Saving Wildlife Starts at the Community Level

Excellent article in The Guardian.  Saving wildlife starts at the community level.  Native poachers are mostly the poor, but the real profits from their work goes to international criminals.  In Kenya community activists are working to find ways to rob these international criminals of the first link in the chain that stretches from the killing fields in Kenya to the shops in China and Vietnam.

“She got me out of a mud pool and into a pool of light,” Lotak said of Josephine Ekiru, the chair of the Nakuprat-Gotu conservancy, a community-run conservation area in northern Kenya where the two former poachers now work.

In a pastoral community where women are traditionally expected to defer to their husbands and keep their opinions private, a 16-year-old Ekiru insisted on attending community meetings that were normally the preserve of men, and began trying to reform the men she knew were poaching. But confronting the poachers put her own life on the line.

“First they wrote a letter to me threatening me. The second time, they called in [five men] to me and threatened me. That time they were pointing guns at me. I said I was ready to die but can I tell you some reasons [why she was trying to persuade them],” she recalled.

For 20 minutes she told them they were being used, that they were creating conflict between ethnic groups and were destroying the “treasure” that was their local wildlife.

“One of them said: ‘Don’t kill her’, he dropped his gun. He said, ‘Nobody has ever told us about this.’”

To Ekiru, the answer lies in having local people run the show. “The only future we have for this wildlife is in the hands of the communities living with this wildlife.”

Of course to really end this trade the chain must be broken at every link.  

Bees As Important As Water

Last week we discussed the drastic year over year decline in commercial bee colonies.  Without bees agricultural production faces precipitous decreases in productivity.  When a shortage develops in any critical service two things happen:  the value of that service increases and, at its margins, criminal activity increases.

This excellent article in The Guardian tells the story of bee thieves the United States agricultural heartland, California’s Central Valley.

These are strange times for the American beekeeper. In California, the centre of the industry, members of this tight-knit community find themselves enjoying an economic boom while trying to cope with environmental turmoil. And now they’re dealing with a new kind of criminal: the bee rustler. Every year, at the height of pollination season in the spring, dozens of nighttime thieves – nobody knows exactly how many – break into bee yards all over California to steal hives.

The simple law of supply and demand has turned what was a sleepy cottage industry focused on honey production into an integral component of the commercial agricultural industry.  Service contracts must be met even if that means stealing bees from another keeper. 

The surge in bee rental prices in the valley over the last decade has brought with it an unsettling rise in thefts. In 2015, poachers stole more than 1,700 hives – and those are just the thefts that were reported. Last year was the first time anyone had actually counted, but beekeepers and law enforcement both say that the crime is becoming increasingly common.

New keepers enter the industry hoping to cash in on the pollination boom – and it is they who often end up becoming the chief suspects in bee robberies. They sign contracts in the autumn, lose their hives to disease in the winter, then steal to make back the difference in the spring. “People are trying to meet their obligations at our expense,” one recent victim told his local paper, after thieves made off with $100,000 worth of hives. “There’s no doubt in my mind it was another beekeeper.”

Since 2006 bee colonies have been decimated by colony collapse disorder.  Disease often transmitted by the varroa destructor mite combined with the stress of exposure to a mix of industrial grade pesticides and California’s pervasive drought result in mass die offs of entire colonies.

But those who weathered the storm have benefited from simple economics: the national supply of bees fell, while demand for pollination has since quadrupled alongside almond growth. This year, almond farmers paid $180 to rent a single hive. And every half-hectare requires two hives.

Agriculture is the lifeblood of California’s Central Valley and provides much of America’s fruits, nuts and vegetables.  Water is already in short supply, but without bees abundant water won’t make much of a difference.

With bees, an almond tree produces 70% more nuts than without. “Bees,” one almond grower told me, “are as important as water.” 

 

The Painted Dog

One of the most beautiful and intelligent animals on the African continent is the African Wild Dog (Lycaon pictus). The wild dog is a highly specialized pack hunter with an 85% rate of success bringing down prey animals. The Wild Dog is listed as endangered, constrained to 12% of their original range, with packs routinely coming into conflict with human activity.

In Namibia, the Naankuse Foundation has several groups of wild dogs in their care. Almost every individual currently living at the center came in as an orphan, some came alone, others with litters of up to 7 pups. Namibia farmers have taken to killing what they see as "nuisance" animals who kill their livestock. The wild dogs amazing hunting ability and extremely high success rate make them vulnerable to blame. Unfortunately farmers may take the shoot first approach and this is something Naankuse works tirelessly to rectify.

One call to the center and either by plane or by truck someone is on site to help farmers with any livestock issues. Either by relocation, GPS tracking or through education they work to keep the wild dogs in the wild. Namibia's Ministry of Environment and Tourism is solely responsible for deciding the fate of the animals who are taken into care at Naankuse and whether or not they can be reintroduced to the wild.

How can you help? Try the Painted Dog Conservation.