Conservation, chimps and rhinos

I have been a member of the East African Wildlife Society for over forty years. In the early days they published a magazine called Africana. Some time in the early 1970s there was a rift in the organization. For a while both Africana and a new magazine, called Swara  (which is Swahili for antelope) ran side-by-side, but then Africana, of which I still had a few copies until we recently moved house, disappeared.

The latest issue of Swara is a reflection of what is happening to wildlife across Africa. There are eight articles under the general heading of Conservation and four Spotlight pieces. Two of those four are also about conservation.

Two of the conservation articles report in-depth examinations of the trade in wildlife and wildlife products. One of these, by professional photographer, author and long-time conservationist and bushmeat activist Karl Amman covers the latest development in oft-studied SE Asia, particularly as regards rhino horn. The other deals with things that have gone on in Morocco for ages but have not been much reported upon.

All the authors bemoan the massive decline in wildlife numbers, and by wildlife I don't just mean animals. Forest have been under threat for may years, mostly due to the fact that the populations of these countries are expanding at unsustainable rates and people want land to cultivate their crops. The Mau forest, on the western side of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya is but a remnant, and now the Kijabe forest has taken a beating.

Karl Amman also has an opinion piece that follows right on the usual editorial and administration material and gives something of a taste of things to come. He does not mince words. Even the title tells the tale: Conservationists should carry condoms, ‑ not GPSs. I have written similar sentiments in the past, but the meat of Amman’s article was a shock. In it he tells of the illegal and growing trade of live baby chimps into China and to a lesser extent to the Middle East. He reports “some 130 chimps and 10 gorillas were smuggled out of Guinea [West Africa] during the last three years.” As he writes further “That’s a horrific number, considering how many adults were most likely killed to generate the orphans for trade.” It would be at least ten adults per orphan. As there are a reported 95 dollar billionaires in China, and over a million millionaires, money is no barrier.

It is obvious that Amman is not impressed with the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) staff involved. He criticizes them for completely ignoring the China connection and even ignoring the written offer of a Kenya-based chimpanzee sanctuary to house them in new facilities.

In his book What I tell You Three Times is True Ian Parker, who knows more about ivory and elephants than almost anyone considers CITES to have become “a top-heavy bureaucracy that is held up by its own inertia;” he describes it as “an orgy of silliness.” Sad, but based on these and other reports, probably true.

Amman makes an interesting point. He compares the effective campaign to interest the media in the rhino horn trade and the increase in smuggling to SE Asia. I have written about this on a few occasions and the Swara editors have been a part of this effort. In the same July-Sept 2012 issue as Amman’s piece they provide a table showing the increase in poaching of rhino in South Africa. In the year 2000 only 7 rhino were poached, none in the Kruger NP. By 2011 the number had risen to 448, of which 252 went from the Kruger. The 2012 figures to June show a continued increase. As Amman points out, even in the face of these events rhino numbers are on the increase.

To quote him again, Amman states, “the ape conservation community could learn a lot from the rhino community in terms of lobbying, campaigning and activism.”

Try and find a Guinea Ape Traffick story on primate blog sites. Not easy. I found three.

This was the third item on the Google list during my search today. It is by Jeremy Hance but it is headlined Cute Animal Pictures of the Day. I see nothing cute at all. Just desperately sad. 

This picture of a young chimp, that I took in 1997 in Cameroon, is a more realistic reflection, but it won’t win any “cuddly” prizes. He was in the grim cage 24/7 in the forecourt of a hotel near the coastal town of Limbe.

You will find Amman’s story (in a slightly different version) here where you can read about his thesis on the need for condoms.

Amman’s final paragraph, both in the magazine and on-line begins “The fact is that when it comes to wildlife conservation the animals are not the problem. The humans are.”

How true.

Elephant Problems and Solutions

Elephants and humans compete for many of the same resources, and for years now the competition has been fierce, with the humans “winning” most of the time. I enclose winning in quotes because of course the victory is a tainted one.

Last year, when we took our granddaughters (and their parents) to Kenya we saw the results of one such conflict at the elephant orphanage outside Nairobi. 

A tiny calf, no more than a week old had been rescued in the Imenti forest a scant three kilometres from our old home in Meru. His mother had been killed in what was termed “Human wildlife conflict.”

My own direct involvement with the war, for that is what it is, goes back 37 years to Rwanda, where elephants had started to kill people and destroy their homes. At the time this was the most densely populated country in Africa. Peasant farmers, scratching a living on their small plots by growing some maize, matooke, beans or other crops would wake up in the morning to find the entire year’s supply of food for the family had been wiped out. An adult elephant needs tons of food every day, and those crops would have been a perfect source of readily available groceries.

The solution, at the time, was to cull the entire Rwandan population of what was certainly viewed as a major predator. I got involved when President Habyarimana persuaded the African Wildlife Foundation that monies they wanted for the gorilla project should instead be used to save human lives. At first all the elephants were to be destroyed, but then it was decided, for political reasons, that an effort should be made to save the younger animals and translocate them to a national park.

Several people who have read my account of the project in WrestlingWith Rhinos, during which we moved twenty-seven young elephants to the Akagera National Park  have quizzed me on why we did not drive all the animals to the park. Short answer – Mission Impossible. The herds were in small family units and widely dispersed; they would have had to move through hundreds of small farms and plantations and would have destroyed everything in their paths, crops, buildings, vehicles and of course people. 

The Rwandan skirmish was but one chapter in a conflict that has gone on for at least a hundred years, and perhaps much longer. It continues today, and not just in Africa. Elephants and people in India and their close cousins in South Asian countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Borneo and others are under similar pressures.

Several solutions have been tried. Desperate famers in India and Indonesia have tried to drive the huge beasts away with fire. That is, at best, a temporary measure and fraught with risk for the people. Fire baskets run back and forth on overhead wires work for a while to keep the marauders out. With illegal logging and massive development of palm oil plantations crushing the hungry giants into ever-smaller areas the famers and the elephants are losing ground.

Moorlands at 13,000 ft. Mt. Kenya from the north

The peaks from the forest edge

Kenya’s northern agricultural area around Mt. Kenya, the Aberdare Mountains and the grasslands of Laikipia at least two attempted methods have ended in failure.

Wide, brush-covered ditches were dug at the Aberdare forest edges, where farms come right up to the trees. They worked for a while as the elephants were fearful of stepping on the brush when they could not see what lay beneath. Once the huge job of maintenance declined the elephants figured it all out, and were back into the maize and other goodies.

As elephant numbers increased on the open plains attempts were made to drive them back with helicopters and flash guns. This also failed as the elephants soon returned and took no notice of repeated attempts to drive them. Some elephants were captured in family groups and translocated. 

We even saw some of them in their new home in Meru National Park, our favourite among all the parks of Kenya. 

This was fine and dandy, but one cannot capture elephants that hang out in the forests.  Too bushy, too difficult, too dangerous.

Two modern solutions have been developed. One is ideal for the individual small holder and particularly applies to families living outside the forests. This is very definitely a case of “thinking outside the box.” Of course this is a cliché, but it is also a pun.

The box in this case is a beehive. Zoologist Dr. Lucy King, working in Kenya, figured it out. Rural Kenyans, particularly the Ndorobo, are avid honey eaters, and they make hives for wild bees from hollowed out logs.

One thing that elephants do not like is bees.  If African bees are disturbed they are likely to swarm and attack. The elephant 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.

Dr. King has taken these two facts and writes about her research in her own website

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 driven 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 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.

While this elegant solution will work most of the time for a number of smallholders it is obviously not practical for the hundreds of kilometres of forest boundary around the two massifs of Mt. Kenya and the Aberdares.

Corner construct on the Aberdares

This electrified fence around the Aberdares was completed in August 2009, twenty years after the first posts were driven. It was done at enormous (but unstated) cost, all funded through the charitable trust Rhino Ark whose byline is Humans in Harmony with Habitat and Wildlife. The trust describes the fence as “an ecosystem conservation tool.” You can read some fascinating detail about it at their website. A couple of things that caught my eye were that much of the labour was done by local folks and at least a hundred scouts patrol the fence on a regular basis.

Kazita river gorge. Mt. Kenya

With that fence all done and dusted, the next project, as reported on the BBCwebsite is a similar structure on Mt. Kenya. It will run for at least 400 km across many river valleys and take an estimated 5 years to complete and current cost estimates are $11.8 million. Here are a couple of pics that illustrate the density & complexity involved.

Trout fishing on the Kazita river above Meru

The elephants will not be completely cut off from their traditional migrations. One corridor has been constructed on the north side of Mt. Kenya that allows them to migrate up and down the slopes. They can start in the world-famous Lewa Conservancy and move up through the corridor that lies on land donated by our friends the Murrays at Marania farm into their high-altitude homes. There is a downloadable map here  

The rose bed at Marania, before the elephant arrived

The fences, also electrified, work most of the time although last year the family had a bit of a scare when one old and very wise bull found his way outside the constraints of the wire. We saw the evidence of his nighttime passage a couple of days later as enormous footprints indenting the lawn.

Bongo bull at the Mount Kenya Game Ranch

It is not just elephants that will be controlled by the fence. Several other species live both in the forest and on the wide-open moorlands above the tree-line. I have seen buffalo, waterbuck, zebra and lions up there even at altitudes above 12,000 feet (3600 metres). There were once rhino both in and above the forest and the most striking of  all forest antelopes, the bongo, used to live on both mountains, although no wild ones have been seen for many years.

There is one other species that will at least be deterred. Humans will not be so ready to cross into the forest for poaching activities or for firewood.

Percy Haigh and the Shortest War in History

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Frances Evans Percy Haigh joined the Royal Navy on the 29^th of June 1894. Little did he know that he would be a photographic witness to the aftermath of the shortest war in history just two years later. By that time he had sailed to the Indian Ocean on HMS Bonaventure and he recorded some of his adventures with his new camera, as I showed in last week's post.

On the 13^th of July 1895 my granddad transferred to the HMS Cossack, the third of six British naval vessels named after the Cossack people of Eastern Europe. This one was launched in 1886 and sold in 1905. Like the Bonaventure she too cruised in the Indian Ocean. To get the exact dates and locations of either ship I would have to get hold of the their logbooks, which I cannot do without either going to Kew and the National Archives, or maybe the naval museum in Portsmouth.  I suppose I could pay someone to dig through the millions of microfilm pages for me. Kew is in Richmond, Surrey and Portsmouth even further from London’s Heathrow, both a long way from Saskatoon.

I have searched the National Archives but had no luck. The references to HM ships named Cossack are for later reincarnations.

We do know that one of the 1886 Cossack’s stops was at Aden, and we also know that this visit occurred in April 1896 because of a fascinating tidbit about a rescue. The only reference I could find to this little event comes from the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser of 15^th April that year. You can read the scratchy copy of the scanned newspaper article, just one 59-line single colum article here,  It is headlined A GALLANT OFFICER OF H.M.S. “COSSACK.” It tells how an officer on the Cossack went for a sail with a carpenter’s mate and how he saved the man’s life by tying him to a buoy with his jacket after he had fallen overboard.  The original report was written in the Times of India and obviously caught the attention of the editor in Singapore, perhaps because it was a maritime event. Was Percy that “gallant officer”?  Maybe the logbook would reveal the truth, but for now, who knows?

We know that HMS Cossack sailed into Zanzibar harbour a short time after that remarkable war had ended. Again, I have no exact date.

The war had started because of the ill-advised decision by Seyyid Khalid-bin-Barghash to declare himself Sultan after the death of his cousin H.H. Seyyid Hamed-bin-Thwain at 11.30 a.m. on Tuesday 25^th August 1896. Within half an hour Barghash had seized the palace.  Consul General, Mr. A. Hardinge, Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s representative on the island, disapproved of Khalid and suggested that he “retire quietly.” He refused and must have foolishly failed to realize that Mr. Hardinge had the backing of five of Her Majesty’s Royal navy ships under the command of Rear Admiral H.H. Rawson. They were the Philomel, the Racoon, the Thrush, the Sparrow and the St. George and all were anchored in the harbor. 

This plan comes from a Wiki article I found. These next ones are also from that article. On the right are a some marines standing by one of those old cannons.  Barghash obviously had no idea how outmatched he was or what high explosive shells could do to to buildings.

The St. George and the Philomel in harbour

 

 The third picture comes from an Italian source and I'm not sure if it is a B&W photo that has been re-touched or a painting. Either way is shows what a mess those naval guns made of the palace.

The “new” Sultan mustered his supporters, some seven hundred in all, in the palace courtyard, where he had the ancient cannons primed and shotted. He also had a warship. This was the three-masted HHS Glasgow, which he had “inherited” from his predecessor. The Glasgow had been built near Clydebank not far from where Percy would end his career as a captain after being in charge of the torpedo factory at Greenock. She was equipped with 9-pounder guns. However, Barghash must have failed to recognize that his ship would be a sitting duck for the Royal navy’s little fleet.

Edward Rodwell, Kenya historian and long-time newspaperman, tells the story of three ladies who were eye-witnesses to the events that followed, as the whole thing became a bit of a spectacle and breakfast was being served aboard the flagship, the admiral’s wife as hostess. One of them was Mr. Hardinge’s wife.  The sultan had been warned that failure to capitulate would lead to a bombardment that would start at 9.00 am on the Thursday morning.  It did, with one minute’s grace. The cease-fire was ordered at 9.45 after the palace flag was shot down.  The Glasgow had returned some fire but her guns were quickly silenced.  By 10.45 she had sunk.  That is Rodwell’s version. There are others that differ only in minute detail.

For instance the author of an extended Wiki article states “The variation is due to confusion over what actually constitutes the start and end of a war. Some sources take the start of the war as the order to open fire at 09:00 and some with the start of actual firing at 09:02. The end of the war is usually put at 09:40 when the last shots were fired and the palace flag struck, but some sources place it at 09:45. The logbooks of the British ships also suffer from this with St George indicating that cease-fire was called and Khalid entered the German consulate at 09:35, Thrush at 09:40, Racoon at 09:41 and Philomel and Sparrow at 09:45.”

The charitable view must be that the ship’s captains did not coordinate their ships clocks or watches before the battle, as logbooks are meticulously kept in the navy.

The specific time hardly matters as the record will likely stand. The outcome was of course that Khalid became persuaded that he had made a false move and he fled to the German Consulate, whence he was removed to German East Africa.  On August 27^th  Hamed-bin-Mahommed, a brother of the late Sultan, was installed as Sultan.

That same Wiki article has several interesting pictures from the war, but Percy Haigh took two that do not seem to appear anywhere else. Using that same Schoville Dry Plate camera with which he took pictures in the Indian Ocean he took two that are now in the British Naval museum in Portsmouth. Along with the ones I showed in my last blog they had lain hidden in Percy’s old tin trunk for over a hundred years. My cousin Sue Langford found them when she went though our grandmother’s treasures and at once realized their significance.

HHS Glasgow and some British naval ships off Zanzibar

The first shows the masts of the sunken HSS Glasgow. As contemporary accounts have it, “The three masts of the Sultan’s steamship Glasgow – which was sunk during the engagement – still stand up out of the water and form to this day a picturesque memorial of this revolutionary step.”

The second was captioned by Percy as being of slaves chained as they walked past the ruins of the harem and palace that the navy had so quickly reduced to rubble. 

I do wonder about this one a bit as slavery was officially abolished in Britain by Slavery Abolition Act 1833. But the Act did not do all it might have and others were passed at later dates, at least up to 1873.  It would not surprise me if these men were actually prisoners captured after the war or perhaps they had been incarcerated by the Sultan in some hell-hole and are on their way to another prison under the watchful eye of the men behind and to side of their little column. However, Zanzibar was an infamous market centre for slaves for many years and when my wife and I visited Zanzibar a hundred and one years, almost to the day, after Percy’s photos were taken we saw the horrific low-ceilinged dungeon where slaves to be sold were crammed like sardines and also the place, now inside the Christ Church Anglican cathedral where, it is alleged, slaves were chained. The altar is said to be in the exact place where the main "whipping post" of the market used to be. Chilling!

HMS Bonaventure and Percy Haigh

When my wife and I visited the Gaspé Peninsular of Quebec we did the tourist thing and went out to the island of Bonaventure to see the gannet colony. Later we passed through the village of the Bonaventure a few kilometres along the coast from Percé.  I wrote about the trip to in my last post and of course began to think about the word Bonaventure in terms of the naval ship, HMS Bonaventure, in which my grandfather journeyed to the Indian Ocean.

Frances Evans Percy Haigh joined the Royal Navy as a twenty-one year-old on the 29^th of June 1894. Just shy of six months later, on the 12^th Dec that year he was sailing to the East Indies on H.M.S. Bonaventure. Little did he know that he would be a photographic witness to the aftermath of the shortest war in history just two years later, when he had moved to HMS Cossack, a story I have told in my book The Trouble With Lions.

One thing he took with him when he left England was a new-fangled Schoville Dry Plate camera, probably a gift from his professional photographer father Edward Makinson Haigh of the firm Moira and Haigh of London’s fashionable Bond Street. The Moira and Haigh business card carries a portrait of a bishop on one side, and the inscription “Photographers and Miniature Painters to the Principal Sovereigns of Europe” on the other.

The camera was a dry plate, which meant that photos could be stored for long periods. The change from wet plate was as much a revolution in its day as the change from film to digital that occurred this century. Percy took photos in several spots on his way to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal. This one is obviously well known and does not need a caption.   Unfortunately he did not record the dates on his captions, so I'm guessing the course of the voyage, but there are other scenes from the  the tanks and people at Aden (to the right and below). The one he called "The Native Element" must have been a formal portrait as it is well set up. Presumably the ship then sailed to Mahé in the Seychelles, where the crew had some down time. Street scenes of the town included this line-up of rickshaw taxis.  There does not seem to be any record of the stop in Bombay, but from the several photos there I have selected one of the ship in dry dock, which must have meant she was undergoing some sort of maintenance. As the Bonaventure made her way towards the China station there was a stop at Sober Island off the port of Trincomalee in north-eastern Ceylon. As the modern maps will show, there are two Sober islands. Percy did not record at which one this relaxed picture was taken.  "The Billiard room at Sober Island" As I searched for more information about the ship I discovered that there have been many naval ships of that name. Among them the aircraft carrier HMS Powerful which was sold to Canada in 1952 by the British, where she was re-named HMCS Bonaventure. She never saw action but was part of the major NATO fleet during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Granddad’s ship was the eighth of that name in the British navy, the first one having been a warship built in 1489. She was built at Devonport Dockyard, launched 2nd December 1892 and completed 5th July 1894. She was twin-screw cruiser of 4360 tons, 9000 horsepower, and 18-19.5 knots speed.  Her length, beam, and draught were 320ft, 50ft, and 21ft. She was armed with ten guns and four torpedo tubes.  I wonder if those torpedoes fascinated lieutenant Haigh? They certainly were a major factor in his later career.

After Percy was transferred to H.M.S. Cossack the Bonaventure went on from the Indian Ocean because this website records that she served in the Pacific Squadron. "In 1900 the “Bonaventure” commanded by Captain Robert A Montgomerie, played a minor part in the third China war or “Boxer Rising.” She also visited Canada and there is a picture of her in Vancouver harbour in 1904 at the same website. She returned in |May 1906 to Devonport to be paid off.  From there she went to Haulbowline Dockyard, Cork, Ireland to be converted into a depot ship for submarines. This work was completed in April 1907 and she served in World War I as a submarine depot ship.

Percy Haigh may have had more dealings with the “Bonaventure” after 1907. By that time he had had a couple of promotions. According to the naval records stored at Kew near London he “passed ordinarily for Engineer on 8^th July ‘99” A year later he was promoted to Engineer and worked on torpedoes up to and through the war. Who knows if Percy had occasion to visit his first ship again? The naval records make no mention of it, but it is certainly possible

On 3^rd July 1912 the engineer lieutenant was promoted commander and seven years later he was appointed superintendent of the Royal Navy Torpedo factory at Greenock, on the south side of the Scotland’s Clyde River. He retired from Greenock in 1922 with the rank of engineer captain. Greenock is not far from Glasgow, where my father joined the Highland Light Infantry and I went to vet school. The apple and the tree metaphor fits, again.

Percé rock and Bonaventure island

We have just returned from a trip out to the eastern end of Canada, specifically to the Gaspé peninsular that lies on the southern side of the St. Lawrence River in the province of Quebec.

One of the things we did was spend time in the village of Percé, which is really just a tourist town, now that the fishery has declined and no longer provides a sufficient source of living for the inhabitants.

No trip here would be complete without a ride on a tour boat to see the famous Percé rock that stands like a beacon.

There were numerous seabirds on the cliff tops, including two species of cormorant, and I did spot a single osprey. The southern-most rock outcrop used to form an arch with the rest of the structure, but time and erosion have taken their toll. The arch that you can see will also be eroded over time, but I doubt we shall see that!

From the rock we sent round the southern side of the nearby Bonaventure Island to see that famous gannet colony. This is truly astonishing. The guide told us that the colony contains something just short of 48,000 birds. It is one of the two largest such colonies in the world and in this view we see a small part of that mass roosting on the cliffs. We also saw a bald eagle in a tree, several grey seals and a single whale, probably a minke whale, but it was too far off to make a sure identification.

Back on the north side of the island, we disembarked to make the 2.6 km trek up the path and over the top to get close to the gannets.

Now we really did see a mass of birds. The ropes that keep the public at bay were only about four metres from the nearest ones and we could see that the nests, mere mounds of mud with bits of dried vegetation in them were very close to one another. The young lady interpreter told us that they are precisely eighty centimetres apart. 

  

This bird was having a good scratch. 

 

One of the closest nests had a young bird in it, but the chick was pretty lethargic and showed little interest in food. A single adult sat close by, trying to spark youngster into some activity. During the thirty minutes or so that we were there no other adult showed up and we could see a few other nests, further away, with much larger chicks, many of them with lots of forming feathers. In this pic you can see that our subject was still mostly down-covered. This one has little or no chance of joining the southern migration to the Gulf of Mexico next month.

Another thing the interpreter told us was that about 40% of nesting pairs do not succeed in rearing their young. She would not admit to the clear observation that less than10% of the birds we could see across our front even had chicks in them. I quizzed her about the failure rate and asked if any research was being done on possible causes of mortality. I was particularly interested to learn if any necropsies on dead chicks had been carried out. The short answer? NO. I asked why and was more or less brushed off with “this is a natural system and we don’t like to interfere. She did admit that the population had been dwindling for a few years and we agreed that the decline might be due to a reduced food supply or possibly pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, This makes some sense, given the history of the BP oil spill of 2010. However, the lack of scientific curiosity in the Quebec ministry seems sad.

I took a few still shots of what we saw and also ran my little Nikon video camera to watch some interactions. In this clip you can see two birds “necking” in the centre of the frame. This is not just a courting ritual – we were way past that stage of the annual cycle. According to the informative movie that one can see back on the mainland at the Percé interpretive centre, the birds do this routinely because they like it. About half way through the clip you will see a bird land at a nest (at the 3 o’\clock position) and at once seem to attack the one that it sitting on the nest by grabbing its neck. Apparently males do this routinely when they return to make sure that they have the right partner. The aggro quickly changes to the necking, so they must have recognized one another. 

A Story About Bats

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Just finished the annual gathering of the Storytellers of Canada – Conteurs du Canada which took place in Montreal this year. Four days of great stories, workshops, meeting old friends and making new acquaintances.

One thing I am always on the lookout for at the sale counter is books of African stories and I found four of them. By chance the first one I opened, published by Beacon Press of Boston in 1962, is called Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola. It was translated and collected by Merlin Ennis and had a story in it that linked directly to my last post about bats in Uganda.

The story is called Fruit Bat and Sun. I have edited it slightly. It explains quite nicely why it is that bats spend their daylight hours in dark places and ties in with my last post about Ebola.

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When the only child of Sun was sick, Sun went to the house of Elder Fruit Bat, and said to him, “Save my child for me.” Fruit bat went and soon cured the child.

Not long after this marvelous cure Elder Fruit Bat’s child got sick and so of course he went at once to Sun’s house and said, “Now my child is sick. Will you please come and save him for me in your turn.”

Sun replied “Come tomorrow very early and seek me. Don’t be late for once the day has started I never turn back.”

So, Fruit Bat came good an early, but not early enough for Sun, who said “Didn’t you listen to me? I said come early because I never turn back. Come again tomorrow but make sure you arrive while the ground is still black.”

Next day, when he arrived Sun said “You are late.”

Fruit Bat again turned for home, but when he arrived he found that his child was dead. Of course he was very sad and he swore an oath that he would never again speak to or see Sun.

From that day forward he has never once seen Sun, for, as he says, “He has done me a wrong.”

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So, now we know.

Ebola Outbreak in Uganda

There has been another outbreak of the deadly and highly infectious Ebola virus in western Uganda, in the district of Kibale. A report of July 29 about it appeared in the online Guardian newspaper

Ebola was first reported in 1976 in Congo and is named for the river where it was recognized, according to the Atlanta-based US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

As a CDC fact-sheet states states It “is a severe, often-fatal disease in humans and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees”

It manifests itself as a haemorrhagic fever, is highly infectious and kills quickly. It is "characterized by fever, headache, joint and muscle aches, sore throat, and weakness, followed by diarrhoea, vomiting, and stomach pain. A rash, red eyes, hiccups and internal and external bleeding may be seen in some patients".

A chimp family in Kibale NP. Photo by one of 70 students, not sure who.

Those gorillas and chimpanzees, both of which have strong social groups, live closely together all year long. This undoubtedly helps the rapid dispersal of the virus, which is spread by close contact, not just with a victim, but also on communal food sources and other surfaces. So much so that Dr. Jane Goodall told me that one of her primate researching colleagues in the Congo basin had had her work utterly wiped out, not once, but twice, when entire families of habituated gorillas in her study died from the disease.

Of course grieving human family members also make close contact with their sick or deceased loved ones and hospital workers are very much at risk as there is no vaccine and no specific treatment.

Black and White Colobus monkeys

There are several things to think about, and perhaps the most important source of the outbreak has been skimmed over by either the newspaper or the investigators on site. In the July 29 report a brief mention is made of “contact” with monkeys. I’m sure there is more to it than that. About 8 years ago a case occurred in the most northwesterly part of Uganda when a man died of Ebola. He had been skinning out a black and white colobus monkey he had killed for consumption.

Red colobus in Kibale NP

However, it is by no means just great apes that can be involved.

There is a very strong and growing use of bushmeat in the area.  Traditionally Ugandans were averse to bushmeat, and in particular they did not eat primates. But over the last 15 or 20 years or so a large number of refugees have fled the events in the DRC and brought with them their hunting and bushmeat culture.  Of course relationships with locals have developed and so the consumption of bushmeat has risen steadily. 

For a really comprehensive review of the possible role of wildlife in Ebola epidemiology I would recommend an on-line article by a team from the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Emerging Health Threats Journal.

Canadian & Ugandan students on a forest trail

I made numerous trips to Kibale and other areas of Western Uganda between 2002 and 2009 when I took final year vet students there for one-month wildlife conservation externships. Our first field work took place in Kibale National Park

My students and I had what, in retrospect, were some very close calls. For one thing some of us handled monkeys. But primates may not be the only zoonotic source of the virus. 

There is a body of evidence that suggests that Egyptian fruit bats and even some other species may be carriers. They too are a major source of bushmeat and also certainly carry Marburg virus, which is very closely related to Ebola. So closely in fact that they are almost indistinguishable except by very detailed examination. The produce virtually the same symptoms and sufferers almost always die.

There is a fascinating cave in the Maramagambo forest in Queen Elizabeth NP that used to be part of the tourist circuit and we visited is several times. In this clip you can see some of us getting very close to the mouth of the cave in an attempt to see the resident python. He had surely found a perfect spot to hang out, practically a case of free lunches. The background noise is not a technical glitch. It is the sound of the chittering conversations of thousands of bats.

The cave is the roosting site for those thousand of bats.We all got quite close to them and lots of close-up photos were taken.

In the mid-2008 Dutch authorities confirmed that an unfortunate woman tourist who had had direct contact with a bat in the cave died of Marburg infection after she got back to Holland. 

In a report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy it was stated that three miners died of the same infection after bat contact in a different cave in another area of the country. 

Bats don't just roost in caves. Hundreds of them use the trees in the Makerere University grounds in Kampala and as the fast-falling dusk of the tropical evening approaches thousands of them can be seen swooping across the sky as they head out for their nightly feed.

I read about the Dutch woman through the wonderful ListServ of Promed and at once alerted my colleagues in Uganda. One of them, Dr. JB Nizeyi, was the chief in-country veterinarian for the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project and very much involved in our teaching. I understand that the cave in QEP has been closed to tourist ever since.

Bushmeat and the bushmeat trade is an emotional issue. I discussed it at some length in my book The Trouble With Lions. I feel that as Africa’s human population continues to increase the trade will expand. In some countries (Uganda, Kenya) the human population doubles about every 20 years. People get hungry. They kill wildlife for food and for revenge when their crops are destroyed or their cattle eaten by large predators. Of course that gets us into a whole other debate, about which I have posted before, but all of it is related.