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January 1995 |
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January 1995
North Luangwa National Park
Dear Everybody,
No elephants in North Luangwa have been shot by poachers for months! Chimana, one of the radio collared females, and her male offspring, Chops, move freely around the park without harassment. They usually stay with Chimane's family unit, but for several days we found them with over one hundred elephants. After the beginning of the rains, the large herd meandered across the lush green savanna in a long line, as elephants once did before all the poaching began.
We are following the movements of sixteen radio collared elephants, and learning a great deal about their range movements, social life, and habitat utilization. First, we locate them using a radio receiver in the Cessna 180 airplane, then we relocate them in the chopper, and land nearby. Following them on foot, we learn who is in their group that day and if they have any new calves. Camp Group is quite accustomed to us, but even after all this time, they still do not trust us completely - it will be many years before they forget about the poaching. And most of the other groups are still very shy. They either move silently away when we approach, or mock-charge us.
Gathering data under these circumstances is not easy. One thing we have learned for certain, their society is very flexible. For weeks we will find one family in a small valley in the hills, feeding on the small shrubs. Then the group will suddenly move more than twenty miles and join another family to forage on the long grass of the open plains. This is not unusual, but poaching has altered much of their social structures and behavior. For example, thirty-five percent of the families contain orphans, five percent are made up entirely of them. And because many of the reproductively active females were shot in their prime, many of the females who are having calves are very young compared with elephants in other populations. Many of them do not know how to care for their first-born infants, and without older females around to teach them, quite a few of the calves die. Consequently, the population is taking longer to recover than it would otherwise. Nevertheless a recovery has begun! The females have had a bumper crop of babies. Almost every female of reproductive age has a calf. And local people are seeing elephants in areas far beyond the park where they have not been seen for years.
At last everything seems to be working. Our Community Development Program offers job opportunities to many reformed and would-be poachers, our Conservation Education Program is reaching many of the children, and our new rural health care program, under the direction of Dr. Philip Watt, is teaching first aid and family planning.
People occasionally ask how we know that offering opportunities to people has helped stop poaching. An example comes from the village of Fulaza, which for many years has been notorious for harboring poachers. Located on the northern boundary of the park, and almost completely cut off from the outside world, the villagers have no industry other than the barter of meat poached from the park and traded for mealie-meal, their staple food. With their snares and muzzle loaders they had virtually sterilized the northern third of North Luangwa of its larger animals.
But we have been working with the people of Fulaza for more than five years now, at first hiring some of the known poachers to construct an airstrip - to be used for airborne anti-poaching missions - as well as for the Flying Doctors. With this infusion of cash, families were able to buy mealie meal instead of bartering meat for it. Others began small industries, with start-up loans from our project, making products, like sandals from old tires, that could be sold locally, or carried to the market in Mpika. We helped the community build a school, provided agricultural training, seeds, a grinding mill, and medicines. It has been a long struggle, but now many of the villagers are growing their own corn and grinding it with the mill; they no longer trade meat for mealie-meal. This year, Ms. Alston Watt, our Community Development officer, is introducing sunflower seed presses so that they can produce their own cooking oil. As always, it is all based on a free enterprise system.
Just a week ago, Mark and I flew the chopper to deliver t-shirts to the game scout children near Fulaza. As we approached the circle of small thatched huts, herds of impala and puku grazed placidly along the riverbank opposite the village; and a family of wart hogs was digging up roots nearby. This was a sight we never thought we would see; wild animals almost literally coexisting with the villagers. The living standard of the village has been improved, and the wildlife is quickly coming back.
None of this would have been possible without your support. We never, never take these small successes or you for granted. Both of them keep us going.
In November, we were honored to attend, as official delegates for Zambia, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Florida. Once again, South Africa introduced a resolution to downlist its elephant population so that a trade in skin and meat could resume. In the face of strong opposition from most of the elephant range states, including Zambia, South Africa withdrew its resolution. Thus, the ban on the trade of all elephant parts including ivory, will continue, a policy that we feel is essential to control poaching. As we have told you before the Luangwa elephants learned long ago that poachers ambush them at the river, so that, in recent years, they seldom drank or bathed during the day. But on Christmas Eve this year it was very hot in the valley, almost 103 degrees, and so it was hard getting into the Christmas spirit. The elephant males who often visit camp - Survivor, Cheers, Long Tail, and Stompie - were feeding on the sand bar across the river. Stompie, a young male without a tail, apparently could take the heat no longer. He rushed to the riverbank, blasted two Cape buffalo out of the water with a magnificent trumpet, and then plunged straight into a deep pool, disappearing completely underwater. As he rolled and splashed in the cool current, now and again a leg or a trunk would poke out of the water. That he felt safe enough to bathe in the day time, right next to our camp, was Christmas present enough for us.
Thanks again for all you do for us and all the wild animals of Luangwa.
Cheers from the bush,
Delia and Mark
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