Response to comments about kob numbers

Thanks for your comments on my posting of May 19th Jeff. You are right about the kob migrations in the Sudan. I did mention this amazing sighting on pages 417 and 418 of The Trouble With Lions when I was searching for more hopeful signs about some of the disastrous effects that humans have had on wildlife populations.

The report came in from the Wildlife Conservation Society through their web site and was also featured by The National Geographic in a Internet report filed by Nick Wadhams titled Massive Animal Herds Flourishing Despite Sudan War, Survey Reveals at this web site

Michael Fay, a WCS biologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence is quoted as follows in the National Geographic piece "Seeing thousands upon thousands upon thousands of white-eared kob streaming under the aircraft, day after day, was like I had died and was having the most unbelievable dream you could ever have."

Apart from my natural interest in the story, simply because it brings some measure of hope, one the folks involved in the finding was of particular interest. This was Paul Elkan, with whom I worked in Cameroon in 1996 when I helped out an overstretched Dr. Billy Karesh with his veterinary work on forest elephants, a one-month program described in The Trouble With Lions. Billy is the director of the WCS field veterinary program, and has written an entertaining book called Appointments at the End of The World: Memoirs of a Wildlife Veterinarian. For those who don’t know it, and are interested in conservation and the role of vets, this is one to add to your bookshelf. It was Paul, who is the WCS program director in Southern Sudan, who took the photo shown the article.

Anyway, back to the kob. There are three subspecies. The type species, the Western Kob is from northern savannah zones of West Africa are Kobus kob kob. The ones we have been working with in Uganda are K. k. thomasi. The lower picture shows two Canadian students together with Dr. Innocent Rwego of Uganda and Dr. Jacques Iyanya of the DRC working on an immobilized kob during our research studies. The kob in the Sudan are the white-eared kob, K. k. leucotis. It is numbers of the two former ones that have declined so sharply, but it is worth noting that Jonathan Kingdon remarks that population numbers of the species can fluctuate considerably. In his Field Guide to African Mammals, which contains a small spattering of his fantastic art work from the massive 7 volume major work to which I referred in my original blog Kingdon gives some more hopeful insights. His map on page 405 does show both the former and current ranges and he states “Despite having been eliminated from many areas (notably from all the shores of L. Victoria), kobs readily recover from near extermination.”

Wildlife Declines - not just lions

Sadly, yesterday’s announcements from the World Wildlife Fund and The London Zoo which can be found here about species disappearances and declines come as no surprise. It has been documented many times, in many ways. It forms part of The Trouble With Lions and within that text, excerpts of which are at here I have given very specific numbers and citations for the declines of many of Africa’s megafauna. In 1989 Ian Parker and Alasdair Graham- took the time to collate the information on thirty species that is scattered throughout Jonathan Kingdon’s seven-volume masterpiece East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa. Among those species is the Uganda kob (Kobus kob). In this case Kingdon documented a drastic decrease in the range of a species that was once seen all the way from West Africa to Uganda. He calculated that by 1990 their range had decreased by 89%. Kingdon’s map on page 368 of his 7th volume (IIIB) tells the tale as it has occurred in Uganda. The former distribution covered more than half the country.

In 1975 the range was limited to small pockets in three national parks, including Queen Elizabeth NP where we have been working for several years with Canadian and Ugandan students. The total area is probably no more than 1% of the country. Even inside the parks, the range has further declined under the constant pressure of poaching. We have seen very direct evidence of this near Lake George, where the stone sign shown here acts as a kob monument, rather than in its intended capacity as an information-cum-warning of the presence of large numbers of kob on their mating grounds. We have stopped at the sign and never seen a kob.

Kob are but one example. Rhino, elephant, lions, wild dogs, and a considerable variety of bushmeat species are all mentioned in the book. The latest “method-of-choice” for getting rid of unwanted species is the application of minute amounts of the insecticide carbofuran, sold in East Africa as Furadan. If the recent reports (see the blog posting of May 5th) of poisoned lions in the Maasai Mara are anything to go by poachers had better be very cautious how they use the stuff, which is cheap and readily available. In the lion case the animals succumbed after they ate the carcass of a hippo that had been poisoned. A poacher or his customers might suffer the same fate if he used Furadan to kill his prey and then ate or sold the meat.

reference:- Parker, I.S.C. and A.D, Graham. 1989. Elephant declines: downward trends in African elephant distribution and numbers (part II) Intern. J. Environmental Studies. 35.