Asian elephants and poaching

Linkhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31519427/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

The pressure on wildlife is unrelenting, often ugly, and world-wide. This week another story about elephant destruction came across in my email box. It was not the usual African story, but came from Indonesia, where crop-raiding elephants have been creating problems for villagers for many years. There is an excellent video from a few years back about efforts to protect crops from the ravages of these animals, and the ugly role of the pulp and paper and palm oil industries in the decimation of forests that has led to the creatures being crowded into ever-shrinking habitats. This story is different.

It appears that poachers after ivory have turned to a cheap and deadly, but utterly indiscriminate form of killing. In one of my regular group mails from the WDIN - Wildlife Disease News Digest the headline in the accompanying picture appeared.

The link lets one further into the story and it turns out that poachers after ivory have used cyanide-laced fruit to kill Sumatran elephants, an endangered sub-species of the Asian elephant.

This picture appeared with the story.

This is just one of many places where Asian elephants, that used to roam in their hundreds of thousands across much of the continent, have taken massive hits. Current populations, which are the result of a combination of guesswork, old (very old) data and some science, put the entire population of all sub-species at no more than 30,000 to 50,000.

A very comprehensive report came out earlier this year from TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, about the ivory trade in Myanmar (Burma) and the neighbouring countries of Thailand and China. It is 40 pages long, and anyone interested can get hold of a copy of the entire pdf document through TRAFFIC headquarters. The citation reads Chris R. Shepherd and Vincent Nijman (2008): Elephant and Ivory Trade in Myanmar. TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia. ISBN 9789833393169

I have lifted just one small segment from the executive summary of the report.

"Illegal trade in ivory and other Asian Elephant Elephas maximus products remains widespread, especially in markets along Myanmar’s international borders. In 2006,TRAFFIC surveyed 14 markets in Myanmar and three border markets in Thailand and China, and found some 9000 pieces of ivory and 16 whole tusks for sale, representing the ivory of an estimated116 bulls. Illegal killing and capture of elephants for trade continues to be a major cause of decline for Myanmar’s wild Asian Elephant populations."

Nanyuki Sports Club, Kenya

Link

Nanyuki Sports Club

The other day an email came in that I might easily have consigned to the trash heap as the sender’s name (Maggie) meant nothing to me. The subject line was the kicker. It simply said Nanyuki Sports Club. This was the social centre of European life for the best part of forty years before Kenyan independence in 1963. My mother managed the club during WWII when the men were away at war and twenty-five years later my new wife and I held our wedding reception there.

There is another link and this is where my email correspondent came in. She was searching, from her computer in Plymouth, England for information about a painting of the club made by her partner’s late brother. Somehow she navigated her way to my web site and the Amazon site about my first book Wrestling With Rhinos: The Adventures of a Glasgow Vet in Kenya.

She ended up there because one of the illustrations in the book shows a painting done by one Ronald Snoaden, about whom I knew nothing, that was done in 1944 and shows a view from one of the lawns around the main club building. Snoaden gave it to my mother at some point. The painting now sits on the wall of our home in Saskatoon, Canada.

The club remains the social centre of the business and professional people of Nanyuki, but these days has a real rainbow mix of races and people as members. We have retained our overseas membership and stayed there in March of this year. We not only stayed there, but also were assigned the very cottage (banda in KiSwahili), where Jo changed out of her wedding dress into beautiful cream-coloured Benares silk sari that she had chosen as a going-way dress. The champagne was also stored there before the event, but by the time Jo changed it was almost all gone!

A small part of the banda is visible at the very edge of Snoaden’s painting. What is less obvious is that Snoaden was standing with his back to one of Kenya’s most spectacular views, that of Mount Kenya. Here is a wide-angle shot of the mountain taken from just outside the clubhouse in front of the children’s playground.

Wildlife declines in Kenya

Link

My In Box of yesterday carried an interesting Kenya-based article from the Wildlife Diseases News Digest. The somewhat over the top headline “Kenya on the brink of recording big five extinction” is at least an attention grabber. It came from the East African Standard and highlights, once again, the problems that plague the country’s wildlife situation.

The article, dated June 7th, is by one Joe Kiarie and tells how four cows were killed by lions in the community of Oloolaimutiak within the Masai Mara National Reserve. Naturally the villagers reacted and laced the carcasses with poison. ONE young lion died within 100 metres of the scene and four others are missing. The inevitable “by-kill” of vultures occurred.
No poison is named, but it is a racing certainty that they used Furadan. Important questions remain. How did they get the stuff? Was it some residual stock or were they able to purchase it in a village shop? In the past many shops carried signs such as “Agricultural Supplies” and in them Furadan was readily available. As those who saw the CBS 60 Minutes show in March this year will recall the manufacturers of the chemical stated that they would discontinue its supply. If you missed it, I referred to it in my blogs of March 15th & 29th.

It is not just lions and poison that Kiarie mentions. He states “Three days before, a poacher was shot dead after he was caught removing a horn from a black rhino in Laikipia.” This picture accompanies his article. He goes on to mention some other species. These include roan and sable antelope (the black one with the huge horns), Hirola, or Hunter’s antelope and Grevy’s zebra. Rather than bore with numbers, the Grevy’s shows the trend. In 1970 there were thought to be some 20,000 head in East Africa (many in Ethiopia). Perhaps there are 18,00 today, and many of these are on private reserves. This picture, taken by Dick Neal in Kenya in 1975 shows a mixed aggregation of the common or Burchell’s zebra, with their broad stripes, and the taller, large eared Grevy’s with the narrow stripes. It has been suggested that there may be fewer Grevy’s zebra than there are the much higher profiled black rhino in Africa.

In a related article by Beatrice Obwocha of the 11th of May this year the plight of one of the world’s great sights, the massed ranks of flamingos on Kenya’s Lake Nakuru. In a nutshell, the numbers are at an all-time low. There may not have been more than a thousand of them after the long drought between November and March. Contrast this with numbers that were once thought to exceed half a million.
And why? Partly the drought (an estimated 100,000 returned between March and May), but a much bigger and long-term problem comes from human activity. The water source for the lake lies on the escarpment above it. Water levels are down, alkalinity is up, and the algae upon which the birds feed are not thriving. On top of this the nearby town of Nakuru has grown enormously and the sewage and agricultural waste from the surrounding farms all drain into the lake.

What neither author mentioned up front is the core problem of human population expansion, which inevitably leads to crowding for space and diminishing resources. When people’s livelihoods and way of life are threatened they will react, either vigorously, in the case of lion attacks, or insidiously, even unknowingly, in the Lake Nakuru example.

Elephants and bees

Linkwww.elephantsandbees.com, http://www.ruffordsmallgrants.org/rsg/projects/lucy_king

When I hear the phrase “think outside the box” my first reaction is cliché. However, zoologist Lucy King, working in Kenya has done this in a way that means exactly what it says, as long as one accepts that the box in this case is a traditional beehive.

Rural Kenyans, particularly the Ndorobo, are avid honey eaters, and they make hives for wild bees from hollowed out logs. This thorn tree close the Uaso Nyiro river in Laikipia District has at least seven such hives hanging high up in it. Unfortunately I cannot get this one to upload in its true colours (it was taken over 30 years ago & scanned from the original slide), but the hives appears near the top as longish dark blobs.

One thing that elephants do not like is bees. Their skin is probably impervious to the stings, but around the eyes, and especially inside the very sensitive trunk, bee stings obviously hurt. One semi-tame bull elephant was described as “going berserk” when stung there. They may not get ‘bees in their bonnets’, but ‘up the trunk’ obviously does the trick.

If African bees are disturbed they are likely to swarm and attack.

Lucy has taken these two facts and has carried out a trial that has recently been reported on the BBC web site which you can find here

She also writes about her research in her own web site.

The ‘outside the box’ idea was to use actual beehives as part of a crop-protection fence after Lucy and her supervisor found that elephants could even be drive off if they heard the sound of buzzing bees.

As you can see in this photo that Lucy took, and has released to the media, farmers can can construct a fence that has beehives strung on wires every few metres around their plots of crops. Any touch of the wires by an elephant (or a careless human) will set the wires a-twanging, and the hives a-swinging. Ouch!

While the technique is not 100% effective it has helped reduce elephant incursions considerably. The by-product is delicious honey that the farmers can sell. Elephants are magic, if they do not raid ones crops and terrorize ones family.

There are several other reports of Lucy’s work that she is carrying out as part of her D. Phil (Oxford’s equivalent of a PhD) program. For instance this one of April 2008 shows a transcription of an interview she gave about her work.

Link

www.elephantsandbees.com.

When I hear the phrase “think outside the box” my first reaction is cliché. However, zoologist Lucy King, working in Kenya has done this in a way that means exactly what it says, as long as one accepts that the box in this case is a traditional beehive.

Rural Kenyans, particularly the Ndorobo, are avid honey eaters, and they make hives for wild bees from hollowed out logs. This thorn tree close the Uaso Nyiro river in Laikipia district has at least seven such hives hanging high up in it.

One thing that elephants do not like is bees. Their skin is probably impervious to the stings, but around the eyes, and especially inside the very sensitive trunk, bee stings obviously hurt. One semi-tame bull elephant was described as “going berserk” when stung there. They may not get ‘bees in their bonnets’, but ‘up the trunk’ obviously does the trick.

If African bees are disturbed they are likely to swarm and attack.

Lucy has taken these two facts and has carried out a trial that has recently been reported on the BBC web site which you can find here file:///Users/admin/Desktop/BBC%20web%20site/BBC%20-%20Earth%20News%20-%20'Beehive%20fence'%20deters%20elephants.webarchive

She also writes about her research in her own web site at www.elephantsandbees.com

The ‘outside the box’ idea was to use actual beehives as part of a crop-protection fence after Lucy and her supervisor found that elephants could even be drive off if they heard the sound of buzzing bees.

As you can see in this photo that Lucy took, and has released to the media, farmers can can construct a fence that has beehives strung on wires every few metres around their plots of crops. Any touch of the wires by an elephant (or a careless human) will set the wires a-twanging, and the hives a-swinging. Ouch!

While the technique is not 100% effective it has helped reduce elephant incursions considerably. The by-product is delicious honey that the farmers can sell.

There are several other reports of Lucy’s work that she is carrying out as part of her D. Phil (Oxford’s equivalent of a PhD) program
For instance this one of April 2008 shows a transcription of an interview she gave http://www.ruffordsmallgrants.org/rsg/projects/lucy_king

Marie Stopes International

Linkhttp://www.mariestopes.org.uk/Home.aspx


Been away with family in the USA, and did not take my computer, so was “off air” for a couple of weeks. Canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and telling bedtime stories to grandchildren makes a nice change.

After wading through the usual stack of emails and dumping the obvious rubbish I found one that at first looked interesting. It appeared to come from the Mary Stopes International folks, who are so well known for their world-wide work in the women’s health field, and especially in the area of reproductive choice. The have expanded their activities and now offer services as Sexual Health Specialists with tabs on the web site for women, for men, and for young people.

The remarkable Scottish woman for whom the organization is named was educated as a palaeobotanist and had a remarkable academic career in the early part of the 20th century, earning a PhD in 1907, when women had a tough time breaking into the male dominated world of science. According to Wikipedia (where this photo of her in her lab in 1904 appears) she edited journal Birth Control News which gave anatomically explicit advice and it is for her work on family planning that she remembered.

The “reply to” address on the email header was in Hong Kong, and the message mentioned Mary Stopes Canada. Something made me hesitate before replying, although I have seen Stopes clinics in many countries and admire their work. In countries like Uganda they are a vital refuge for many women. A check on Google gave me no hits for a Canadian leg of the organization. I penned an email to the head office, and soon got a reply. My instincts had been right. The thing was a scam. I hope nobody got caught.