Keep an eye on the lions; watch where the elephants are, where the people are; track the poachers; count the nesting vultures.
That’s a tall order far on the veld, or deep in a vast nature reserve, where constraints of distance, cost, connectivity and a shortage of hands make conservation a thorny task at the best of times.
There’s little as rare as a rere’s egg on Madagascar. So when Chris Ransom, the Director of Field Programmes at the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, announces that they’ve had a few eggs hatch it’s huge news. “We got quite excited,” he says. “We haven’t managed to breed them at our Ampijoroa breeding facility since 2017, but this year we managed. That was a real achievement”.
The ethologist and environmentalist Dr Jane Goodall thinks big and acts small to solve global problems. “If we can’t save the planet, we can’t save Africa,” she told a select audience of scientists at the Wits Origins Centre in Johannesburg.
Wildlife crime has many threads. It’s entangled in the very fabric of our society and we must get to grips with its subtleties if we hope to unpick it. Maxcine Kater reports.
Apart from a skeleton at the Durban Natural Science Museum, a mummified head and foot at the Oxford Museum of Natural History in England and no doubt some bits and bobs in other collections, little remains of the dodo.
Environmental scientists should step out of their silos if they want their research to make an impact, says Duncan MacFadyen, head of Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.
Many of South Africa’s cash-strapped and sometimes poorly managed provincial parks risk collapse and new ways must be found to sustain them. We can do this by learning from successes and failures elsewhere on the continent.
Support from wealthy individuals helps conserve our natural spaces and wildlife. But there are limitations …
Four in every five of us worldwide depend on medicinal plants for their primary healthcare. But are Africa’s traditional healers, the source of many of these cures, benefiting? These and other environmental and conservation questions are expected to be raised by Kenyan forest ecologist, Dr Doris Mutta at next week’s Oppenheimer Research Conference (4 to 6 October).
Yves Vanderhaeghen interviews the team spearheading an operation to rid Marion Island of mice which are annihilating seabirds and other life.