Bush Warriors Founder, Dori Gurwitz, was only a teenager when he personally witnessed Kenya’s first burning of ivory stockpiles 22 years ago–an experience he will never forget.
Photo credit: Tony Karumba
In 1989, African wildlife conservation saw a historical event–one that many people did not think would happen. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) lit aflame a massive ivory stockpile, underscoring their zero tolerance for the illegal ivory trade. No matter what political thoughts people and governments around the world had about Kenya at that time, one thing was very clear: the government was seriously committed to the preservation of its wildlife, at all costs. It got to a point that game wardens were given permission to kill, should they confront a poacher. This zero tolerance policy worked and, despite all of the challenges associated with being a new and developing nation, Kenya rose as a leader in wildlife conservation. The eco-tourism industry exploded! Continue reading →
The Asian Elephant, Elephas maximus, is listed as ‘ENDANGERED’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™. It is found in isolated populations in 13 tropical Asian countries. The Asian Elephant is smaller than its African savannah relative; the ears are smaller and the back is more rounded.
There was a shootout. Andy and I weren’t there, but we learned through satellite text messages that Colonel Gui and his soldiers from the Congolese army ran into the bandits somewhere between Kisangani and Obenge—likely the brothers of Colonel Toms, a convicted war criminal and poacher. A gunfight ensued. One poacher was injured and two others were apprehended. Colonel Gui, with his prisoners in tow, is still coming to Obenge to route out poachers in the region. We should see them tomorrow.
I got the news during a four-day sampling hike through TL2 with Andy and the scientist John Hart [http://www.bonoboincongo.com]. But let me back up. After Kisangani, which is where I last blogged, we flew to Kindu, a town on the border of the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2. It’s the region Elephant Ivory Project-lead Samuel Wasser [http://depts.washington.edu/conserv/Director.html] wants elephant dung samples from most (read the previous posts to understand why). From Kindu, the three of us spent two days on the back of motorbikes, riding dirt paths notched into the jungle and savannah. These paths are arteries out of the bush. We saw locals pushing bicycles loaded with everything from pineapples to bush meat in the form of monkeys and okapi, a striped cousin of the giraffe. At the Lomami River, we loaded into motorized pirogues for a supposed two-day trip north to Obenge, the Hart’s research camp in the northern part of the proposed Lomami National Park. John stopped at every riverside village—about a dozen–to explain what the national park meant for the locals.
‘Moses’, a suspected poacher in the Congo jungle, is burning crosses as death threats to National Park supporters, but it’s not enough to derail the Elephant Ivory Project team on to their mission to stop elephant poaching.
We just arrived this morning and I already want to leave Kisangani, a city of 700,000 in the center of Congo’s jungle. A cholera outbreak started in the city last week and left 27 dead—200 more cases have been reported. Andy and I are with Terese and John Hart, conservationists who have been working in the DRC for 30 years (check out their project Bonobos in Congo). They’ve agreed to help us plan our mission. But the question of where to start sampling elephant dung isn’t simple. The region Dr. Wasser wants us to sample most, the proposed Lomami National Park in the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2, has become even more dangerous.
It’s been a fortunate few days. We arrived in Kinshasa on Monday, exhausted from 36 hours of transit, and found the Congo just as hot as we left it two years ago. On Tuesday morning, we met with Dr. Teresa Hart, a 30-year veteran of conservation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Teresa first came to the country as a Peace Corp volunteer in 1974. She’s now in her tenth year studying bonobos, an ape found only in the DRC, in a 25,000-square mile block of forest known as TL2. The region is an elephant sanctuary on paper, but animals are disappearing there faster than ever.
“Research here leads to advocacy because it’s all being destroyed,” says Hart.
Today, I’m packing. After two years in the works, we’re kicking off the Elephant Ivory Project in earnest on Sunday morning, when Andy Maser and I fly to Kinshasa–the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)–with a case of collection vialsand the goal of saving a species. Here’s the back story: Continue reading →
Note: Please play this MUST SEE video and enjoy. This is what is at stake!
A year ago on November 13th, Bush Warriors was first launched into to the world. This was my attempt to put the truth out there of what is really going on with our world’s wildlife. Everyone loves nature and wildlife. We all love lions, tigers, bears and dolphins. We even love sharks, though we were taught to be afraid of them. Wildlife and nature is gaining more popularity than ever, everywhere you look “a green lifestyle” is the new trend. ‘Organic’ and ‘nature’ are buzz words surrounding corporate board rooms, the way we live, and the food we eat. It’s all about ‘going back to nature’.
The sad and unfortunate reality is that we are just about as far from nature as we can get. In fact, we, as humans, are getting further from it by the minute. Despite the growing popularity of the ‘green revolution’, species continue to be lost at unprecedented rates. The fight to save species is not small or easy. Many challenges block the path to success, including corruption, economics (both poverty and wealth), overconsumption of our natural resources, consumerist demand, and societal values.
Photo by Takeshi Igarashi
We live in a world where biodiversity is given due attention only when it is deemed profitable or there is some underlying financial interest in saving it. Some even say, “What is the point in spending well needed funds on animals we know will be extinct from their natural habitat in a generation or two?”
If we truly open our eyes to see what has happened to the world around us, we will not be able to live with ourselves and the destruction of our planet that we cause on a daily basis. Plastic bags that help us carry food from stores are killing our sea turtles, as they are being mistaken for jellyfish. Palm oil, as harmless as it sounds, is a real killer to many of our earth’s forests and all that inhabit them. Yet it is widely used to give our foods a longer shelf life, so that we may enjoy our microwave popcorn. The cost of palm oil is not just the cost of cheap, processed foods. It is also costing us majestic creatures, like orangutans. Valuable components of an ecosystem that also display many similar emotional and social behavior as us humans. Now they slip into the brink of extinction and are being used, abused and slaughtered, while their natural habitat is replaced by palm oil plantations.
Rhinos and elephants, animal icons that we love so much, are systematically being murdered for their horns and tusks. In fact is its estimated that 102 elephants are being killed a day. That is almost a kilometer (over half a mile) of dead elephants on a daily basis.
Photo Credit: Michael Nicols
Since 1997, 353 new species have been discovered in the Himalayas, 1,220 in the Amazon and 1,231 in the Mekong region. Our world has such a rich biodiversity, and yet, with all of our knowledge and growing understanding of how fragile our ecosystems are, we are losing species before they are even discovered.
We citizens of the world must unite in a unified global voice saying, “Enough is enough.” We must put a stop to the war taking place on our wildlife and natural world. If we don’t, it will be lost for good and we will also lose ourselves in the process.
We need your help is educating and spreading the word. Please join our growing Bush Warriors global tribe in spreading the message. We have created the Bush Warriors Ambassadors program that gives you tools for five second online advocacy. All you need to do is paste our blurbs and links on your Facebook, Myspace, email, or any other social platform, and you are done. By doing this you have become an ambassador for change.
We have already grown so much in our first year, and plan to push harder and reach more people in our coming years. Join us in our efforts and step up to be a voice for wildlife today!
John and Jane Kenyon took over the management of Ol Pejeta in 1949 when it was owned by Lord Delamere and together they spent the next 15 years developing the ranch. When John first took on Ol Pejeta he was joined by a school friend and business partner of Lord Delamere named Marcus Wickham Boynton. Together they organized the then 57,000 acre ranch into a successful beef producing company. Over the next few years they successfully expanded the farm to cover an estimated 90,000 acres. John and Jane left Ol Pejeta in 1958, returning in 1959 for a further ten years before finally retiring to run their own cattle ranch to the north. Since that period the ranch has had a number of owners, all entrepreneurs in their own right.
In 1988, the Sweetwaters Game Reserve (24,000 acres) was opened by another of Ol Pejeta’s previous owners, Lonrho Africa. Primarily started as a sanctuary for the endangered black rhino, wildlife populations (including the “Big Five”) have steadily increased since that time. In 2004 the ranch was purchased by Fauna and Flora International, a UK based conservation organisation. The Sweetwaters Game Reserve has now been extended to encompass the entire ranching area to create the “Ol Pejeta Conservancy”, approximately 90,000 acres in extent. This has created the largest black rhino sanctuary in East Africa, with the aim of generating profit from wildlife tourism and complementary activities (including cattle) for reinvestment into community development in the local area.
The Conservancy boasts the largest sanctuary for black rhinos in East Africa, provides a sanctuary for great apes and is host to the ‘big five’ among a large selection of other African animals. The Conservancy also operates a successful cattle program that is integrated with the local wildlife. The Conservancy also operates programmes with the surrounding local community to aid health, education, water, roads, provision of agriculture and livestock extension services and the development of community-based conservation tourism ventures. It has a number of projects aimed at protecting the highly endangered black rhino, and spends considerable time and effort ensuring that the security and further growth of the current population is maintained, the number of black rhinos on the conservancy currently stands at 100.
In 2009, four of the world’s eight remaining Northern White rhinos were transferred to Ol Pejeta from the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic. Other than these four, Northern White Rhinos have gone extinct in the wild. Ol Pejeta is trying to repopulate the area with these rhinos.
Tsavo National Park is Kenya’s largest national park with 20,812 square kilometers and is home to incredible biodiversity. However, the early years of the park were marred by unchecked poaching of many of the native species including rhinos and elephants. In 25 years of poaching over 90% of the countries rhinos and elephants were illegally killed for their horns and tusks. However, in the mid 1990s CITES finally recognized what had been going on and listed rhinos and elephants as as Appendix I animals and a moratorium on all elephant and rhino products was enacted.
A local Kenyan who lives on the border of Tsavo National Park
In 1989 in a show of good faith Kenya burned 12 tons of ivory worth $1 million dollars. Tsavo National Park is now facing new types of pressures; when the park was first founded the population of Kenya was approximately 1 million people, it is now over 40 million people. This means that the edge of the park and human settlement is now a very obvious line of settlement on one side of the line and wild park line on the other side. Climate change, trade in arms between war torn states and the bush meat trade are now all major concerns for the Kenyan government and Tsavo National Park. Another problem is that as soon as animals cross the border into Tanzania they lose much of their protection as the Tanzanian government is not nearly as strict in their anti-poaching enforcement.
Elephants in Tsavo National Park
Black rhinos that had a population of 6000 in the 1970s is now down to about 50 individuals. The same story is true for elephants: 36,000 in the 1970s and only 6000 now. The future of Tsavo National Park is going to depend on some creative thinking of conservationists and government officials. It is obvious that the park and animals that call it home can not survive if a way is not found to have the park benefit the locals who live around its borders. With the price of ivory so high in China and other eastern countries the lure of poaching is just too strong.
Kenyan and Tanzanian anti-poaching units with suspected poachers
Photo Credit: Michael Nicols
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