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