pool that had been cut off as flood waters receded. Painted storks, two species of egret and a solitary gey heron were pulling up fish at a furious rate. And the winner was.. a greater egret that caught a fish about as long as its bill and had a hard time swallowing it.

We drove through thousands of acres of tea estates and it struck me that they, just like golf courses, are really an environmental wasteland. Not quite a monoculture, but awfully close to it, they stand in stark contrast to the remnant tropical forests that border them. At least they employ a lot of people.

India & Sri Lanka trip

2010-02-05T06:19:00.001-07:00

Link

I've been trying to get a posting on to this blog for almost 2 weeks, but from
grungy Internet cafes in India it seems to be impossible. The worst one was
not only grungy, but had no lights and a keyboard that was so worn most of the
keys were illegible!

We are now a friend's house in Mysore & he has broadband, so here's trying
again.

I wrote this a week ago.
We have left the cold north for a trip to India. The main reason was to visit
my wife's old medical school - Vellore Christian Medical College - for a class
reunion. I won't mention the number of years since she graduated, but it is
more than a few. For some reason all her classmates have grey hair, but of
course we have not changed a bit. The fact is, the goal posts have shifted.
After a week in UK, where we had to do battle with the fact that the Brits know
almost nothing about snow, we arrived in Bangalore and went straight away to
the city of Tirupathi. The 300 km taxi ride cost about $60!!
The best thing about the city was the food in our hotel. All vegetarian, but
wonderfully delicious, with various forms of Dosa being the star attractions.
We are now in the alumni hostel at the medical school and I can finally get out
my camera and see what interesting birds there may be among the wonderful array
of trees in the compound.

Since then we have seen the most amazing golden temple at Vellore. It is said
to be about 4 times as large as the more famous one at Amritsar, and to have
between 7 and 8 tonnes of gold on the roof, pillars, ceiling & walls! There's
no way I can attach a picture but I will endeavour to do so once we get home.

From there we headed to the Kerala coast and had avery interesting time
relaxing, swimming and eating delicious food. My hair cut cost 35 rupees,
about 70 cents.

Tuesday early we head to Sri Lanka and more exploring.

Let's hope this blog effort reaches its destination

Bushmeat smuggling and the illegal Wildlife Trade

2010-01-11T09:13:00.004-07:00

Linkhttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/12/monkey_meat_cas.php

I have been following the case of Mamie Manneh (aka Mamie Jefferson) in New York who smuggled bushmeat into the USA from Liberia. I first wrote about this extraordinary story in The Trouble With Lions and described how she had used a defense of the right to religious freedom as one of her reason for the smuggling. I again mentioned it in my blog of Sept 22nd.

In a report of Dec 12th from the New York Village News Blog the case seems to have finally come to an end, and the probationary sentence seems utterly trivial for a crime that involved the importation of 720 pounds of baboon and warthog meat. As the judge said, the deliberate circumventing of the law to hide the importation was the problem. It seems he was not swayed by Jane Goodall's written testimony about the severity of the situation, or indeed by the clear evidence of the potential diseases risks involved with such importation.

When I got my copy of the National Geographic magazine of January 2010 the whole thing came into perspective. A story by Bryan Christy, with disturbing photos by Mark Leong, tells about the Kingpin of Asia’s wildlife trade. His name is Wong Keng Liang, known to wildlife traffickers and officials around the world as Anson. His work (if this is the right word) makes Mamie’s crime seem utterly trivial. Christy’s figures are mind-boggling, almost impossible to comprehend, and the fact that Anson gets cooperation from some government officials in Asia just makes it worse. When he as arrested in 1998 Anson managed to plea bargain his way out of a sentence that might have involved 250 years in prison and a $12.5 million fine. He ended up with 71 months, with credit for 34 months already served. By all accounts the smuggling and trading continued throughout his time in gaol and continue to this day, the latest venture being a big interest in tiger farming.

Stones Into Schools

2010-01-04T05:53:00.007-07:00

Linkwww.ikat.org

In my blog of December 2nd I wrote briefly about Three Cups Of Tea, the remarkable story of Greg Mortensen and his work in Pakistan and Afghanistan building schools in remote areas and concentrating on the education of girls. It is a heart-lifting story. My wife and I told our daughter about it, and lo and behold! A parcel arrived for Christmas with a new book by Mortensen.
This one is called Stones Into Schools and concentrates on the continuation of the efforts of he and his team in Afghanistan. Read it, share it, tell your friends about it. It would even bring real tears to the eyes of a crocodile.

Orangutan intelligence

2009-12-28T06:38:00.006-07:00

Linkhttp://www.aazv.org/

From time to time stories appear on the Web that cannot be ignored. They are intriguing not only for what they report, but also for what they may have missed. Such is the case with two recent reports about that most fascinating of the great apes, the orangutan, which is held by many who have worked with this group of primates to be the most intelligent of all (after humans). My own experience with them is limited, but many years ago, on a visit to the Singapore zoo we were introduced to an ancient female orang who was allowed out for walks with the staff. We were on a semi-official visit and as we walked along the ape held hands with my daughter and then, when we all (including the orang) sat on a bench she gently put her hand on my son’s knee as we contemplated the wonderful array of tropical plants around us.

Both of the web stories concern the use of tools. One is an account by Andrea Thompson, a senior writer with Live Science of how researchers in Borneo who have been studying wild orangs have noted that the apes developed the use of leaves to make a sound called a kiss squeak for communicating with other members of their species in the forests. You can find it here.
The other report is more whimsical and relates how zoo staff in Germany have given one particular female ape her own Facebook page. This after she learned to use a simple camera. Each time she does so she receives a raisin as a reward. The story can be found here
and shows how inventive zoo staff can increase public interest and hence zoo attendance with innovative ideas.

There are other stories about orangs that have not yet appeared in the popular literature, and deserve to do so, as they show even more clearly how smart these creatures really are. The most amazing also involves the use of tools and was told to me in 1988 late at night on a subway train in Toronto by my friend and colleague Dr. Lyndsay Phillips.

“I came into work one morning,” he said, “to find the place in an uproar. The adult male orang was sitting on the roof at topmost point of the primate house with the entire group from the enclosure. We took the calm approach and persuaded him to come down with an offering of food. He led the group back into the cage through the door used by the keepers, which was hanging open. Of course the director went ballistic and hauled the keeper staff over the coals for carelessness. Next morning it was the same, the orangs were on the roof.”

“I imagine the director was not impressed” I said.

“No, you’re right, but we took a measured approach. The keepers swore black and blue that they had double-checked everything. That night volunteers sat all night in the passage way near the door. Nothing happened. We assumed no more volunteers were needed and that it had just been a weird coincidence until the day after that, when the orangs were on the roof again. Now we had a serious situation on our hands.”

Now comes the amazing bit, as Lyndsay told it.

“We set up a video surveillance system and late at night a red hairy hand appeared between the bars and began to fiddle with the padlock. Several minutes later the hand gave a jerk to the lock and the door opened. The orangs headed out and up, to be found perched on high in the morning.”

Lyndsay switched to a brief side-bar.

“There’s a couple of things to know about orangutans. When you have them in captivity you need to keep an ice cream pail handy. You pick up nuts and bolts from the cage area until the pail is full. Then you lock the group into their night quarters and enter the cage to find all the places where the pieces you have found have been removed and replace them. Orangs are incredibly strong and have all day and night to inspect and fiddle. There is one female in our group who will pick up a broom when the keepers come to clean and help them sweeping. She knows exactly what she is doing.”

“So what happened?” I asked as the train slowed on the approach to the downtown station near our hotel.

“Well, long story short, I anesthetized the entire group and we did body searches. We found nothing. As a last resort I set up the portable X-ray. We did the big male first, and saw a metal object in his mouth, near his front teeth. There, between his lip and gum, he had a length of wire. He had become a lock-pick! Once we took the wire away there were no more escapes.”

In case you doubt this account, it is worth mentioning that a much drier version of it was published the following year in the proceedings of the annual convention of the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians. The meeting was held in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I was chairing a session on zoo safety. Lyndsay’s story was a perfect fit.

White Rhino Rescue

2009-12-21T06:23:00.012-07:00

Linkhttp://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/pejeta-rhino.html#cr

In the book Last Chance To See written by the late Douglas Adams (he of the five books in the trilogy The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy) and co-authored by Mark Cawardine, Adams described his visit in 1980 to the last refuge of the Northern White Rhino in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. At that time there may have been two dozen of the creatures left after a century of relentless slaughter, aka poaching. So relentless in fact that early in the 20th century the French organized and armed gangs of poachers for the express purpose of collecting rhino horn for sale. Then came the terrible times of Idi Amin in Uganda, and the end of all rhinos in that country.

This picture was taken in Kenya in the 1971 and shows Southern White Rhinos with their guard, but if I had not told you that this was the Southern, as opposed to the Northern, there is no way that you would have known - any more than I would if I had not been told. They look the same.

Four years ago, when I was in Kenya on a visit to my old stamping grounds around the town of Nanyuki, nestled on the western slopes of Mount Kenya, there was serious discussion of the possibility of bringing the last remnants (now only three or four animals) of the DRC group of rhinos to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where this picture was taken. That effort foundered on the rocks of local politics in the DRC’s Garamba National Park where the rhino hung on under some measure of protection.

There was one glimmer, a faint one, in that seven individuals of this now critically endangered rhino had been taken to the Czech Republic and kept at the Dvür Krålové zoo. In ten years only one calf, a female, was born. There were three more in San Diego, but they were not breeding at all. In 2009 there are now only eight northern white rhino in existence.

Now comes the latest, and probably last attempt to save the remnants. As reported on the BBC web siteof 20th Nov under the banner headline

Czech zoo sends rare Northern White rhinos to Kenya

The translocation is not without is detractors, but Rob Brett, who is a member of the IUCN rhino specialist group is quoted as saying

"Moving them now is a last-bid effort to save them and their gene pool from total extinction."

More details emerge in another posting and it is here where one learns about the team of folks who have been involved in this exercise, and perhaps why some folks are concerned. These concerns stem mainly from the fact that the Northerns are likely to breed with the Southerns that are already at the conservancy (if they breed at all). Of course their gene pool would immediately be diluted, but the prevailing view seems to be that the genes would be lost completely if no efforts were made.

Of course the hope is that the return of the two males and two females to a more natural habitat, and relative freedom of thousands of hectares of bush, will turn on their reproductive juices. It seems a faint hope until one remembers that the thousands of Southern White Rhinos scattered in parks and zoos around the world are all descendants of about ten animals left alive in South Africa in 1904.This animal was one of my patients in one of those refuges, Meru National Park in Kenya.

You can find more about this remarkable recovery, and about the long and ugly history of rhino slaughter and why people do it, inThe Trouble With Lions.

Veterinarians Without Borders/ Vétérinaires Sans Frontiéres

2009-12-13T16:46:00.011-07:00

Linkwww.vwb-vsf.ca
If you are thinking of donating anything this Christmas season, why not go the web site of Veterinarians Without Borders/ Vétérinaires Sans Frontiéres and see what you can do. Of course tax receipts are issued as this is a registered charity. If you do not have money to spare you may have AirMiles points and they would be most welcome. The money will go straight to a project somewhere in the world. For instance there are projects needing help right here in Canada, and of course there are projects in many other regions. My efforts have mainly been focused in Africa, and for those who have not delved back very far on this page you can find a length report about our activities in Uganda in the blog of Monday, May 4, 2009 titled Uganda and WCVM primary schools report.. To save you time just click here and you will get straight to it.
It has a large number of pictures, many of them related to activities in two small primary schools.
But not all of them. As a teaser here is one that shows the sort of thing the children would have seen when we arranged for them to take a boat trip and see some wildlife.
My travel to Uganda was supported through the AirMiles program of Air Canada who support VWB/VSF. When Dr. David Waltner-Toews, the CEO of VWB-VSF read the report he wrote to me saying that it is interesting how many of our projects start out working with animals and end up with schoolchildren. Thats' where the need is, that's where the educational opportunties lie for the betterment of the lot of people and their animals.

I know some of you folks following this are veterinary students. Think about joining VWB/VSF. The rewards will far outstrip the costs (which are pretty low as there are special student rates).

Enjoy the holidays!

Murder by elk (moose)?

2009-12-09T07:37:00.005-07:00

Linkhttp://stju.blogspot.com/2009/12/swedish-man-cleared-of-murder-after.html

An unusual report has come out of Sweden and appeared on the BBC website (here) on 28th November and on a blog called JUSTICE", FROM THE CRAZY TO THE DEEPLY DISTURBING" (here). The BBC headline reads,

“Sweden woman's 'murder' committed by elk not husband”

.
I have been trying to find out more about it since the as the report has some intriguing holes in it. Of course the first thing to clear up is that the word elk means something different in Europe than it does in North America. It is a bit difficult to figure our why the elk of North America, known as Wapiti, ever became to be called en elk, which is what the moose is known as across the pond and right round the globe as far as the Bering Strait. Elch, Alg, and others are the names in languages other than English. Idle speculation on my part makes me wonder if one of the early settlers, maybe even someone on the Mayflower, was either short-sighted or had cataracts. If he or she saw a large brown deer-like beast it might have been dubbed an elk.

Anyhoo, that aside, the story is a sad one. A man named Ingemar Westlund says he was "dragged through a nightmare" after being arrested on suspicion of the murder of his wife. He found the body of his wife Agneta, aged 63 in September 2008 and was immediately arrested by police and held in custody for 10 days.

In the initial investigation, police did not take into account the possibility of a killer elk, assuming that the animal hairs on Mrs. Westlund’s coat were from her dog. It was only when the police realized that 68 year-old Mr. Westlund was not strong enough to have inflicted the damage to his wife that they went to forensics. Scientists at Umeå University sorted out the hair types and identifed the saliva. At that point it must have been assumed that she had been attacked when taking their dog for a walk in the forest. The charges were later dropped.

One of the weirder elements of this story appears as a quote on the BBC site

“Swedish Radio International says the animals can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens.”

There are more detail on the “Justice” blog where it states that:

“Drunken elks attacked an old people’s home four years ago, and had to be driven back by police and hunters… Typically weighing up to half a tonne, elk are best avoided when they are tipsy. They have entered department stores, got stuck in lifts, attacked skiers and barged into kitchens.”

If the “murderer” was a bull then there is a much stronger likelihood that apples had little to do with the event.

The deer scientist in me at once raises a red flag. The sad event occurred in September. September is the month when the rut starts in moose in the Northern Hemisphere and as the month goes along the rut gets more intense.

That intensity is driven by a huge spike in testosterone (T4) in the blood. I am not aware of any exact studies of T4 levels in moose, but in elk (the wapiti version) they are well known. As you can see from this graph, which I made almost 30 years ago during a research project of the rut in wapiti, T4 concentrations increase about 100 fold in the space of two weeks. The scale on the graph does not give a true picture as it had to be altered to fit on a page or screen.

Aggression is then the watch-word and humans are targets if they get too close to the sex-crazed creature. One of my colleagues, who will remain nameless, descried a particularly randy male student (who also flies incognito) as a life-support system for an erection. A rutting male deer really does fit that description.

I have talked to moose hunters who have been attacked. They were all terrified and were mighty thankful to have guns. Poor Mrs. Westlund would have had no chance.

Even if the moose was a female and Mrs. Westlund had got too close, she would have been completely outmatched. Moose cows, especially if defending a calf, are powerful and would attack a dog much as they do a wolf, using the front feet to strike and pound. Imagine 400 kg or more of enraged moose, bull or cow, up against a woman and a dog. No contest.

Another sad element. Mr. Westlund was shunned by his neighbours. “When I and my children bade farewell to Agneta at her funeral in front of 300 mourners, I was suspected of murdering her — can you imagine what that means?” he said. He is now seeking compensation.

Three cups of tea

2009-12-02T08:57:00.006-07:00

Linkwww.ikat.org
I have just finished an amazing book called Three Cups of Tea. It is written by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin and tells the story of how Mortensen has led a fantastic program in Pakistan and later Afghanistan, to educate thousands of children, boys and girls equally, through his personal initiatives to build schools in remote regions. The story is compelling and one cannot fail to be moved by it.
Of course this blog is mainly about conservation, and at first the book would not seem to have much to do with the subject, but ultimately it is only though education that we can hope to achieve any kind of balance. Mortensen has, in my opinion, achieved more than all the wars that one can imagine. It seems appropriate to send this post on the very day of the announcement of an additional 30,000 troops are destined to be sent to a country that has never, in all its history since Alexander the Great, been conquered.

Wildlife in Kashmir

2009-11-26T08:03:00.006-07:00

Linkhttp://wdin.blogspot.com/

Once upon a time (this is not really a fairy story) Kashmir was one of the great places to visit. During the era of the British Raj it was a major tourist destination and for the avid fisherman the state offered some of the very best fishing in the world. It has been assort of pipe-dream for me to dip a line in those waters, but for twenty or more years it has been no more than a pipe-dream as Kashmir is also the core of the long-standing border dispute between India and Pakistan.

There is one possible benefit to the near-war status of the region where it is estimated that since the 1989 full-blown rebellion against Indian rule blew up over 47,000 people have been killed. Hunters and poachers have hardly dared to set foot in the region.

If two recent reports are anything to go by wildlife in general and Himalayan black bears in particular may have had some measure of protection.

In a Reuters report of Nov 17th by Sheikh Mushtaq that you can find here it seems as if several wildlife species have shown marked increases in population size. Mushtaq quotes Kashmir's wildlife warden, Rashid Naqash as stating that

“Rare birds like the black partridge and pheasant have increased in thousands while more Asiatic black bear, leopards, musk deer and hangul, a rare red deer, now roam the disputed Himalayan region's pine forests.”

Most spectacular is the claim that the population of black bears has jumped from 700-800 to something over 2,500 in twenty years. This would mean that the population has increased by 7% a year.
A more focused report available here comes from Yahoo news and also quotes Rashid Naqash. In this case he is reported to have said that only 300 of the bears inhabit the region. He also told the reporter that three bears have been fitted with GPS collars and that three more are to be collared soon.

"This is the first time in India that Himalayan black bears have been fitted with a GPS collar."

Naqash is also quoted as saying that the collars could also help prevent bear attacks in the region, which are certainly a serious threat to the local villagers. Wild bears have killed more than two dozen people in the past four years and left 150 injured. For those who love nature stories told with the utmost skill this account is very reminiscent of the wonderful stories of naturalist Jim Corbett. If you don’t know them, try & find one such as Maneaters of Kumaon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Eaters_of_Kumaon) and give it a read. I was hooked at once and have all his writings.

Naqash also made a claim that seems to be more hope than reality when he stated

"We can always monitor their movements and sound an alert once they start moving towards the human habitations."

While three, or even six bears may be monitored, what about the 294 others or, if
Mushtaq’s numbers are to be believed it would be another 2494!

Something seems to smack of the fairy story element, or maybe the editors have made a mess of what would seem to be an encouraging report.

Of Moose And Men

2009-11-13T06:16:00.002-07:00

Link

I am starting on a new book about work in Canada. The title is Of Moose and Men and here is a short extract from one of the chapters. The scene takes place in Alberta when I had been asked to examine a pet moose that had recently delivered a calf and was not well. The moose (Petruska) had complete trust in her owner but when I approached to about 50 metres in my attempt to examine her...

Petruska let out a loud snort as she set off at a full charge and then I could hear her breath as she crashed through the underbrush, her hooves pounding on the hard ground. It became a sort of Mexican stand-off. Petruska looked at me between the fortunately thick branches of the spruce and tried to get at me, first by stamping her feet, much as she would in killing a predator, and second by trying to move around the tree to get a clearer run. Of course there was nothing I could do about the stamping except be glad that it was occurring twenty-odd feet from me, but I could and did move around the tree to make sure that we remained at exactly opposite sides. Not that she came round all the way. That would have put me between her and her calf, which would been quite unnatural as she presumably viewed me as some sort of predator that was going to get the most precious thing in her world.

Ring-around-the-roses is now a children’s game derived from the grim days of the black death. Ring-around-the-spruce-tree played by me and an irate mother moose intent on reducing me to a thin layer of pulverized flesh on the ground is quite another. While she was determined to protect her new calf, I was keen to protect myself.

Giraffes in Niger

2009-11-08T20:16:00.008-07:00

Linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8349712.stm, http://www.wcs.org/

Wildlife in Niger has been in serious trouble form poachers and hungry people for many years. One species that has been extirpated from the region is the scimitar-horned oryx, seen here in Texas and most of the world’s remaining members of this species now reside in North America. Indeed several exist on private game ranches. In the late 1980s I visited one such ranch in Texas where a philanthropic oil man had give over a large chunk of his land to their propagation. One of our party asked him “Why don’t you send some back to Niger?"

His reply – “Why would I? Everyone and his brother has an AK47. The animals would not last a month.”

So, the recent story from the BBC webs site about the resurgence of the West African giraffe in Niger is all the more remarkable.

As the reporter Martin Plaut writes

“From a herd of 50 animals, careful conservation supported by Niger's government has seen their numbers rise to around 200.”

Mind you this is still only a fraction of what once was an enormous number of these remarkable animals that roamed right across the region all the way to the Atlantic coast.

As I wrote in my blog of December 31, 2008 there are now five recognized species of giraffe. You can see four of them in that blog, but I have never seen the West African species, the rarest of all. My only chance to do so would have been in northern Cameroon in 1996, but I was fully engaged in an elephant collaring project with New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. If you would like to read how very difficult this project was you can do in chapters 10 & 11 of The Trouble With Lions.

The good news in this BBC story is that the giraffes have been seen within 60 km of the country’s capital city Niamey and the government has banned all hunting in the hope that the animals will help with the tourist trade.

Furadan in the USA

2009-11-05T06:04:00.006-07:00

Linkhttp://www.news-leader.com

A recent story out of the state of Missouri caught my eye because it involved the prosecution and sentencing of a man from Raymondville for using Furadan (Carbofuran) to kill wildlife. The story appeared on Nov 3rd & 4th in the on-line newspaper the Springfield News-Leader, which you can find here.

I have posted in Furadan a few times before, all to do with African wildlife, and in doing so was under the mistaken belief that the stuff was banned in North America. In Africa it has been used to deliberately kill lions and to capture huge numbers of birds. You can read about that in the blogs of March 15 & 30, May 29 and June 13 & 18.

This case is interesting because the culprit, one Eric Bryant, carried out the offense in January this year. He had treated some deer meat with the poison in an effort to control coyotes. In six weeks had killed at least three domestic dogs, several coyotes, a gray fox, a skunk, a red-tailed hawk and three American crows. These creatures were found by federal agents, and there is of course no way of knowing how many other animals perished.

My own yellow lab, Caesar, would be just as susceptible as any other dog, maybe even more so given his breed's tendency to eat anything he finds.

This just goes to show that the poison can kill a wide range of species. It acts by disrupting nerve conduction. The stuff is highly toxic to humans, and as little as a quarter tea-spoon can be fatal.

Because it is such an effective pesticide, and kills insects on contact, it is much favoured by crop producers. Farmers who apply it must do so in closed systems and one wonders how much risk the drivers of modern tractors, with their efficient air conditioners, are running. Can Furadan in a mist be brought back into the cab and create a hazard for the driver?

Hunting and meat from stores

2009-11-03T06:50:00.006-07:00

Link

A couple of weeks ago the writers group of which I am a member met and reviewed some of our work. Most of the group write in the world of science fiction & fantasy, but two of us write outside that genre. One is a mystery writer, and then there's me, writing in creative non-fiction.

I have related in my published work that I am a hunter, and have been for many years. For the last 30 years my wife & I have not purchased meat, except bacon (a little difficult to hunt). We get ultra low-fat meat, and what fat there is has only 3-omega fatty acids. Some members of the group could not understand that I have spent a career trying to work on wild animals in many corners of the globe and then go hunting.

To me it is simple. I get good food, I know where it comes from and I can control how it is processed. Cost is not an issue. By the time I have purchased licenses, filled my truck with gas and paid for ammunition I probably spend more than I would at the butchers shop or supermarket. I also get great enjoyment being outside in the countryside or sitting in a canoe casting a line.

It is obvious that there is a huge disconnect between my approach and that of some urban dwellers. We know that many inner-city folks have no idea that milk comes from cows, but then one of my group sent me this.
Where did this writer come from? Does she or he eat chickens, steaks of sausages? Or is this a case of an elaborate spoof. Sadly, I doubt it

Gorilla street party

2009-10-24T15:07:00.005-06:00

Linkhttp://gorillacd.org/2009/10/21/gorillas-throw-a-street-party-in-goma-to-sell-briquettes/, http://gorillacd.org/, http://endingcharcoal.wildlifedirect.org/

Conservation in action is exemplified in the video made by the group from the Democratic Republic of Congo's Gorilla Conservation group.

They are obviously having fun and doing great conservation work at the same time as they promote the use of briquettes to reduce the enormous pressure on the forests and the heavy use of charcoal. Take a look and make sure you sound is turned on. The music alone if worth listening to!

You can learn lots more about this kind of work at the Wildlife Direct Blog site here. Have fun and watch this! Then follow some of the links to see what is going on.

Bad news for books and publshers

2009-10-15T18:36:00.003-06:00

Linkhttp://www.skwriter.com/, http://216.219.85.117/

Bad news on the book front. In British Columbia the provincial government has suddenly withdrawn all its annual support, terminating a 22-year partnership with the non-profit society that sponsors B.C. BookWorld. The withdrawal was announced by phone, giving little notice, and the B.C. book publishers’ association and the B.C. magazine publishers’ association got the same message on the same day. Callous, calculated or what?

At the Federal level our government has made similarly draconian moves, in one of the worst cases, entirely removing a program that supported artists (of all stripes) in their overseas travels. Most artists, apart from the high profile stars, have incomes well below the so-called “poverty line” as it is defined in Canada. Being invited to travel to galleries and shows may be a two-edged sword if the organizers are unable to offer full coverage. Going to an event and taking our Canadian culture along may be impossible

Another program that has been savaged is the support for magazines through postal subsidies. If circulation is below 5000 there is no subsidy. This hits particularly hard in small population areas (like Saskatchewan) but may not affect magazines with larger catchment areas like Quebec and Ontario.

It seems to me that the politicians are forgetting that culture is at the very foundation of what we are about as humans. They all went to school. Maybe some of them hated their English teachers.

Writing is the bedrock. With writing comes reading. There you have two of the Three “R”s. Without them, we are mere cavemen, daubing ochre and charcoal on rock faces, banging, scratching and blowing on primitive instruments.

2009-10-13T10:22:00.000-06:00

Link

Black-footed ferret reintroduction

2009-10-09T09:51:00.006-06:00

Linkhttp://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2009/02/c3014.html, http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5iR4nbQUHgcK2oBdXvtGDJ3sXOjNA,
http://www.prweb.com/releases/black-footed_ferrets/Grasslands_National_Park/prweb2981044.htm

Next week I’ll be heading south to the Frenchman River Valley, one of my favourite places in the province. The scenery is quite different than most of the rest of this part of the world, and the wildlife is also somewhat different.

A few years ago bison were brought back to the Grasslands National Park to repopulate a region where they must have existed in their thousands at one time. One piece of the evidence for this is a deep buffalo jump site where the bones of many animals can still be found.

Another important re-introduction has been the smallest of all the canid species in Canada, the swift fox, no larger than many a house cat, that was extirpated in Canada and only reintroduced after many years of tireless work that was started by Miles and Beryl Smeeton of Cochrane, Alberta.

The latest arrivals, or re-arrivals, are a group of thirty-four black-footed ferrets. Several news services have picked up on this story and sent out releases such as WWF Helps Masked Bandit Return to Prairies and
Calgary Zoo helps return black-footed ferrets to Canada after 75 years!

These attractive black-masked relatives of the weasel, the otter and the mink were extirpated in Canada many years ago, having last been seen in Saskatchewan in 1937. No one knows for sure how this population died out, but in other areas the numbers of their main prey, the black-tailed prairie dog (a relative of the ubiquitous gopher, or Richardson’s ground squirrel) crashed mainly because of farming practices. On top of that disease, especially the plague (yes, the same bacterium that caused the black death) probably took a heavy toll.

By the late 1970s it was thought that the ferret had become extinct, but in 1981 wildlife officials in Wyoming found a small group. Captive breeding programs were started in a number of zoos, including Toronto and Calgary in Canada. Many partners cooperated in the captive breeding program and you can find a black-footed ferret microsite at Calgary Zoo’s web site. It contains educational vignettes and will be updated regularly.

Despite some early bumps, which included the near loss of many animals from canine distemper (that I wrote about in my last blog of October 2nd) the program has been a success, and there are now 17 sites in the USA where reintroductions have taken place, as well as one in Mexico and now near the small town of Val Marie, where the Grasslands NP headquarters is located. There are plans to bring more ferrets in future years, as this release is just a start, and the numbers are not sufficient to ensure long-term success. No one has asked the prairie dogs what they think about all this, but for thousands of years the ferrets were part of their every day lives, and even made their homes in the burrows of their prey.

If you want to see black-footed ferrets head to the park. You might find them near prairie dog colonies and you will likely see other wildlife that is not found in many other spots of Canada, let alone Saskatchewan. Even if you don’t the sunsets over the hills are well worth the visit.

Canine Distemper in a new species

2009-10-02T08:14:00.005-06:00

Linkhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TD6-4X9TTTY-6&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d3ed97ecb6027210b92b683fe472e67d, http://wdin.blogspot.com/, http://asuka.wildlifedirect.org/2007/03/

Once again the Wildlife Disease Listserv and blog has provided an entry into a convoluted story of disease among wildlife, domestic animals and even people.

A recent report published in the journal Microbiology has further broadened the range of species that can contract and die from a nasty virus disease once thought to occur, as its name implies, in dogs. It is canine distemper. The title of the article, written by Zhaozeng Sun, Aixue Li and their colleagues, is Natural Infection with Canine Distemper Virus in Hand-feeding Rhesus Monkeys in China.

It has been known for many years that some other species can contract the virus, or its very close relatives, and it seems obvious that the virus itself is able to undergo slight changes that allow it to infect new hosts. In the last thirty years it has been seen in seals (hence phocine distemper), dolphins, and other species. In Africa it had devastating effects on the African Wild Dog populations and was reported in jackals and hyaenas. It would be no surprise to learn that it also killed other canids like bat-eared foxes, but they tend to fly a bit under the radar and do not have the charismatic appeal of the larger species – they only weigh about 3 kg. Then in 1994 an epidemic occurred in lions in the Serengeti, killing an estimated 30% of the population, something like 1000 animals, in two years!

As I wrote in The Trouble With Lions

“There is a dramatic, but grim, movie clip shown on the Glasgow Veterinary College web site, taken by modeler Professor Ray Holborn, of a lion in the Serengeti in the throes of a grand mal seizure, which is one of the classic signs of distemper”.

I have just spent a fruitless 30 minutes trying to find the video, but it seems to have been taken down.

In dogs some of the classic signs of distemper are fever, loss of appetite, respiratory symptoms and thickening of the footpad. Another name for the condition used to be “Hardpad” and at one time this was even thought to be a different disease. Distemper was once a major killer of inner-city dogs in Glasgow and we students used to go into slum areas and take part in free vaccination clinics. This is much the same as the clinics that now take place around national parks like the Serengeti and Masai Mara in Kenya and Tanzania. You can read more about this on the Wildlife Direct blog here.

Many dogs developed central nervous system signs and seizures were common before they went on to die. There is no mention of CNS signs in any species other than the lions, but deaths certainly occurred. That is exactly what took place in the Chinese Rhesus monkeys where twelve of twenty that were sick went on to die.

So, will distemper jump to humans? Maybe it has done so already, aeons ago, in the form of measles. We may be lucky, because the distemper and measles viruses are closely related. So much so that for many years measles vaccine was used to protect puppies. Another point. When measles vaccines programs fail, or folks take decision not to vaccinate children, the consequences can be terrible. Measles was once a major factor in many areas of the world where European invaders arrived and brought the disease to fully susceptible people.

Wildlife smuggling

2009-09-28T13:38:00.003-06:00

Linkhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6204087/South-African-caught-at-airport-with-crocodiles-in-luggage.html,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090911-pythons-florida-giant-snakes.html

In The Trouble With Lions I wrote:

There seems to be some debate about which illegal trade generates the most income, but the top four are drugs, arms, people (mainly women as sex workers) and animals. All are worth billions of dollars a year and the animal trade involves the death of a vast proportion of its victims even while in transit.

It now seems as if wildlife smuggling has leapt into second place behind drugs in South Africa and overtaken arms.

The latest report of a bizarre case comes from the Wildlife Disease News Digest listserv of Sept 21st to which I subscribe. They provided a link to a story from Britain’s Telegraph online news outlet. The headline reads

South African caught at airport with crocodiles in luggage

It was not only crocodiles that he had tried to smuggle in his luggage, but a real mix that included snakes, a turtle, spiders, scorpions and frogs. In all some seventy animals were involved.

The man had flown in from Thailand and many, if not all (the article in not clear about this) of the animals were non-native and came from the Far East. There were at least three endangered species.

There are several issues to think about. First, and obvious, is the drain on species in the countries from which the animals came. Then comes the other big question. What happens when the smuggled animals arrive at destination; will they bring foreign diseases; what impact will they have on native wildlife?

The most recent and well-publicised example of a bad news answer to this question comes from Florida in the USA. Two species of non-native python have been found in the state. They are the Burmese Python and the African Rock Python. No doubt so-called “pet” owners released them when they got too big to handle. What is alarming about the rock python story came in a Sept 14th report by Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic News who wrote:

“Six African rock pythons have been found in Florida since 2002. More troubling, a pregnant female and two hatchlings have been found, which means the aggressive reptiles have set up house.”

The smuggling continues and will no doubt do so as long as bad people want to make money. Maybe scanners like the one I wrote about in the blog on bushmeat need to be used in all airports.

Bushmeat smuggling from Africa

2009-09-22T09:03:00.014-06:00

Linkhttp://www.silive.com/news/advance/index.ssf?/base/news/1252497614318590.xml&coll=1, http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/05/seizure_of_bushmeat_from_lugga.html

In The Trouble With Lions I wrote about an unusual case of bushmeat smuggling in the USA. An immigrant woman from Liberia had been prosecuted for smuggling monkey parts. At her pretrial deposition in the Brooklyn federal court in Brooklyn she stated that she ate the bushmeat for religious purposes and

‘because monkey from the wildlife is a very smart animal’.

The case has moved along and a report by Frank Donnelly in the Staten Island Advance of Sept 9th states that the woman, named Mamie Manneh (or Jefferson) has pleaded guilty to smuggling illegal monkey parts. This happened after her church minister debunked her claim of bushmeat's religious significance. She will be sentenced on Nov 13th in Brooklyn Federal court.

One of the issues raised by the prosecution was the potential of disease spread from bushmeat. The prosecution veterinary expert mentioned Ebola, measles, tuberculosis, monkeypox and retroviruses similar to HIV but added that she was ‘she was unaware of any documented cases of such diseases being spread through consumer bushmeat.” It maybe that she was referring to such diseases occurring in the USA, but it is important to recognize that several of these diseases are known to have crossed into humans from bushmeat in other countries. The classic is the spread of HIV to humans from chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys on at least seven occasions in the last 100 years. Then there is the more recent finding of a gorilla derived form of HIV occurring in a human, which I recounted in this blog on August 4th under the title Gorillas and AIDS.

In a somewhat related case a Ugandan man was caught red-handed with bushmeat and fruit when his luggage was screened at Newark Liberty International Airport. Reporter Christopher N. Dela Cruz, writing in New Jersey Real-Time News, which is associated with the Star Ledger related that parts of antelope and cane rat were found along with fruit and other illegal commodities.

Lest anyone think that bushmeat smuggling is unusual, local authorities in Newark relate that this was the sixth seizure of bushmeat since October last year, totaling over 41 pounds. Last year, similar seizures weighed in at 88 pounds. Once again, and entirely appropriately, disease transmission to people from bushmeat was raised by federal authorities.

One of the slightly odd things about this report was that a picture accompanying the report showed a uniquely North American species, the pronghorn antelope. It seems possible that the newspaper lacked a picture of the most common antelope species in Uganda, the Uganda kob, (pictured here) which is often a target for poachers in Queen Elizabeth National Park and elsewhere.

In this case the man, whose name was not given, was fined $300 and released.

Gorilla hunting in Congo

2009-09-17T06:46:00.003-06:00

Linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8256000/8256464.stm, http://www.karlammann.com/

A recent headline on the BBC web site goes like this: “Scale of gorilla poaching exposed”. The story, by Earth News reporter Jody Bourton tells how

“An undercover investigation has found that up to two gorillas are killed and sold as bushmeat each week in Kouilou, a region of the Republic of Congo.”

Quoting Mr Pierre Fidenci, president of Endangered Species International (ESI) Bourton wrote:

"Gorilla meat is sold pre-cut and smoked for about $6 per 'hand-sized' piece. Actual gorilla hands are also available."

What Bourton did not mention is that there has been a culture of gorilla hunting and consumption in the Congo basin for a long time. In his autobiography On Safari: The Story of My Life (Collins 1963) Armand Denis published several remarkable photographs of gorillas that had been hunted by large gangs of Ituri hunters deep in the forests of the Congo basin when he accompanied pygmies on a well-orchestrated hunt in the forest. These hunters used home-made guns that fired anything that could be turned into a lethal projectile and were dangerous to use, as they might explode in the user’s face.

More recent photos of butchered gorillas and indeed the whole bushmeat saga have been published by Karl Amman, who allowed me to use some of his images in The Trouble WIth Lions. You can see some of them on his web site.

It is very likely that the current hunting is more systemic and highly organized than the events that Denis witnessed and it is also likely that it is unsustainable. The investigators found that half the population is killed each year. No population of slow-breeding animal can sustain itself under such pressure. The situation is compounded because the main targets are adult gorillas that carry the most meat.

Fidenci’s team estimates that there are perhaps 200 gorillas left in the area. That number won’t last long.

A worthy, but in my opinion unattainable, goal, is to stop the hunting by providing alternative income, increasing conservation awareness and creating a gorilla reserve.

Bourton ends by quoting Fidenci.

"Enforcement does not exist. Even though there are existing laws which protect endangered wildlife against such activities."

With war, inaccessible forests and many other problems to deal with it is difficult to see how antipoaching can be a high priority.

Elephant anthrax

2009-09-15T11:08:00.006-06:00

Linkhttp://www.promedmail.org, ttp://www.isid.org, http://expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Controversy+over+Elephant's+burial&artid=WraxIQ7HFmI=&SectionID=9R67TMeNb/w=&MainSectionID=9R67TMeNb/w=&SEO=&SectionName=gUhH3Holuas=, http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1001:2959849136667116::NO::F2400_P1001_BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1000,79120

Anthrax is an ongoing problem all over the world and frequently appears on Promed listserv newsletters. Most often the story concerns a group of people who have eaten a carcass of a dead animal. The consequences are deadly. A story from India’s state of Kerala has a different twist. It concerns the burial of an elephant that was thought to have died of this nasty disease. The elephant’s name was Unnikrishnan, and it belonged to a saw mill owner in Perumbavoor.

Simple burial is simply the wrong way to deal with any animal that has died of anthrax because the bacterium that causes the disease is one of the hardiest life forms known and can persist in the soil for enormous (but unknown) lengths of time as a spore.

There is a safe way to bury anthrax carcasses, and that involves using lime and digging down so that the body is at least six feet deep. For an elephant that would no doubt mean that the bottom of the hole has to be ten or twelve feet deep.

In this case the story gets even uglier because the elephant was buried, near the Muvattupuzha river and could therefore pose a threat a source of potable water in the district.

In some elephant camps in India and elsewhere there is a routine preventive program that involves regular vaccination. Witness this picture of Dr. Carlyle Jaganathan holding a syringe and waiting for a working elephant to lie down so that he could vaccinate it. I witnessed this event twenty years ago in Mudumalai NP that lies between Kerala and Kamataka states. What I was could not document was the animal’s objection to the needle. I am sure she knew what was coming and even as Dr. Jaganathan inserted the needle into the fold of skin under her tail she started to try and get up. Her mahout prevented that and the injection was administered without further ado.

Grandson's first fish

2009-09-08T20:36:00.005-06:00

Linkhttp://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/sk/princealbert/index.aspx

Nothing much to do with conservation, but I can't resist posting a pic of my grandson and his first fish. It is a pickerel (walleye to some) and was caught in Prince Albert National Park on a yellow jig. The lad cast his own line from the canoe, hooked and played the fish on his own (with his dad's advice on keeping the rod tip up) and brought it to the boat. His dad then lifted into the canoe, at which point the six-year old said "So that's what this is all about.". As they returned to shore his dad asked "Don't you want to put your line out again and try for another one?".
To this came the memorable reply

"No dad, my nerves are having a party and I can't handle it."

That line has to go into a book at some point.

Bushmeat in Madagascar and Asia

2009-09-02T14:32:00.005-06:00

Linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8210000/8210355.stm,
http://www.wildlifetrust.org/news/releases/flyingfoxes.shtml, http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=worlds-largest-bat-being-hunted-int-2009-08-31, http://wdin.blogspot.com/

Two seemingly unrelated stories, one from the BBC and the other from the Wildlife Disease News Digest that came to me via their listserv once more showcase the subject of the bushmeat trade. The bottom line? Hunting is an old, old tradition and hungry people need to eat and will hunt the wild animals around them.

The first story comes from Madagascar and is headlined Lemurs butchered in Madagascar. Reporter Jody Bourton relates how the recent unrest and loss of law and order and “suspension of conservation aid” has led to wide-spread hunting and consumption of these already threatened or endangered animals. She sates

“The dead lemurs are sold to restaurant owners seeking to serve new delicacies.”

This may not be so much a story of hunger as of novelty.This picture shown in Jody’s report, taken by local non-government organisation Fanamby and released by Conservation International shows a basket of smoked lemurs available for sale.

Bourton concludes that

"The problem of illegal killing of lemurs in Madagascar will only be solved when authorities act and are empowered. Also, the big donor agencies, the United States and Europe need to reinstate funding for conservation activities there immediately, or the advances of the past 25 years will forever be lost."

The other story comes from Asia and concerns a different type of bushmeat. In this case it is the world’s largest bat, the so-called large flying fox that is being hunted. The story by John Platt is headlined World's largest bat being hunted into extinction

The study that Platt refers to was headed up by Dr. Jonathan H. Epstein of the Wildlife Trust in New York City. It was published in the August 25 online edition of the Journal of Applied Ecology.
In his report Epstein stated that in Malaysia alone, 22,000 bats are legally hunted every year, and an unknown number are also illegally killed.
He went further to say that

“this level of hunting is unsustainable
for the number of bats in the country and will decimate this ecologically important species."  

The only real way to gauge the size of these animals is to look at the pictures (© 2009 Wildlife Trust) that appear on Dr. Epstein’s report. Keen observers will note that the man handling the bat is wearing protective clothing as well as a mask. I am sure that the garments are worn to protect not only the bat from human diseases, but vice versa. We do know that some really nasty viruses can be transmitted to people by Egyptian Fruit Bats in Africa. Check out Ebola and Marburg as a starter. I have not seen any similar reports about disease transmission from bats to humans in Asia, but who knows?

In this case the disappearance of the bats will have much wider implications than just one species. Epstein stated that the bats

"eat fruit and nectar and in doing so they drop seeds around and pollinate trees. So they are critical to the propagation of rainforest plants." 

New Species in Himalayas

2009-09-01T06:31:00.005-06:00

Linkhttp://wdin.blogspot.com/, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-species-himalayas

The most interesting thing to arrive in my email this morning was a posting from the Wildlife Disease News Digest about the discoveries of new species. The pick-up came from the Scientific American and you can see a slide show of seven of those species here.

Datelined Aug 28th and headlined A Decade of New Species Discoveries in the Himalayas it is well worth a look. The first sentence goes like this.

"The remote eastern Himalayas--home to tiny deer and big vipers--have offered enterprising researchers a wealth of new species to document and describe."

Of course for most of us there is no chance of ever seeing any of these creatures, but just knowing they are there is somehow heartening.

Enjoy!

Walking with Moose

2009-08-26T05:52:00.012-06:00

Linkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqOTBuso6kI, http://www.usask.ca/wcvm/

Just back from an interesting weekend in Alberta, all of it related in some way to moose.

It started with a wedding. I’m not going to show wedding pics – I’ll leave that to the happy couple, but the bride is the daughter of a former student and long-time friend. He is Dr. Jack Williams, who graduated from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in 1978 and one of the highlights (so he tells me) of that final year was a trip to Rochester, north of Edmonton, where I took him to help with a moose research project. In this very short video clip, edited out from a longer one that you can find here on Youtube, you can see Jack (he turns to smile at the camera) as we walk a moose out of heavy bush so that we can weigh him and have more room to change his collar.

One of the stories told at the wedding of Jack’s daughter Ashley was of how he had almost tried to commit suicide by walking backwards along the body of the helicopter towards the tail rotors. He says that had I not rugby tackled him he would have been chopped up. The wedding would certainly never have taken place, because at that time there was no Ashley.

Naturally this story will appear in my new book Of Moose and Men

Moose wrestling

2009-08-16T06:08:00.007-06:00

Linkhttp://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1&gsessionid=E6jb7pzRVH6TCU-ICnQJzA

If you have returned to this blog you will now have an inkling of what my new website will look like. I hope it will be up within a week or ten days, certainly by the end of the month.

Yesterday I posted a 3 minute video to Youtube. It tells, without the benefit of a continuity staff member, how we used to capture moose for research purposes in the 1970s and 1980s. Nowadays almost all moose excpet the huge Alaskan moose, appropriately called Alces alces gigas are captured using net guns. I'll let you have a look at it at the end of this post, but here are a couple of is a teaser photos.

I developed this walking with moose technique after learning something about wildlife capture and darting in Africa and applied it to moose when we needed to weigh them and would often be working in fairly heavy bush where we could not get the helicopter near them.

Here I have put a small piece of the video because the blog cannot handle too much band width. The whole thing is on Youtube.

Of course the method will also get a description in the new book I am working on. It looks as if my title will be Of Moose And Men.

Marburg Virus and Fruit Bats

2009-08-05T09:27:00.007-06:00

Linkhttp://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSL1166433320080711, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090801185900.htm, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6958015.stm

Just over a year ago, on July 11th 2008, there was a report on the important ListServ Promed Ahead and some other news outlets that told the terrifying story of a Dutch tourist who had died in Holland after being in contact with fruit bats in Uganda. She had visited the Maragambo Forest in Queen Elizabeth National Park, like thousands of others before her. These thousands included me, my wife and at least fifty of my students. We had gone there because there is a cave there that is home to thousands,
if not tens of thousands of Egyptian Fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) and it is mesmerizing to watch them flit in and out of the roost, never mind to see them clinging to the rock in their serried ranks.

There was an added bonus of attraction at the cave. A pair of African Fish Eagles had taken up residence just outside the entrance – grub to go as it were. Furthermore there was a resident python. In fact the last group of students had seen two pythons. So it is probable that a little biology 101 had been taking place. No exercise need for their packed lunches!

As you can imagine, the park authorities have closed the cave to tourists. The last thing they need is another catastrophe.

The Dutch doctors who cared for the dying patient and identified the cause of her death could not be absolutely certain where the virus came from, but the evidence has now mounted and seems conclusive.

The first suggestion of the link between fruit bats and Marburg, which is closely related to the better known Ebola virus, seems to have been made in 2007, as this BBC report shows.

Then came the recent (Aug 2nd 2009) report in ScienceDaily titled
'Ebola Cousin' Marburg Virus Isolated From African Fruit Bats. To quote:- “A paper published in the open-access science journal PLoS Pathogens provides new insight into the identity of the natural host of this deadly disease.”

As the authors of the PLoS article state, this brings the identification of the natural host of Ebola one step closer, as fruit bats are also strongly suspected in this disease. The first indication of this may have been in a 2005 paper in the prestigious journal Nature that can be found here.

There is one more important part of this chain. Fruit bats are a major source of bushmeat in the forests of central Africa. They are also pretty easy to catch when they return to their roosts during the day.

How many human forest dwellers have died of one of these deadly diseases and not even been noticed?