Of Moose and Men

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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.

Snares and poachers

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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.

The Plastic menace

A recent posting on the Wildlife Disease New Digest blog, which appears two or three times a week as a listserv item (here is the URL http://wdin.blogspot.com/) carries a series of quotes and pictures that highlight the world’s growing problem with plastics. Many brief reports on the blog carry links to full stories on many subjects. The plastic one can be seen here. It opens with a quote from The National Geographic News of Sept 2003 that carries this blunt message:- Data released by the United States Environmental Protection Agency shows that somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastics bags are consumed worldwide each year.

The posting goes on to quote Jared Blumenfeld, Director of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment and states that There’s harsh economics behind bag recycling: It costs $4000 to process and recycle 1ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold on the commodities market for $32.

These quotes are followed by numerous grim pictures of plastic clogging up our cities and killing untold numbers of wild creatures in many ways.

Of course the authors do their best to offer a solution, pointing out that if only one person in five in the USA were to stop using plastic bags the reduction in waste would be absolutely huge – perhaps as many as 1,330,560,000,000 bags in our life time. They list several countries where plastic bag use has been banned – most notably in Africa, Rwanda has led the way

My own take on this problem appears in The Trouble With Lions in chapter 15. I quote:
We occasionally passed through villages whose chief characteristic was masses of thorn bushes highlighted by what have been euphemistically called Natal Poppies. The real reason for the colour is the accumulation of plastic bags, mainly black, which have blown from the ground where they have been carelessly dropped and have caught in the thorns. As the bags are virtually indestructible, the number of “poppies” continues to increase; moreover they seem to multiply of their own accord, as they gradually shred, so that one large bag becomes several small strips, all caught up in the thorns. An ugly sight.
In an interesting example of parallel evolution, Natal Poppies have sprung up all over Africa, and have become a common sight wherever one goes. A more generic name might be African Wild Flowers, as we have seen them in every African country that we have visited in the last fifteen years. Eventually they either shred themselves so small that they cannot hang on to the trees, or end up becoming the major visible form of garbage lining village streets. What a pity that they lack DNA and cannot propagate into useful bags every year or so. Since that time an attempt at control of this situation has been made, by making the giving away of plastic bags illegal in South Africa, but Markus (Hofmeyr) tells me that it has not had a noticeable effect on the flower crop.
The situation has hardly improved in the ten years since we learned the cynical nickname. Vast amounts of plastic clog up systems in most countries and recent reports indicate that even in Canada people are beginning to feel the grip of the man-made monster. In Uganda it is almost impossible to make a purchase without the item being stuffed into a small black plastic bag, called a Kavera. The bags end up in roadside garbage heaps and may be sporadically picked by an antiquated dump truck that drives off with its contents dribbling on to the road. The garbage piles are burnt from time to time, sending a plume of foul-smelling, choking toxic fumes into the air. It is hard to know which is worse.

An even newer posting on the Wildlife Disease New Digest blog concerns the effects of plastics in quite a different way. A report here suggests that the a breakdown chemical of plastics causes a fatal condition in lobsters called shell disease. Hans Laufer, the lead scientists on the study thinks that alkyphenols derived from hard plastics may be interfering with the ability of lobsters to develop tough shells.

It is difficult to see our way out of this one. A lot of people need to take a lot of action, or else our grandchildren – and their grandchildren - are going to inherit a world that we would not even recognize.