Gorilla street party

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.

Gorillas, snares and wildlife blogs

Linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7549444.stm


One of the very best blogs on which to keep abreast of developments in gorilla conservation is the one run by the park staff in the DRC’s Virunga National Park. This blog is regularly picked up by the BBC and features on their main web site

While this blog is specific to gorillas and particularly gorillas in the DRC, a more general blog is that at Wildlife Direct which collates news from around the world. Today’s Wildlife Direct post covers good news about wild dogs in Zimbabwe, news about snares and the capture of poachers, and a post from the Lion Guardian program in Kenya’s Masailand. The post on gorillas issues goes wider after the arrest of the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, which, it is hoped, will bring the killing to an end. Not just the killing of gorillas as reported in last year, and which showed this ugly picture credited to Altor IGCP Goma, but the death of a ranger after an attack by Mai Mai geurillas

The snare issue is unlikely to go away any time soon. I have written about it in The Trouble With Lions, and like any visitor who delves a bit into Africa’s wildlife scene we have seen snares ‘up close and personal’. There is a blog that covers snares in the Masai Mara and has not yet appeared on the Wildlife Direct site. Thelatest post is headed Entries in Poachers & Snares (34). I’m not sure if this means that there have been 34 snare reports, but it is of course under the more general Mara heading.

The whole snare thing needs highlighting. I’ll have a go at that in a day or two, but right now we are getting ready to head out for the airport en route to Nairobi.

War in the DRC and gorilla survival

More desperate news from the DRC. An email this morning describes how rebel soldiers have completely taken over thePark Headquarters at Rumangabo in the of the Gorilla Sector of Virunga National Park. The fighting between the rebels of Laurent Nkunda and the army has engulfed the park. One reason for the continued war in this region is that it is incredibly resource-rich. One of the most important minerals is Coltan, which contains tantalum, used the world over in electronic equipment, particularly cell phones, DVD players and computers. Miners have been forced to work at gun point, in a grim return to the Heart of Darkness days of Conrad. For more details on Coltan you can go to the Wikipedia site.

The park rangers have been forced to flee en masse and so there is now nobody to keep an eye on things. For a map of the region you can go to the blog. Of course this blog is rightly concerned with the fate of the 200 or so mountain gorillas that make the park home, but with that level of human incursion it will not just be gorillas that are being hammered. Hippos have taken a huge hit over the last years (down from over 20,000 to a few hundred) , and anything that moves in the forest is going to be considered as fair game (bad pun) for hungry soldiers looking for bush meat.

Anyone wishing for more information can send a message to this email samantha@gorilla.cd

Gorillas, Conservation and Trouble in Paradise

One of the very best sources of news about conservation and wildlife issues cannot be considered a mainstream source of such information, but it is very much a mainstream source of world news. It is the BBC news web site that you can find here.

Within the site it is easy to navigate to almost anywhere in the world, and two recent reports caught my eye.

The first is a well-edited film clip, is titled Turmoil Troubles Masai Reserve and its subheading reads “Kenya's tourism slump after the recent political violence is threatening the Masai Mara game reserve.” You can find the footage here.

It opens with a shot of a small group of elephants walking across the grassy plain but quickly shifts to an interview with a Maasai community leader who tells of his struggles to look after his family in the face of collapsing tourist industry income. The original post was made in March this year, and I do not have the most recent information about any recovery. Maybe a reader has more to tell us. Let’s hope it is less pessimistic than the clip.



My own shots from the Mara bring back happy memories of several visits.

The second BBC item can be found by going directly to at this URL, or accessed through the gorilla wildlifedirect spot of the blog here about the desperately difficult situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the park rangers who try to protect the Virunga area. They concentrate on two closely related things, gorillas and charcoal.

It is headed Diary: Protecting Mountain Gorillas and the sub reads “Two rangers share their experiences of protecting mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park, DR Congo".

The most recent post on the direct blog tells of a horror story in a troubled land. The heading reads Ranger Shot 12 Times and Killed in Virunga by Rebels. Over to you.

On the lighter side, for a bit of what she titles “Tee hee hee” humour about my own blog series you can go to writer, director, actor and television host (not to mention award winner) Nicole Stamp’s blog.