Gorillas in the Mist Are Recovering, But Park Rangers Still Face Attacks by Armed Militias

March 13, 2021

They also serve, those who rarely make the headlines unless something bad happens to one of them.

Or 20 of them, as has happened these past 12 months in the mists of Congo’s Virunga National Park, home to one of the world’s last remnant populations of mountain gorillas.

Twenty.

That’s how many park rangers, trackers and other staff have been killed in the performance of their day-to-day duties in this land of dangerous beauty, where bandits, insurgents and various warring militias look to cash in on the coltan, tantalum and niobium that go into making our smartphones.

Earlier this month the bush wars claimed Luca Attanasio, the Italian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The ambassador’s Congolese driver and security guard were also killed in the ambush, prompting Virunga’s chief ranger, Emmanuel de Merode, to tell the BBC, “The level of sacrifice that’s involved in keeping this work going will always be the hardest thing to deal with.”

The park is renowned not just for its terrible history but also for its beauty. Virunga is where Dian Fossey of Gorillas in the Mist fame conducted her pioneering research into mountain gorillas. At 7,800 sq km (3,000 square miles), the park is one of Africa’s oldest, and largest. Its landscape ranges all the way from active volcanoes to vast lakes to cloud forests, and is home to an astonishing range of biodiversity.

There are just 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the world, but Virunga has been recovering — slowly — in recent years. Three gorilla babies were born in the park in just the past month, and while that sounds like a tiny number given that the future of the entire species is at stake, three is better than none.

Despite the constant fighting — until recently DRC was also the site of one of the world’s longest lasting, least reported civil wars — gorilla numbers are increasing.

For now.

In April last year, 13 rangers were killed during what park officials labeled a “ferociously violent and sustained” ambush by another armed group. This past January, another six rangers were killed by marauding militias while patrolling the park’s lake region on foot. All those who died were between 25 and 30, and left young families behind.

De Merode, born in North Africa and raised in Kenya, has lived in DRC for nearly 30 years. The odds seem weighted against him and his staff of roughly 800 rangers, but he remains defiantly optimistic.

“You have to accept that (there’s risk),” he told BBC earlier this month. “This national park is part of a Congolese state which has been affected by civil war for most of its recent history. . . . (Virunga) has had enormous ups ands downs. We’ve suffered enormously, but alongside that is the incredible achievement of keeping this park alive.”

Tensions surrounding the park were documented in the 2014 Oscar-nominated film Virunga, on Netflix.

The future of the park’s survival, De Merode insists, rests on tourism. The park is in a region beset by poverty. People who live in the area live on less than USD 1.50 a day. The park’s future rests on a strong economic foundation if it’s to be sustainable.

Neighbouring Rwanda, pre-pandemic, overseas tourism generated USD $500m a year in revenue. Kenya, the region’s tourism success story, has generated an astounding USD $3.5bn from overseas visitors.

With light finally at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel and vaccinations taking hold, there’s hope for the future, De Merode insists.

“People join the militias because they have no choice, and the only way to overcome that is to give them a choice,” he told BBC. “The issue of security cannot be resolved with weapons alone.”

David Attenborough: ‘I Don’t Have Long Left’

February 03, 2021

David Attenborough turns 95 in May, and he’s the first to admit he hasn’t much time left.

He will leave the natural world in worse shape than when he first touched on it in his groundbreaking natural history series Life on Earth, all those years ago, in 1979. He was solemn, subdued and philosophical in a poignant 60 Minutes profile late last fall, on the eve of his personal witness statement A Life on Our Planet for Netflix.

“Even the biggest and most awful things that humanity has done pale into insignificance when you think of what could be around the corner,” he said quietly. “There could be whole areas of the world where people can no longer live.”

Attenborough witnessed the changes with his own eyes during his research for Our Planet. He visited many of the same wild spaces he first visited for Life on Earth for BBC’s Natural History Unit, more than 40 years ago now.

“Coral reef is one of the most dramatic, beautiful and complex manifestations of life you can find anywhere.

“But during my last trip it was like a cemetery — all the coral reef had died. Because of the rising temperature and acidity.

“We live in a finite world. We depend on the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat and every lung-full of air that we breathe.

“If it wasn’t for the natural world the would be depleted of oxygen tomorrow. If there were no trees, we would suffocate.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has proved to be a mixed blessing.

“People who have never listened to a bird’s song are suddenly thrilled, excited and inspired by the natural world. They realize they are a part of it. By saving nature, we are saving ourselves.”

There are moments, during those quiet times when he’s on his own and thinks back on his half-a-century’s worth of natural history programming, when he wonders if he had any effect.

“My generation is no great example for understanding. We have done terrible things.”

There is a glimmer of hope, though, he said, and it has come from an unlikely source: The younger generation, as represented by an 18-year-old from Sweden. The 94-year-old and the 18-year-old have become united in a common cause.

What Greta Thunberg has achieved in her short life on planet Earth has been remarkable, he told BBC’s Radio 4 last fall.

What she has done, he said, is “astonishing, and admirable.

“She has achieved things that many of us who have been working on it for 20-odd years have failed to achieve.”

Thunberg, guest host that week of BBC Radio’s Today program, insisted that wasn’t entirely true.

“I’m just a part of a very large group of people who have done it,” she said, in her clipped, accented English.

“And you are a part of that group, too,” she told Attenborough.

From the Trenches: When Is It Not Okay to Pose a Semi-Naked Model in Front of a Wild Elephant?

October 20, 2020

“Any photographer covering issues of wildlife and conservation who puts their ego and commercial interest in front of those of their subject needs to seriously consider their motives.”

— Charlie Hamilton James

It seems simple enough. Pick up a camera, find an animal, focus on the eyes, and take a picture.

And yet.

Controversies dog nature photography, from staged photos to animals being photographed in captivity — captured, if you will — and being passed off as wild, to, famously, a stuffed anteater being passed off as the real thing and winning one of the most prestigious wildlife photography awards on the planet, only to have the awards committee claw the award back when the secret is revealed and the perpetrator outed as a fraud.

Some prominent nature photographers attract controversy more than others — serial offenders, if you will — and hardly a month goes by without some behind-the-scenes dust-up or other landing headlines in the mainstream media.

That’s especially true this time of year, during October awards season, when wildlife photography is in the public eye, thanks to shout-outs from mainstream media outlets as widespread and diverse as BBC and The Guardian to CNN, the South China Morning Post and Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC.

Enter David Yarrow. One of the genre’s most popular and successful luminaries in the wildlife photography field is in the frame — again — for “turning wildlife into an accessory,” as the photography news website Fstoppers put it.

Like his style or hate it — and there are vocal voices on both sides of the philosophical divide — he is a star in a crowded community. Yarrow commands big prices for his work, and can call on his friends and colleagues in New York and London fashion scenes, to fill out his wildlife portraits with everything from scantily clad supermodels to guaranteed exposure on the breakfast-TV circuit on two continents. Yarrow has openly invested much of his time and energy into fundraising for various wildlife charities and NGOs, no small consideration when fundraising and financing conservation efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic has become easier said than done.

Yarrow calls himself a fine-art photographer, not a wildlife photographer.

Ethics are ethics, though, and Yarrow’s practices don’t sit well with many nature photographers. They don’t care for triggering animals to get a reaction, or using captive game farms for posed shots, game farms that have a reputation for mistreating their animals once the cameras go away. Think Tiger King crossed with Vogue.

The simmering controversy boiled over yet again recently, after Yarrow photographed one

of the most famous, iconic tuskers on location in Amboseli, Kenya, framed by a topless model.

Yarrow has posted actively on social media to say that photographing wild animals in Africa has never been more rewarding for the photographer than right now, when crowds of tourists are thin-on-the-ground owing to Covid-19 travel restrictions.

Yarrow’s elephant shoot drew the ire of the NGO Saving the Wild, however, and members of the International League of Conservation Photographers, a member organization of professional photographers who put ethics before results.

National Geographic photographer Charlie Hamilton James likens Yarrow and photographers like him being more “ego-warriors” than eco-warriors.

“The term encapsulates not just the way these people approach their subjects, but also how they cast and caption their work,” James has said.

The issue isn’t limited to just one famous photographer and his work in high-end glossy magazines and collectible coffee-table books— it’s a global, worldwide problem.
One photographer-guide who runs expeditions out of Churchill, Manitoba told Fstoppers he won’t accept clients who won’t play by the accepted rules of conduct during his ground-based expeditions to see the area’s polar bears as they congregate around the town, waiting for the sea ice to freeze in Hudson Bay.

Yarrow for his part has been contrite, saying in a joint statement this past week that he unintentionally “put the message out there that it’s okay to get out of a vehicle to be in close range with a wild animal, and it’s not. That is when things can go dangerously wrong.

“I have a responsibility to convey that these were exceptional circumstances, with rangers present, and my narrative should have made that explicitly clear.”

Saving the Wild, the NGO that helped organize the photo shoot and who went public with their misgivings once the shoot unfolded not as they expected, noted that if a wild animal like an elephant caused someone harm during a photo shoot, regardless of whether that elephant was provoked or not, it would be put down, defeating the whole purpose behind the conservation message.

“It’s not philanthropy when animals have to suffer for the charity to benefit.”

The Latin name for elephant is Loxodonta africana, by the way, not Victima fashionista.

Getting to the Point About Rhino Horn

July 24, 2020

“The first priority for all rhino conservationists should be to ensure adequate anti-poaching monitoring and security (including intelligence-gathering) to protect rhino populations, and only then should dehorning be considered. For is a rhino really a rhino without its horn?”

— Save the Rhino, NGO website (SaveTheRhino.org)

Violent but bloodless, dehorning is considered a necessary evil by anti-poaching campaigners in South Africa, the heading in a 2018 essay, reprinted this past week in The Guardian, noted.

The idea is not new — it wasn’t even new in 2018 — but it has gained currency during the recent spike in poaching due to Covid lockdowns and the accompanying crash in conservation funding and cuts to law enforcement in national parks and private wildlife reserves throughout Africa.

The essay, by Durban-based environmental journalist Tony Carnie, is well-researched, fact-checked and covers a lot of bases — including, for example, the care taken to prevent pain to the rhino, in much the same way one needs to be careful when trimming a cats claws, and why de-tusking elephants can’t and won’t work the way it does with rhinos and their horns. It’s a solid, succinct article, and well worth reading, whether one is up-to-speed on the latest campaign to save one of Earth’s most striking living relics of a past age or just curious about an animal we’re all familiar with from childhood and its prospects for short-, mid- and long-term survival.

Trying to trim the illegal trade in rhino horn using education and basic common sense does not appear to be working; old prejudices, traditions, misconceptions and misinformation die hard. Certain cultures are determined to stockpile ivory and rhino horn, regardless of the cost to the environment and biodiversity, and they’re determined to kill every living elephant and rhino that they can to accomplish their goal.

Self-interest is a powerful motivator, though. And if a rhino doesn’t have a horn to begin with, the risk of being caught — the illegal wildlife trade is still, well, illegal and punishable by law, in theory anyway — outweighs the gain.

South Africa, hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, is a special case because, despite the recent surge in poaching, it is still home to the world’s largest surviving population of wild rhinos. That means something, because the rhino isn’t just a prehistoric being — a living, breathing throwback to the Pleistocene Age — but it has fired the human imagination since Roman times, when Gaius Plinius Secundus — Pliny the Elder to you and me — penned his Natural History, believed by some to be the first encyclopedia ever written.

The rhinoceros, Pliny wrote, is a natural-born enemy of the elephant. “It prepares itself for … combat by sharpening its horn against the rocks.”

Well, just not so, but Pliny was writing in AD 70.

Besides, he got other parts right. “We learn from modern naturalists that the two-horned species is a native of the southern parts of Africa, while that with one horn is from Asia.”

Rhinos are a sworn enemy of the elephant, Pliny insisted.

“The other enemy is the dragon, as described in c. 11 and 12 of the present book,” Pliny continued.

The rhino is one of the so-called Big Five, the five African animals traditionally considered by big-game hunters to be the most difficult animals to hunt, but this near-sighted, short-tempered relic of a past age also has its admirers. The New Big 5 project, a campaign to name the five animals most sought after by nature photographers — boosting those animals’ prospects for survival in a world where wilderness habitat is dwindling by the day — shares some fascinating facts about rhinos on its website at newbig5.com.

In Africa, for example, rhinos are often found snoozing during the day on particularly hot days, lying in shade beneath a big tree or shrub. They come out at night, suggesting that, despite a reputation for poor eyesight, their night vision is not too shabby. The name ‘rhinoceros’ comes from the Greek, rhino (nose) and ceros (horn), or ‘nose horn.’ The white rhino is not white but rather grey; the name ‘white’ is a bastardization of the Afrikaans word for ‘wide’ (wye), and refers to the white rhino’s distinctly wide lower jaw. The black rhino, similarly, is not black but would be more accurately named the hook-lipped rhino, owing to its more pointed snout and overbite. Black rhinos have a reputation for being more irritable and short-tempered than white rhinos, and the two do not get along.

It’s worth noting that, not so long ago, there were many thousands of rhinos roaming the planet. Half a million rhinos are believed to have lived across Africa and Asia at the turn of the 20th century; today, fewer than 29,000 remain, spread across five species and sub-species in Africa and Asia.

Incredibly, rhino horn — basically, hardened keratin — is still used in traditional Chinese medicine, even though it has been shown time and time again that rhino horn has no medicinal properties whatsoever. Species extinction is an awfully high price to pay for superstition.

From that point of view, dehorning rhinos — while expensive, time consuming and inherently risky, to both animal and person — seems the right thing to do. In an imperfect world, there are rarely easy choices.

CITES warns: Regulate the Illegal Wildlife Trade, Or Expect More Covid-19s

June 26, 2020

“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.”

— Tedros Adhanom, Director-General, World Health Organization, March 11

Ivonne Higuero is an environmental economist — or, in Trumper terms, a loser — with a decades-long career with international organizations that specialize in sustainable development.

She has been Secretary General of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, since October, 2018, around the time Trumpers decided that while they had never liked environmentalists much, now was the the time to get positively medieval on what’s left of Earth’s precious — and precarious — wilderness resources.

Trumpers look at the name “Higuero” — never mind the outré spelling of her Christian name “Ivonne” — and no doubt write her off as yet another uppity Mexican, leaving aside the fact that she’s actually from Panama and her post-secondary bona fides include Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) and Missouri University of Science and Technology — which, oddly enough, is based in the US midwest state of Missouri.

Since the unwelcome arrival of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, she has repeatedly gone on record as pointing out that the illegal trade in wildlife — everything from the bushmeat trade to so-called wet markets, where wild animals are served up as human food — has encouraged the spread of pathogens into the human population, directly, through the food chain, and indirectly, by eroding wildlife habitats which — crazily! — act as a natural barrier between zoonotic viruses and spillovers from animals to people. Who knew?

Trumpers equate her to a loud, obnoxious bully who goes out of her way to terrorize the delicate sensibilities of the fossil fuel industry, at the same time questioning the manly fragility of trophy hunters. After all, what is Don Jr. to do if not cost US taxpayers $75,000 for Secret Service protection just so he could fly all the way to Mongolia to gun down a rare and endangered mountain sheep for the trophy wall? The Argali sheep, the largest of sheep species and renowned for their large horns, is listed as “near threatened” on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, which is another way of saying there are not that many of them.

Shooting defenceless mountain sheep partly on the taxpayers’ dime is one thing, and certainly worthy of CITES comment.

With the Covid-19 pandemic showing every sign of growing, though, and not slowing — hey, Trumpers, could we please just start accepting facts as, well, facts — the issue of how, where and why a deadly virus jumped

from animals to humans has taken on an added, worldwide urgency.

This past week Higuero penned an essay in the South China Morning Post headed, ‘How regulation of endangered wildlife trade can prevent the next pandemic’ which — spoiler alert! — points out that if Covid-19 was caused even in part by the unregulated trade in animal parts, regulatingsaid trade might, just might help prevent pandemics in future.

Conveniently, Higuero wrote her opinion piece in English, not Chinese, so Trumpers can’t use the excuse that they don’t read Chinese and so, like, who cares if it’s in Chinese, if it’s in China-language it doesn’t mean anything, and so it doesn’t exist.

The South China Morning Post is an English-language newspaper in any event, and based in Hong Kong, not China, but pointing that out would only confuse Trumpers even more.

“We know zoonotic diseases emerge when pathogens carried by animals — wild or domesticated — spill over to humans and subsequently adapt for human-to-human transmission,” Higuero wrote, describing something eerily similar to the Trump campaign, though science itself has yet to pin down whether Trump himself is either wild or domesticated.

CITES, Higuero noted, is the global regulatory body that oversees the international trade in more than 36,000 species of wild animals and plants; the organization has no say in domesticated animals, but it does have jurisdiction over trade in wild animals that are farmed, ranched and/or bred in captivity.

CITES supports efforts to ensure that the international wildlife trade is legal, sustainable, and traceable — three things that Trumpers rank somewhere between their disdain for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their obsessive hatred of Hillary Clinton.

Higuero supports the ‘One Health’ approach, which focuses on the links between human health and that of the planet. Through CITES, One Health envisions a world in which interactions between humans and wildlife are safe and sustainable, which in turn reduces the risks to nature, ecosystems, endangered species — and we human beings.

That’s a message even a Trumper can understand. Acceptance, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish.

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3089832/how-regulation-endangered-wildlife-trade-can-prevent-next-pandemic