On World Lion Day and ‘The New Big 5’

August 09, 2020

“Africa’s parks hold the most charismatic species on the planet – giraffe, elephant, hippo, zebra, lion, leopard and cheetah – a true global heritage. It’s up to all of us to help cover the costs of protecting these species. If the lion goes extinct, all these other species will go as well. We must all work together, but the scale of funding is beyond the scope of conservation groups. The financial requirements can only be met by world governments.”

— Dr. Craig Packer, World Lion Day

World Lion Day matters, and here’s why. Just 100 years ago, nearly 200,000 wild lions roamed across Africa.

Today, there are 20,000 — if that.

Photojournalist Graeme Green’s “New Big 5 Project” is designed to create a new “Big Five” of wildlife photography — the Big Five was an expression originally coined by big game hunters with small appendages to label and identify the five African animals most difficult to hunt — and while the African lion made that particular list, there’s no reason to think it won’t make the new list as well.

Real men, after all, take shots with a camera, not a high-powered hunting rifle.

Furthermore, not only does the lion live to see another day, but in terms of generating tourist revenue, a lion that lives to see another day draws more visitors the next day, and so on.

It’s hard to believe that some stakeholders — and even some scientists — insist that trophy hunting raises money for conservation and gives local people a reason to ensure a steady supply of lions for the trophy wall, when the simple truth of the matter is that money raised by trophy hunting disappears long before it ever reaches the conservation stage. Wildlife tourism, on the other hand, pays for itself over and over, and is the reason many African parks are financially sustainable. Strange as it may sound, tourists — and wildlife photographers — would rather photograph a living lion than a dead one.

As Dr. Craig Packer, a professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota and one of the world’s most respected authorities on lion behaviour, noted in his seminal 2015 book Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns, “Hunting companies had a misplaced belief in the ‘inexhaustible supply’ of nature. They needed to learn that natural populations were finite.”

They still need to learn that, by some accounts — and so do some university-educated field biologists, it seems.

Packer knows a little something of what he speaks: He is both the founder and former director of the Serengeti Lion Research Center, and is chiefly known for his research on lions in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. (He has been banned from Tanzania for his efforts, and his accusations of systemic corruption high up in Tanzanian government circles, but that’s a discussion for a whole other day.)

That’s a big deal on two fronts: Serengeti is a name known to the public-at-large, even among those who haven’t studied lions or travelled to Africa, and who — let’s face it — may never travel to Africa, Covid or no Covid. They have, however, seen The Lion King.

The Serengeti Lion Research project is the world leader in lion research, and dates back to the work of George Schaller and the late Hugo van Lawick — Jane Goodall’s then-husband — who established that lions lead complex social lives unique among the big cats, social lives we’re still learning about.

World Lion Day is about more than another trip to the zoo, or — God help us — the circus, then.

It means something.

It matters.

Because, if current trends continue the way they are at the present rate, in another 100 years or so there will be no wild lions, in Africa or anywhere else.

That is all.

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2016/10/11/african-lions-on-the-brink-a-conversation-with-lion-expert-craig-packer/

https://www.newbig5.com/lions-photo-gallery

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.

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.

A New Big 5 for a New World

May 11, 2020

“We can heal some of the harm we’ve inflicted.”

— Jane Goodall, NewBig5.com

When in Africa, do as the Romans do. That, at least, was the way of the world until the animals started dying out, and the idea of Africa’s so-called “Big Five” of big animals became the focus of increased scrutiny.

The Big Five — and this is the part tourist guides in Africa seldom tell you — are not the five largest African mammals, as is widely assumed, but rather the five animals most difficult to hunt. That’s why the hippo and giraffe — “big” by anyone’s measure — were left out, and the cape buffalo and relatively small — though elusive and breathtakingly beautiful — leopard made the list.

With people’s horizons expanded in the new media age, and with wildlife photography going through a creative renaissance, thanks to digital technology and mirrorless cameras as quiet as a breeze through tall grass, the idea of hunting big game for the trophy wall has gone the way of black-and-white TV and printed morning newspapers.

Today, the very idea of shooting a buffalo and mounting its stuffed head on the den wall seems like a relic from a past age.

So now, a group of the world’s leading wildlife photographers, with the blessing of leading conservationists and field biologists like Jane Goodall, have proposed a new “Big 5” — the most cherished and representative iconic species to photograph, not just from Africa but from around the world.

The vote is by public acclimation and anyone can vote, by visiting https://www.newbig5.com and casting a ballot. The site has helpfully compiled a list of candidates — just tick the appropriate boxes — or you can make your own suggestion.

The site is no mere Twitter poll, though. The site features essays from many of the world’s leading nature photographers (Brent Stirton, Tom Mangelson, Ami Vitale, Tim Laman, Nick Brandt, Joel Sartore and others) and conservationists (Goodall, Iain Douglas-Hamilton), news, a lively podcast (hosted by UK project director and wildlife photographer Graeme Green and available on iTunes, among other services), interviews and photographers' galleries.

It’s exhaustive in scope, a life-affirming project that, to cite the project’s mission statement, doubles as a celebration of wildlife and wildlife photography and a gentle, show-don’t-tell reminder that we can indeed save the world’s wildlife provided we act now.

First, some back-story.

The original concept of the Big Five came out of Africa, an unnatural side effect of the big game hunting that drove early European explorations of the so-called Dark Continent, as mapmakers of the time liked to call it.

Africa was — and is — unique, in that it’s one of just two places on Earth (the other being southern Asia) that remains home to much of the world’s megafauna — the big animals — like elephant, lion, buffalo, rhino and leopard.

As palaeontologists, zoological archeologists and other earth scientists have warned, other continents had their own megafauna, but a

successive wave of mass extinctions over the past 50,000 years wiped out everything from mastodons and sabre-tooth cats to, in Australia’s case, echidnas the size of sheep, marsupial tapirs and giant, short-faced kangaroos.

Climate change and other natural causes were a major cause of these early mass extinctions, but as humanity developed it became clear that the more recent extinctions followed with the arrival of humans. That was no coincidence.

Today, right now, the survival of the natural world’s remaining iconic animals depends not on big-game hunting and those who would argue that hunting helps pay the bills for conservation (it doesn’t) but rather on ecotourism and wildlife photography.

Wildlife photography is critical to the 21st-century equation because it brings nature into the homes of those who, either through economic or practical circumstances, might otherwise never have the chance to see a lion or elephant in its natural environment. The best nature photography inspires and incentivizes us to get involved, whether it’s by private donation or simply living a greener, more environmentally friendly life, in order to help save what’s left.

The original Big Five is a throwback to a past era an era where Ernest Hemingway’s green hills of Africa were thick with game, but that era, like Hemingway himself, is in the past. Big game hunting is a relic of the first half of the 20th century and has no more place in a 21st-century world than black-and-white TV and printed morning newspapers.

The New Big 5 — the numerical “5” is more marketable and packs a bigger visual punch — takes at least part of its inspiration from the World Wildlife Fund’s famous panda logo. In terms of the bigger picture, it’s about the bigger picture: the “world” in world wildlife. The Sixth Mass Extinction, which ecologists, field biologists and zoologists warn is already upon us, is a world-wide event, and will affect virtually every remaining species in the wild world. The New Big 5 focuses not just on Africa but on Asia, northern Europe, the polar regions, Australia and the Americas. Even in Africa, though, there are critically endangered iconic species that could use the attention, from the cheetah, the world’s fastest land mammal and genetically one of the oldest predators on the continent, to the African cape hunting dog, recently renamed the painted dog or painted wolf, perhaps the closest spiritual relation the continent has to Old World wolves.

The year so far has reminded us that life is tenuous and the future uncertain. The world’s remaining wild species — indeed every species on Earth, including we humans — face a critical 10 years. What we choose to do now may well determine the fate of life on Earth. More than a million species face extinction, from iconic animals like the lion and cheetah to the “unsung heroes” that include rare and endangered frogs birds and lizards.

The New Big 5 project posits that it’s not too late — yet. Change is possible. Provided, that is, we find the collective will.