Dereck and Beverly Joubert’s ‘Jade Eyed Leopard’ a Diamond in the Rough

September 05, 2020

“We generally don’t wave cameras in front of animals. That is for TV personalities who want fame and reaction and usually get scratched as a result. We believe that when an animal sees and reacts to us, we have failed. Our ambition is to be invisible, wallpaper; to see, document, and be led into a magical world of acceptance. You only get this with respect and trust.”

— Dereck Joubert, The Soul of Africa

Leopards are elusive, famously so, which is why the new documentary film from National Geographic Explorers-at-Large Beverly and Dereck Joubert is such a joy to behold — and a privilege to watch.

Monday marks the first day of NatGeo Wild’s “Big Cat Week” and the Jouberts’ film, Jade Eyed Leopard, kicks off a week of programming dedicated to raising awareness of the crisis that faces big cats worldwide.

The Jouberts followed a leopard cub, Toto, Swahili for “little child,” and her mother Fig over three years in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. At the beginning of the film, Toto is tiny, high-energy, playful and blissfully unaware of the dangers that will face her during the weeks and months ahead. By the end of the program, as Toto defends a fresh kill against marauding hyenas, she is no longer a child but a fully grown female leopard, in the prime of her life.

The film is beautifully photographed, sharply edited and narrated by the English stage and screen actor Jeremy Irons, who has become the go-to narrator for the Jouberts’ growing library of high-end nature films — a Shakespearean voice set against the ever-shifting rhythms and tides of the natural world. There are times when Jade Eyed Leopard literally glows on the screen.

Jade Eyed Leopard is not all pretty pictures though, heartwarming and inspiring thought the story may be. Jade Eyed Leopard is intimate and personal, but it also speaks to a bigger picture. The Jouberts are first and foremost about conservation — that’s why they’re making films for National Geographic and PBS Nature, and not, say, Disney. The world’s last surviving big cats are in trouble, and the Jouberts want the world to know that. Dereck Joubert founded National Geographic’s Big Cat Initiative — the clue is in the name — in 2009 in a bid to stem the decline of big cats in the wild.

The facts are these. World lion populations have declined to 30,000 from 110,000 in just 50 years.

Over that same period, jaguar populations have crashed to 15,000 from 60,000, and tigers are down to a mere 3,200 from 45,000. Leopards, which numbered some 80,000 in 1970, today number some 23,000.

These are estimates only. As Jade Eyed Leopard shows, big cats — while playful, curious and high-energy when young — become shy, moody and reclusive in their later years. Leopards, jaguars and tigers are near impossible to count with any degree of certainty; lions are a little easier because they tend to frequent open grasslands, and are social animals that live in groups.

What is certain, though, and what matters today, regardless of the exact numbers, is that there are fewer big cats in the wild today than there used to be. If big cats vanish altogether, it will be an unsettling harbinger of things to come. One doesn’t need an advanced degree in the biosciences to know that apex predators such as lions, tigers and leopards play a critical role in a healthy ecosystem. They cull the weak, the injured and the sick among prey animals, prevent the spread of disease — including zoonotic viruses and their attendant pandemics — and, as nature’s guardians at the top of the food chain, they maintain the order of life.

Leopards face an uncertain future because of shrinking habitat, exacerbated by ever-growing farms, roads and development. Wildlife corridors — natural “highways” through which animals can safely migrate or disperse — are one possible solution, especially for an animal such as a leopard. Males have been known to roam 320 km (200 miles) at the outward extent of their natal range, but even then inbreeding among ever-dwindling populations is a problem. That’s why the Maasai Mara National Reserve, the northern extension of the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, is so crucial to their survival. The Mara is still a place where open grasslands can sustain a viable population of predators, without the perils that inbreeding entails.

If you have access to NatGeo Wild, Jade Eyed Leopard is well worth a look. Monday, 8ET/7CT.

Covid Diaries: Sea Turtles in Thailand. A Glimmer of Light in a Time of Darkness

August 27, 2020

“It is exciting, and we hope that the people in Samui will help us protect the turtles in the future. We have a chance.”

— Dr. Thon Thamrongnawasawot, Faculty of Fisheries, Kasetsart University, Bangkok

A glimmer of light in times of darkness: Beach resorts in Thailand are deserted — but — this past week, according to media reports, more than 800 sea turtle hatchlings scuttled from their nests across a lonely beach in Koh Samui, Thailand toward a new life in the sea.

That might not seem like big news — but — the daughter of a local beach resort owner in the area told a visiting journalist she hadn’t seen critically endangered hawksbill and green sea turtles nesting in the area in nearly 50 years, not since she was a teenager helping her father harvest coconuts on the island. The sudden increase in nests has delighted conservationists who for years have been fighting a losing battle to lessen the threats humans pose to one of the most familiar, recognizable species in the sea. Thailand’s turtle hatchlings finally have the beach to themselves.

This is worth pointing out — especially now, as the worldwide crash in wildlife tourism has effectively gutted funding for conservation programs from Brazil to Zambia — because the number of sea turtles in Thailand’s waters has fallen dramatically in the past 100 years, their future threatened by poaching, pollution, overfishing and global heating, which in turn causes sea acidification, the erosion of coral reefs and ever-changing ocean currents, coupled with a marked surge in violent, volatile and unpredictable storms.

The bigger picture surrounding conservation efforts worldwide, as with so much to do with the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown and subsequent re-opening, is complicated. Nothing is quite what is seems. As hawksbill sea turtles cling to life off Thailand’s shores, there’s growing evidence that other species — polar bears, for example, that rely on dwindling shelves of sea ice to hunt for seals, their primary source of food and a necessity if they are to store the reserves of fat need to survive the Arctic winter and breed successfully — are in trouble.

If countries that rely on tourism to fund conservation are not supported — virtually every country in sub-Saharan Africa, for example — entire species and habitats will disappear. Wild creatures, and those who guard them, face a financially uncertain future. In the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown, poaching for ivory and rhino horn was down, then up again, then down, and now up again. In April, 12 park rangers were gunned down in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home to around 1,000 of the tiny — but so far stable — population of critically endangered mountain gorillas. DRC and the volatile mountain areas surrounding Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi are on a political knife’s edge.

It’s hard to know who poses more of a threat to game rangers who place their lives on the line trying to preserve nature: roving bands of heavily armed poachers who are in it strictly for profit, or a rogues’ gallery of murderous militias, bands of bandits and proxy armies still fighting the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, together with a civil war in Congo that started in 1998 and ended in 2003, then started again in 2004 and continues to burn to this day, in flare-ups in and around the northeastern province of Kivu, little more than a day’s march from the mountain gorilla parks. The war, as it is today, is loosely defined as an armed conflict between DRC’s army and the Hutu-based Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, but it’s basically a scrap between various armed groups with constantly shifting allegiances and enough weaponry to supply a midsize army in its own right.

Demand in countries like China, Vietnam and Laos for rhino horn, used in traditional medicine, pangolin scales and ivory — now illegal in China, but still traded on the black market — continues to drive wildlife trafficking, even during a global pandemic. Supply and demand are inextricably intertwined after all. It was ever thus.

Conservation relies on Western visitors for funding — philanthropy plays a part, but the truth is the super-rich, starting with the tech titans, could do a lot more — and so the Covid pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns threaten both the present and future viability of wildlife tourism.

There are signs of encouragement, the hawksbill hatcheries in Thailand being just one example. This past month has borne witness to one of the biggest, most spectacular wildebeest migrations in Kenya and Tanzania’s Mara-Serengeti ecosystem in recent memory, following unseasonably heavy rains earlier in the year and, ironically enough, fewer tourist vehicles to interfere with the cycle of life on Maasai Mara’s grasslands.

What effect will the Covid pandemic on wildlife conservation from here? It’s complicated.

The truth, as with so much to do with Covid, is that no one knows for certain, and anyone who says they do is lying. One thing is certain, though, You can rest easy tonight knowing that hawksbill and green sea turtles have a new lease on life off the coast of Thailand, and the annual wildebeest migration in East Africa, while still under threat, is having one of its finest hours in recent memory.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/21/thailand-turtle-hatchlings-finally-have-the-beach-to-themselves-aoe

Big and Small: My Own Personal Picks for a New Big 5

May 14, 2020

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

— Margaret Mead

The cycle of life goes on, in the wilderness. Look closely, though, and you’ll notice that In the background, ecotourism and the relatively small community of wildlife photographers have gone quiet. The long rains are dissipating in the world-famous — and heavily trammelled — Maasai Mara in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem but, this time, when the wildebeest migration passes through the dusty plains during the dry tourist season of July through October, visitors will be notable by their absence.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant travel warnings and societal lockdowns has led to an inevitable spate of poaching, as desperate people resort to desperate measures to feed themselves and their families.

The calculated, clear-headed view — to anyone who’s willing to read the science — is that the old world order, economically and financially, won’t return for five years. If at all.

Nature and wildlife photographers are staying close to their home bases, looking inward, going over old archival files and thinking outside-the-box to come up with new creative projects. Today, most traditional galleries remain in lockdown, starved of visitors and starved of conversation, except online, where the conversation has rarely, if ever, been livelier.

The New Big 5 — a modern-day reworking of the traditional Big Five of big-game hunting in Africa, a concept that hit its peak in the early 1900s and has been losing public favour ever since — is a case in point. No one would begrudge the lion, the elephant, the rhino, the cape buffalo or the leopard their rightful in the canon of wildlife photography, hunting or no hunting.

These are complex times, though, and the very best of nature photography has always focused on issues rather than aesthetics — images with deeper meaning than mere pretty pictures. Conservation photography, of the kind practiced by Cristina Mittermeier, Nick Brandt, Steve Winter and combat-photographer and photojournalist Brent Stirton, is the new calling.

A looming mass extinction — it will be the planet’s sixth, the first human-made and already dubbed the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction — has inspired renewed energy and human inventiveness among those who have vowed to spread the message through photography, whether it’s a polar bear trying to find food on an ever-shrinking ice cap or a dead rhino with it’s horn chainsawed off to feed the lucrative black market in traditional medicine. (Despite its debatable properties, and they are debatable, keratin, the

primary substance of rhino horn, is not a cure for cancer, nor a reliable treatment for Covid-19, but that hasn’t stopped the black market from taking after it like a Sinaloan drug cartel onto a less costly, more profitable mix of marching powder.

If I were to choose my own New Big 5, I would focus on those animals that are both iconic and recognizable to the public at large, to better and more effectively promote the message of conservation not just to Europe and North America but around the world. My newly revised Big 5 would feature the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the polar bear and the mountain gorilla.

The New Big 5 project itself (visitors to newbig5.com can choose their own picks) is encouraging people to think more creatively, not by focusing only on the sublime and the beautiful but on the overlooked and taken-for-granted, to find a deeper meaning. The world’s remaining wild places, and the wildlife within, are those that fill us with wonder and gratitude for the beauty which has been created from nature. Philosophers of the digital age have written of the power of the photograph to reach beyond the formality of technological reproduction to evoke in the viewer feelings of genuine emotion: anger at what we’re doing to the natural world, and hope for a better, wiser future.

If asked to look beyond the obvious — as much as I grew up admiring lions and tigers and elephants and polar bears — and compelled to choose five lesser-known animals that represent the issues and concerns facing species survival in the early 21st century, in the Age of Covid, my New Big 5 would look somewhat different than the norm.

I would focus, in no particular order, on the pangolin, the African hunting dog (aka painted wolf), the red colobus monkey, the honey badger (or its northern equivalent, the wolverine), and the ring-tailed lemur.

Luminaries who have weighed in on their own personal picks for a New Big 5 include Djimon Hounsou, Joanna Lumley, Virginia McKenna, Jane Goodall and Moby, whose eclectic and highly original picks include the coyote, the bobcat, the rattlesnake, the black bear and the common, ordinary, everyday rabbit, a favourite of children’s literature and arguably one of the most taken-for-granted animals on the planet.

Perhaps that’s the point.

Choose your own, at newbig5.com. Results will be revealed later in the year, pandemic or no pandemic, lockdown or no lockdown.