A Fun Quote on Custodianship of Land and Wildlife

<<<In response to the question: who owns and manages the land and wildlife?

Out of 23 heads of households surveyed in Sankeyo, 92% report the answer to be government, 4% God, and 4% say it is the community.

In Khwai, out of 31 surveyed, 68% percent report government, 16% say it is BaSarwa, 7% say it is God, 6% say it is their community, and 3% report is is all people of Botswana>>>

“Questionable Custodianship” in “Community Wildlife Management in Southern Africa: challenging the Assumptions of Eden” by  Christo Fabricius, Eddie Koch, and Hector Magome. Evaluating Eden Series N. 6. In Evaluating Eden: Exploring the myths and realities of community-based wildlife management: Series overview. 2000, Book/Report - IIED by Dilys Roe, James Mayers, et al. 

Royal Hunts and Royal Hunting (P)reserves or Grounds in Africa

What happened to royal hunts or royal hunting (p)reserves in Africa?

<Giraffes at Tala Game Reserve in Kwa-Zulu Natal; photo: by Tala Game Reserve.

While browsing the web on game parks and reserves in Africa, I have been keen on finding any information on African royal hunts, game (p)reserves and kingly retreats or hermitages, how these were maintained, their cultural significance or symbolism, aspects of royal hunting that were assimilated from the outside, how royal hunting declined in significance with time and what became of these sites. Information on the subject is at best thin and scattered through many texts on the environmental history of wildlife conservation and parks or game reserves in Africa. I found a few marketing highlights from websites that advertise private trophy hunting concessions and parks in Africa. But then websites hardly include references - meaning one has to dig further into more archival work.

Initial impressions following my sketchy search indicate that most of what that one finds on game parks and reserves in African tends to overlook ‘other’ human ecological relations with the environment and to focus on more of the landscape, flora, fauna both from the evolutionary and synchronic perspectives. In reality my attraction was largely aesthetic and sychronic. The colonial histories of most established game parks or reserves in Africa hardly mention the role of customary reserves and of that Africans in the overall establishment of parks.

Following Nicholas Luard and the World Wild Life Fund (1985) “the idea of wildlife sanctuaries was virtually unknown” in the late 19th century Africa until Paul Kruger came on the scene. Both authors credit Jan Van Riebeeck and van der Stel for initiating the first attempts towards wildlife conservation in the Cape area when they imposed restraints on the settler party from hunting around Table Bay. A few findings occasioned by the turn in “decolonizing nature” and the search effective “strategies for conservation in a post-colonial” (Adams and Mulligan, 2003), which now involve a number of African researchers and deep area researchers indicate that Africans and particularly royalty did play a part in the establishment of a good number of game parks and hunting reserves.

The HLUHLUWE-IMFOLOZI

Map by Far and Wide Safaris

Numerous mentions are made of Shaka and the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Game Reserve - 96000 hectares large and one of South Africa’s largest and oldest. Set in the heart of Zululandm it is said to have been first declared a game sanctuary in 1887. Before then, one website states, it was “hunting ground for the Zulu kings”. In other websites, it is specifically referred to as King Shaka’s former hunting grounds. Carruthers (1995) and Fabricius et al (2001) state that Shaka created a royal game reserve in the Umfolozi District of Zululand from which commoners were restricted while Murombdzi’s (2003) own findings attest that the park was a preserve for the ruling political and military class. Another site sees King Dingiswayo and Shaka hunting in the reserve as well as putting into place the first conservation laws. It also mentions the park for having gained world-renown for its white rhino conservation. The Hluhluwe (north) and Umfolozi (south) were formerly managed as separate parks before being merged into a single and continuous game reserve.

HLANE NATIONAL PARK: Photo by Big Game Parks

Swaziland’s conservation efforts are said to have been initiated in 1961 when then King Sobhuza II gazetted an old family farm outside the capital, to which he added Hlane in 1967, formerly a famous royal hunting ground.

<Photo of Hlane N. Park by Swazi Travel

Thus, Spirits in Stone, a newsletter, promises its clients on a private air safari, that “Shangaan trackers will lead you on game viewing excursions in the Kruger lowveld“from where they will “fly into the mountain kingdom of Swaziland, rich in royal heritage and traditional songs… custom and crafts, and wildlife conservation” and from there “into Zululand, a proud nation of legendary warriors where royal hunting grounds are now wildlife reserves and home to the “Big Five.”"

HWANGE NATIONAL PARK

We also learn that the Hwange National Park is not only named after King Hwange, but was also formerly the royal hunting grounds of Mzilikazi and his successor Lobengula. Whether Mzilikazi or Lobengula called the place Hwange is a matter of historical interpretation but a Zimbabwe travel site says: … the area was used (In the 19th century) by both Mzilikazi and Lobengula as their royal hunting site, until the arrival of the fort settlers and hunters (who) killed off a large potion of the wildlife and almost destroyed the land”. Go2africa.com simply mentions the park as formerly belonging to “an early African chief who was ousted by the invading Ndebele tribe and the lands were taken over to be used as a royal hunting ground”.

BENOUE NATIONAL PARK

Photo by Mike Loumis

In Cameroon, Njiforti and Tchamba see the Lamido de Rey-Bouba, a Fulani ruler as having had a hunting reserve that was situated in present day’s Benoue National Park. The Lamido required permission from anyone who wanted to hunt in the reserve. While it appears that the Lamido has handed over much of the hunting  territory under his jurisdiction, he is still allowed with a hunting permitted zone or what is termed “CIZ“.

OBSERVATIONS.

The confluence thus of African history, locality, and modernization in land tenure and marketing is remarkable. As with essential tourist-guide narratives, the ads are scratchy, tell tale, with illuminating detail both absent and irrelevant. The target reader is not the information hungry African - in either sense- but the avid traveler, the Western hunter or eco-tourist, driven by the hunger for escape, the feel for the something different, or the need to replenish the atrophied veins of material memories.

Talking of aesthetic and cultural beliefs, Cunningham and Saigo (Environmental Science: A Global Concern, 2001) state that “In some cultures in nature carries spiritual connotations, and particular species or landscape may be inextricably linked to a sense of identity and meaning. Observing and protecting nature has religious or moral significance for many people”. Thus they mention the concept of existence value, beyond hunting or photography, even seeing, a particular species.

The argument that Africans have a purely utilitarian outlook to the wilderness and to wildlife - meaning economic - sounds absurd - when one considers the mere fact of the prior existence of these royal hunting preserves. A historic perspective of the colonial encounter and its ramifications on land stewardship or the evolving history of the African’s relationship with the environment would throw light not just on the issues of conservation, but also open avenues for the resolution of conflicting claims on which way to go forward.

Hunting Grounds: Expansive Kingdoms or Empires.

Another observation, which is worth investigating is the symbolic use of the hunting grounds. It appears to me that the African Kings that had large hunting grounds, tended to be expansive in terms of land and dominion. The case of Shaka and that of the Lamido of Rey Bouba is well-known.

Colonial Defeat and Forced Appropriation of Hunting Grounds

It also appears that the hunting grounds of these former kings or rulers were appropriated by Western powers after their defeat, or that like King Sobuza, others were compelled by circumstances to give up their hunting grounds for the same of peace.

Comparisons with the Situation of the Indians in North America

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Adams, William M and Mulligan, Martin (2003). Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.

Carruthers, Jane (1995). Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History. University of Natal Press.

Fabricius et al (2001). Community wildlife management in Southern Africa: Challenging the assumptions of Eden: Evaluating Eden Series No. 6. London: International Institute For Environment and Development (HED)

Nicholas Luard and the World Wild Life Fund (1985). The Wildlife Parks of Africa. Salem, New Hampshire: Salem House.

Murombedzi, James. (2003) Precolonial and colonial conservation practices in southern Africa and their legacy today. February 2003. ICUM. (click title for web article).

 

 

Trackers and Trophy Hunters

WAYS OF WRITING THE HUNT

Culture critics, social historians and anthropologists, have explored ways in which to “write empire” or in which to write “against”. The issue at stake for the latter is how “history” and “reality” have been high-jacked and constructed within certain paradigms of understanding for particular effects and purposes. This places on critical readers and the formerly colonized a burden of deconstructing the past in order to reach certain understandings of reality. The literature then about empire and more specifically on the themes of authorship, sport, science, and nature come under the critical gaze of writers such as John M. MacKenzie (The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism, November 1988), Greg Gillespie (Author), Graeme Wynn (Foreword) (Hunting for Empire: Narratives of Sport in Rupert’s Land, 1840-70), and a host of relevant others.

In this sense, it would be interesting to research on the professionalism between trackers anywhere and so-called “Western” safari or trophy hunters to get a glimpse at how myths that inform a particular history of the colonial and postcolonial empire are constructed or sustained.

According to DeGeorges and Kevin Reilly (2008 “The ‘Great White Hunters’ of yesteryear will confide in you that they were only as good as their trackers, the majority of whom were and are traditional hunters“. The authors quote from “personal communication” with a well-known safari operator and author of The Winds of Havoc: A Memoir of Adventure and Destruction in Deepest Africa, Adelino Serras Pires’ own observation of the peformative aspect of African tracker:

“My success was 80% due to the tracker (a traditional hunter), 10% to my driver and 10% to me. Every time I and my tracker found ourselves in an unfamiliar territory, it was a local hunter we would take on to help us locate the game“.

The authors also quote Anno Hecker (2003) a wildlife educator Mweka Wildlife College, Tanzania) who says:”I too felt quite often inferiority complexes when being faced with the art of hunting by those half naked savages“.

Pat Hemingway (who taught in the same school as Hecker also states that if there has to be fairness, then in the Rowland Ward’s trophy records, the names of the trackers should be placed before the owner of the trophy, since in most cases without them the trophy hunter would have gone home empty handed (Hecker 2003).

Writing on the “Shaw and Hunter” Trophy (East African Professional Hunters Association) which is aimed at the professional hunter whose client has harvested the most remarkable trophy, Harry Selby, a living legend made famous in the hunting novels of Robert Ruark, says:

“I myself never did (submit entries) and could have done so had I chosen. In many cases luck was the contributing factor in collecting the trophy, and the part played by the trackers and the gun-bearers - often crucial - was not recognized - only the professional hunter got the honors“. 

In the first quote given by Adelino Serras Pires, whose own views on Portuguese colonialism of Africa could be seen as controversial, ”traditional” could be interpreted as “not modern or European” - a notion that is slippery when one considers that even as the term is used to refer to the ‘other’, another “tradition” is being established. The notion of “confide” here is a disturbing one that necessitates a semiotic reading and perhaps cultural understandings of the programmatic, the said and the unsaid, the edited and the unedited. The professional hunter relationship could be said to be characterized by what Bourdieu has  termed elsewhere as “collective dissimulation and social duplicity“. In West African pidgin English lore there is a curt and apt expression for the inequitable distribution of labor investment gains: “monkey di work, baboon di chop” (or the monkey toils while the baboon picks her teeth and relishes over the harvest.

Without any derogatory implications intended from the image, photographs of trophy hunters ensconced over/beside the game with high-powered rifles (and which have been analyzed by some critics) buttress the idea. In some cases one finds collective photos with trackers, standing beside the hunter and the game, grinning). Such images do a cultural disservice to hunting and reflect negatively on mellowed hunters. Perhaps, this interpretation might not be exact since the sport hunter invests in the hunting project in terms of planning and financial input - the wherewithal of the conservative project. The problem is that of recognizing the roles executed, giving credit where it is due in whatever media - or inscribing the tracker’s own judicious role and cognitive investment. It’s not just about representation but also about history.

The trophy hunter is certainly not alone in this predicament of the unconscious on-goings - the problem of voice and representation has also be-deviled cultural analysts, ethnographers and historiographers: what to do with the presence of the ‘half-naked savages’, ‘natives’, ‘traditionalists’ in post-field representation where they are left behind. The problem could be turned to that of the writer’s or sport/trophy hunter’s society’s own ethos and his or her own insertion into this society. One field’s controversies therefore could be seen as reflecting those of another, thus a collective social problem. Rather than continuously focus on the role of the sport hunter in the hunting narrative, it would be enlightening to examine the role and voice of the tracker. It is possible that these could reflect the ambiguities in the hunting project, as well as enrich our knowledge about wildlife conservation and ecology.

References and Further Reading

DeGeorges, Paul Andre and Reilly, Brian Kevin (2008), A Critical Evaluation of Conservation And Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Book 1. Chapters 1 - 4. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, Pages 140 - 141.

Hecker, A. (2003). Das Ist Afrika. Dornen, durst, und tsetsefliegen. Ein etwas anderes Jagbuch. Begegnung mit Tieren und Menschen in funf Jahrzehnten. Nimrod Publishers: Germany.

Woods, G. (2004), “Shaw & Hunter Trophy”. SA Man (Pty) Ltd. Northway, South Africa. Magnum, Jan.:64.

Modernity, Authenticity, and Play in South African Game Parks and Private Hunting Concessions

Barry Lopez & the Experience of Hunting

I picked up Barry Lopez’s well-known text on Arctic hunting months ago but never had the time to go through the book. As a book lover, you can’t get to count the books you buy that you never come to read. Call it impulsive shopping - I’m not outside the lot.

Now I have spent days and weeks reflecting on the possibility of applying social semiotics to hunting. Semiotics has been best applied in interpreting textual media and communication. I needed an approach that would that would lend itself to examining on the ground realities, one that is multi-dimensional, so I thought of political economic approaches. But again these are more appropriate when examining group dynamics or conditions. None of the two seemed to match my intentions. What about game theory? The risk of simplifying a cultural event through game theory analysis is very high. This might result from the fact that it looks too grid-like, mathematical, structural, or mechanical (speaking from common not critical understanding). The likelihood of missing out on elements of the narrative, which might end of being the “flesh of the game” is high. Then my mind broached the phenomenological method and I saw its suitability to the topic.

I knew I had to study the hunting process as a narrative and “social text” in the sense of it being a real life phenomenon. I still can’t tell why the phenomenological approach eluded my mind, until I stumbled on it by default. Maybe it’s the tendency to not always theorize social processes in academic/Western terms that often come with their own loaded linguistic/cultural terminology, which at times constitute a juggernaut. I wondered wouldn’t why the last approach wouldn’t be the best to understand a hunt, more particularly a “big” game hunt? The bigger, the better as the larger the stakes, which takes us back to Jeremy Bentham’s basic definition of “deep play”. Have be cautious here for not wishing to contrive social reality for research purposes.

The quote below confirmed my thoughts… and now I have to read the narrative more closely. Maybe it’s possible to apply a semiotic reading to it as well. Wonder if it’s possible to combine both a phenomenological approach and semiotic reading? If so, how? In relation to the book of non-fiction mentioned above how subjective is the narrative and to what extent (or how) does it apply to a cross-section of (big) hunters?

HUNTING PHENOMENOLOGY

“Hunting in my experience - and by hunting I simply mean being

out on the land - is a state of mind. All of one’s faculties are

brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into

the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching

for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an

analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land

around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with

it, one so absorbing that you cease to talk with your human

companions. It means to release yourself from rational images of

what something “means” and to be concerned only that it “is”. And

then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be

related to other things. These relationships - fresh drops of

moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven’s

distant voice - become patterns. The patterns are always in

motion. Suddenly the pattern - which includes physical hunger, a

memory of your family, and memories of the valley you are walking

through, these particular plants and smells - takes in the

caribou. There is a caribou standing in front of you. The release

of the arrow or bullet is like a word spoken out loud. It occurs

at the periphery of your concentration.” [pp.199-200]

Barry Lopez. 1989. “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a

Northern Landscape“. Bantam Books, New York.

Quote by Jim Powlesla, University of Calgary.

A Hunter’s Review of New Meanings of Hunting Trophies

A Renewed Definition of “Trophy”

By Daniel W. Parson

As a native Midwesterner, the hunting I did growing up focused on simply filling ones tag(s) and enjoying the camaraderie of deer camp. We hunted mostly public land for whitetails in the forests of northern Minnesota. I don’t have to try very hard to remember a small A-frame cabin and its smells of fried side-pork, coffee, and wood smoke.

Some of my most treasured memories are of standing near my father and his friends as I listened to them talk the talk of men around an evening fire…wondering if one day I might stand among them as an equal. Their conversation was of work and politics and hunting. Things I did not always understand well. But one thing came through clearly to my young and forming mind. When we hunt we must work hard, we obey the law, we are ethical, we are reverent. Every animal taken - young or old, buck or doe - is a “trophy”. They are gifts of the land.

I now proudly reside in the open space of Wyoming. I stand around a fire each fall with good friends and talk the talk of men, while my little boy sits quietly near by listening. The gratitude I feel for this good country is profound. This is an area with far more big game animals than people, a place where the hunting traditions run deep. Come each October, school days are cancelled. Families gather in mountain valleys that have served as hunting camps for generations. Strangers talk with each other of mountains and animals and bad roads as they fill up with gas in the predawn darkness. It is an excellent place to live.

However, times have changed and brought with them trends in the hunting community that I find distressing. It seems the opinion of many that unless the harvested animal has massive antlers or horns it isn’t worth killing, that is unless you’re a young kid or female. Furthermore, a small spike is still considered better than a legal doe or cow. I have taught hunter education for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department for 8 years now and get the opportunity to discuss hunting with a variety of people on a nearly daily basis. Over and over, I hear my fellow hunters say things like, “all I got was a doe” or “I don’t want his first elk to be a lousy cow”…

Of ‘Humans’ and Wildlife Extinction: the Fear and the Fury

Extract from New York Times

“Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird” By BRUCE BARCOTT

Published: December 2, 2007

The story went something like this: On the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, Stevenson took a break from watching the election returns to look at some birds at San Luis Pass, a ripply channel connecting Galveston Bay to the gulf. Stevenson parked his white Dodge van with “Galveston Ornithological Society” bannered on its side, near the end of the San Luis Pass bridge, a tollway that connects Galveston Island to Follets Island. He found a spot in the low grass-speckled dunes and waited. Soon enough, he saw a handful of piping plovers, a federally listed endangered species. Then he saw something else: a scraggly cat stalking the plovers. A colony of about a dozen feral cats had been sleeping under the bridge. The cats liked to wander into the dunes for the same reason Stevenson did: the birds.

“Piping plovers are tame, abiding little creatures,” Stevenson told me. “They roost in the dunes and can’t see or hear a cat creep up on them.”

Stevenson said he tried to protect the birds by capturing the cat. He failed and returned home frustrated. Late that night, he worried the problem. “The American taxpayers spend millions of dollars to protect birds like piping plovers,” he said, “and yet here are these cats killing the birds, and nobody’s doing anything to stop it.”

The next morning, Stevenson decided to act. He loaded his .22 rifle in the van and took off for San Luis Pass. He spotted the same cat under the bridge. Stevenson put the animal in his sights and pulled the trigger.

“The cat dropped like a rock,” he said.

Up on the bridge, a tollbooth attendant named John Newland heard the shot. Newland, a quiet man in his 60s, often fed the cats under the bridge. He called them his babies. Newland bolted out of his tollbooth and saw Stevenson’s van. “I got you!” Newland screamed. “You quit shooting my cats!”

Stevenson fled, but the cops caught up to him near his house. A Galveston police officer cuffed him, read him his rights and threw him in jail.

Hunting and Angling in Modern Environments

NATURALIZING SPORTS

Hunting and Angling in Modern Environments

Adrian Franklin
University of Tasmania

This article investigates the paradoxical coexistence in late modernity of both heightened sentiments towards animals and the natural world, and the growing attraction of hunting and angling sports. The significance of this question can be gauged by the increase in parliamentary and electoral debates over the desirability of hunting and angling, by violent social conflict between hunters and anglers and their opponents and by debates over how best to `consume’ natural environments. To date, the principal literatures have insisted that the terms of this debate be ethical and political, with no attempt to understand the drive and passion behind these sports. The ethical and moral standing of the hunter/angler is often prejudged while their motives are taken to derive from a need to exercise violence and cruelty. The recent literature dealing with the burgeoning of interest in nature and the environment frequently omits to mention those traditional pursuits that are shrouded in shame and conflict. It is argued here that enthusiasm for these sports is historically complex and relates to deeply embedded discourses on anti-modernism, neo-Darwinism, ecologism and masculinity. Far from being the preserve of traditional, rural groups in society, the new proponents of hunting and angling are drawn from sections of the urban middle class for whom such discourses have particular appeal….

International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 33, No. 4, 355-366 (199
DOI: 10.1177/101269098033004003
© 1998 International Sociology of Sport Association and SAGE Publications

In the shadow of the charismatic ones: ant lions, rhino beetles, elephant shrews, buffalo weavers, and leopard tortoises

The Little Five

Information provided by www.serengeti.org

bushdrums.com

Behind the stones, hidden in the grass, and high on an Acacia branch live the Serengeti’s Little Five. They may not be the charismatic mega-fauna that the Big Five are, but for the connoisseur of wildlife or the connoisseur who wants an alternative safari, the ant lion and the RHINO beetle are a fascinating alternative, as well as ELEPHANT shrew and BUFFALO weaver or the LEOPARD tortoise.

Ant LION

The grazers are lined up and plodding slowly on, migrating back toward higher food and pleasant pastures. One of the masses, distracted for just a moment, steps into a sloping hole. The animal pushes back, trying to regain its footing, but the slope gives way under its weight. It holds on with another leg and pushes again, succeeding only in sliding now into the conical hole beside it. It raises its head in alarm and tries to walk out of the hole, the sand slipping and sliding all around it. Suddenly, behind it at the bottom two long hairy legs protrude. The hapless animal now runs forward up the slope and is covered by a violent shower of sand landing on and in front of it. It is running for all it is worth, legs pumping, and the creature behind it scooping up great clouds of sand and throwing them up the slope so that they slide down on top of the victim. As the grazer reaches the bottom of the slippery slope, the pace of things picks up; legs are pumping up and down, frantically trying to escape, while the sand becomes a fountain of earth directed up the slope.

It is at the bottom, running with everything it has, when a hooked, hairy arm reaches out, grabs it and drags it flailing into the bottom of the hole. The ant sinks below the sand and the struggle is over.

I have been lying on my stomach in a sandy corner of a dirt road in the dawn hours finding out just how the ant lion catches its six-legged prey. Ant lions are specialized insects that dig a conical hole about an inch and a half across into sandy soil and then hide in the sand at the bottom. By blowing on the sand, the ant lion is exposed. The ant lion stage of this insect’s life is actually a larvae that looks a bit like a beetle, but with large mandibles and a small head. The adult that will later emerge is a flying insect that looks like small dragonfly.

When unsuspecting ants stumble into the sandy cone, or are dropped in by me, they run and slide on the sandy cone’s sides. The ant lion feels the vibrations of the running prey and emerges to throw sand above and in front of the ant. As the sand slides down the slope, so does the ant, eventually to be grabbed and dragged inside the lair of the fearsome “Simba of the Sand”.

Rhino or Dung Beetle

Across the Serengeti travels a curious animal. Standing on its head and rolling a ball behind it, the dung beetle is working hard for its children and the ecology of Serengeti. Beetles are the most diverse and successful group of animals on the planet, with over 400,000 known species. They occupy a myriad of niches, including herbivores, carnivores, parasites, and detritivores like dung beetles. Dung beetles are one of the most important animals in the Serengeti, because of their particular love of dung. There are millions of animals in the Serengeti, each one eating, each one running about and all of them producing dung. Without dung beetles, the Serengeti would quickly become unlivable.

Adult dung beetles spend their days buzzing about in the Serengeti following grazing animals and looking for nice fresh dung. When they see some, they land and burrow into it, building a ball of dung and soil. The beetle then turns, stands on its head, and rolls the ball away using its back legs. After traveling a distance from a meter to a hundred meters, the beetle finds a suitable patch of soil, digs a tunnel, rolls the dung ball down and lays an egg on the dung. Then the adult emerges, fills in the hole and flies away to repeat the cycle. These amazing creatures roll away up to 75 percent of the dung dropped in Serengeti. When soil researchers dug pits on the Serengeti plains, they found 15-20% of the soil was made up of buried dung balls. The huge amounts of dung and soil moved by these creatures serves to fertilize the soil, loosen the soil, and open up areas on the surface for grass to grow.

Some dung beetles are generalists, while some others are specialists on different types of dung. Thus, there are wildebeest dung beetles, elephant dung beetles, and some that will use any type of dung. Not much is known about the dung beetles in Serengeti other than measurements of their dung-removal. One person who did research on them found over a hundred species in a single morning of collecting. You can tell a beetle from other insects because of its “Elytra”, which are a specialized front pair of wings. These wings are hard and are folded back over the body as protection for the body and the flying wings underneath.

Elephant Shrew and Buffalo Weaver

Elephant Shrew

They may have the same name, but the African elephant and the elephant shrew could not be more different. The elephant is huge, weighing up to 6000 kg and lives for 50-60 years. The elephant shrew lives for only one year and weighs only 50g. This group of shrews has an extended pointed face, ending in a long, flexible nose; giving them their name. Elephant shrews, unlike rats and mice do not dig burrows. They, instead, clear tracks or raceways in the riverine or thicket floor litter, with well hidden observation points at the ends. Like many shrews, they eat insects, and depending on the species will find them on the top of fallen leaves and grass, or by flipping over leaves to find what is underneath.

Elephant shrews find their food during the day and are vulnerable to birds of prey and snakes as a result. To protect themselves, elephant shrews maintain a small territory which they defend from all other shrews of the same sex, and they learn that territory very well. When threatened, they will bounce very quickly on their back legs along one of their pathways and into a hidden safe spot. Unlike rats, elephant shrews do not produce many babies. Average gestation for their litters is two months, followed by only a single month until the offspring is fully adult and able to breed itself. The average female will have only two, sometimes three litters in her single, fast paced year of life.

Buffalo Weaver

The male buffalo weaver, like the full-sized Cape Buffalo, can be very particular about its personal space. Among the bushes and the long grass, keep an active ear open for their warning call of “skwieeeeeeeer”. The white-headed buffalo weaver males call alone from tree tops, at their circular grassy nests or while out and about looking for insects.

Both sexes of this bird have a white head and chest, orange leading-edges on their wings and their rump, white wing flashes, all on a black-background bird. They often nest in colonies, sometimes for several years, so the old and new grass nests make the tree look old and decrepit with age. The most common place to see this bird is as a flash flying up from dense grass to a tree above. Despite its interesting name, buffalo weavers have nothing to do with full-sized buffalo.

Leopard Tortoise

We have been sitting, legs dangling from the open door of our Landrover for about an hour, watching a spectacular leopard chase. The action has been unbelievable, the speeds unheard of, the combatants now exhausted. Before us is the mating chase of two leopard tortoises. The male, about half the size of the female and looking a bit tired is lying in the sunlight and warming up. The female is about a meter ahead and is munching on some yellow flowers.

Leopard tortoises are a common site in Serengeti crossing roads and feeding on bits of green vegetation. They are characteristically highly domed and tan in color with distinctive leopard-like spots.

If the male can catch this female and manage to hold on as she charges away through the bushes, they will mate and she will gestate for a few weeks. She will then dig a hole about a foot across, deposit 6-15 eggs, and cover the hole with soil. Breeding goes on all year, with a peak in the rainy season, and a brood of eggs buried about once a month. After 10-15 months of incubation, the young tortoises will emerge and go immediately into hiding. Only after 3-5 years when they are large enough to escape being crushed by lions and hyenas, the young tortoises will come out into the open.

Leopard tortoises eat green grass and herbs, and will occasionally chew on bones or hyena feces to get calcium for their shells. With their strong defenses, they have almost no predators other than humans and bush fires. These tortoises can live up to 75 years in captivity and can reach 30 inches in length or more in Serengeti National Park.

If you see a leopard tortoise on the road, stop and help it across. Tortoises are killed each year by inattentive drivers. If you pick one up, notice the ticks holding on to the edges of the plates that match the leopard-print exactly. You can tell if your tortoise is a boy or a girl by looking at the belly. If it is flat, then it is a female. If it is cupped, then it is a male; because boys and girls have to meet each other somehow.

The Human Factor & the Houbara Bustard

Of Birds and Bombs

Mary Anne Weaver

APF Reporter Vol.20 #4 Index

I never thought I would ever want to return to Dalbandin, a little desert town of some five thousand people in the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It is one of the least memorable places I have ever been, situated uncomfortably in the middle of nowhere. It has mud-baked streets and a teeming bazaar, and clusters of tiny mud houses that are dwarfed by the soaring minarets of a white marble mosque, which had been built a number of years ago by the Saudi Arabian Defense Minister, Prince Sultan. The town’s economy is based on grazing and smuggling, and every man seems to be armed. Dalbandinians are outnumbered by Afghan refugees two to one.

The Government Guesthouse where I stayed, during a December visit a few years ago, is a low-slung building with peeling green walls and a concrete floor, covered here and there by straw mats. There was no heat, and it was freezing cold. There was no running water, no electricity, no coffee, no butter, no herbal tea. “But if we are fortunate, Madam, we may have a few hours of electricity tonight,” the caretaker of the unfortunate building, Rahim Bux, told me as soon as I arrived. He explained that Dalbandin had no electricity; the town’s center operated on generators provided by the provincial government and by Prince Sultan. “But the Saudi generators stopped working after a year,” he said. “And the government generators never worked at all.”

Now, as I sat in the falcon market in Doha, the capital of the tiny but strategic Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, a falconer whom I happened to meet by chance said to me, “The problem, Madam, the real problem is in Dalbandin.”

It was early January, and Dalbandin, even though it was just across the Strait of Hormuz, seemed very far away. But it was connected to Qatar in two very symbolic ways: the U.S. war in Afghanistan, including the bombing campaign, was being assisted here as it was being assisted there. Every morning, at precisely five o’clock, American warplanes roared over Doha Bay — and over my hotel — giant birds, with wings outstretched, carrying their lethal cargo of bombs. The other link that connected Qatar and Pakistan was a more esoteric one: and it, too, involved a bird.

Indeed, I had come to Dalbandin in search of the houbara bustard, an endangered species of a fast-flying and cursorial desert bird that migrates to Pakistan each autumn — via Afghanistan and Iran — from the former Soviet Union and from the Central Asian steppes. But the year I came, and this year, too, the bird was late, again — causing any number of crises for the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

For it was the Foreign Ministry that awarded dozens of special permits to Arab dignitaries to hunt the bird each year, despite the fact that Pakistanis have been prohibited from killing the houbara since 1972. Yet each season, which lasts from November until March, their countryside is carved up, like a giant salami into ever smaller parts. Some sheikhs — among them the Saudi Minister of Defense — receive permits that cover thousands of square miles. No other hunters may cross the invisible line that separates Prince Sultan’s personal hunting grounds from those of, for example, Sheikh Zayed al-Nahayan, the President of the United Arab Emirates, or the Dubai leader, Sheikh Maktoum. At least, in principle, that is the rule.

Many Pakistanis are puzzled by the royal hunts, and can’t really explain why, with the arrival of the houbara, scores of Middle Eastern potentates — Presidents, ambassadors, ministers, generals, governors — descend upon their country in fleets of private plans. They come armed with computers and radar, hundreds of servants and other staff, customized weapons, and priceless falcons, which are used to hunt the bird. But then the houbara bustard has been a fascination to the great sheikhs of the desert for hundreds of years.

By the 1960s, it had been hunted almost to extinction in the Middle East. The kings, sheikhs, and princes hurriedly dispatched scouting parties abroad. They recruited British and French scientists to attempt to breed the houbara in captivity. But none of their endeavors solved their most pressing problem: Where could they hunt the houbara bustard now?

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Africa seemed the most promising hunting grounds. But the sheikhs quarreled with Colonel Qaddafi, and he forbade them to come to Libya to hunt; they quarreled even more strongly with the Iranian mullahs, who, in a sweeping proclamation, banned the houbara hunts. So did the government of Tunisia. Egypt was more accommodating, but the houbara population had been severely reduced there, too. Afghanistan had an abundance of houbara, but then the Soviet Army invaded, and the ardently anti-Soviet Persian Gulf sheikhs simply refused to deal with the Communist infidel. Only Pakistan and Morocco — and, to a lesser extent, Algeria — remained as preferred hunting grounds.

Now, in the falcon market in Doha, as we sat in a large circle in overstuffed armchairs, bringing a traditional majlis to mind, and sipped cups of sugary tea, the shop’s owner went to a large, rectangular plot which was covered with sand, and retrieved a hooded saker which is used in the houbara hunts. He brought it to us for inspection: the bird perched nobly, upright on his arm. As the morning progressed, and he and other trainers passed by us one by one, all with priceless falcons on their arms, I remembered something that Dr. Mohammed Hasan Rizvi, a leading Pakistani eye surgeon and conservationist, had told me about the royal houbara hunts during an earlier trip toPakistan.

Since Dr. Rizvi was said to be extremely close to the sheikhs, I had asked him why the houbara bustard was of such fascination to them.

“It’s the contest between the houbara and the falcon,” he’d replied. “The fascination is in the flight; it can go on for miles. The falcon is the fastest bird on earth, and the houbara is also fast, both on the ground and in the air. It is also a clever, wary bird, with a number of tricks. The sheikhs fall apart when they see the houbara. They follow the bird helter-skelter in their customized cars — brand new Mercedes 250s is what they used to bring. I hunted with the then Crown Prince (now the ruler) Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai. Within twenty minutes, our muffler broke off. Even with a vehicle that the Sheikh had had so carefully customized — it had special springs and shock absorbers, and higher, heavy tires — a Mercedes is not meant for the desert, and we traveled like a tank.” He paused for a moment, and then he said, “In the old days, it was so much more refined. You would see their caravans for miles along the roads, and the roads were perfumed. King Khalid. Prince Naif. Sheikh Rashid. They were real falconers.”

He paused for a moment, and then he went on, “All their falcons have names. They’re named either for great Arab heroes or famous falcons of the past. Some years ago, when I went out with one of the sheikhs, his favorite falcon was lost. He sat for four days in the middle of his camp, calling out his falcon’s name. Can you imagine? This was the president of a country, and he did nothing but sit and shout ‘Mubarak’ into the wilderness.”

Thinking of Dr. Rizvi, I couldn’t help but recall a feudal landlord I’d met at a lavish dinner in Karachi for one of the visiting sheikhs a few years before. He, too, had been fascinated by the royal houbara hunts and had told me then, “They’re the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, but they’re like a religion to the sheikhs. They’re out in the desert from dawn to dusk, covered with dirt and dust. The driver is submerged in one of those jeeps, as if he were in an A.P.C. The sheikh sits next to him in an elevated seat that swivels at a hundred and eighty degrees. I guess it’s a good hobby, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?” I asked him.

He looked somewhat startled, then said, “My lady, these Arabs eat the houbara for sexual purposes — they think it’s an aphrodisiac!”

As I pondered the mysterious ways of the desert, I puzzled over why the falconer I had met earlier in the day had been so distressed about what was happening in Dalbandin. The main thing I could remember about it was that it was the closest town, thirty-five miles away, from a place called Yak Much, which then, and now, was the Saudi Defense Minister’s personal hunting ground. As a result, the Saudi royal hunters–who usually hunted two to three thousand birds during their monthlong stay–had given the residents of Dalbandin two generators (which, of course, didn’t work), a mosque (which they didn’t need), and an airport (which was used almost exclusively by the hunters themselves — exclusively, that is, until this year’s season by which time the government of Pakistan had granted the U.S. military sole use of it.)

And this, of course, was the falconer’s major cause of distress. For, with the American bombing of Afghanistan, Dalbandin and its sleepy airport had been jolted alive. There was a constant din as B-52 bombers, C-130 transports, and KC-10 air refueling planes landed and took off from the airfield’s runways, which sprawled for forty-five hundred feet. U.S. military men came and went from its low-slung terminal. The town’s smugglers were apoplectic. The guesthouse was full. And royal hunters throughout the Persian Gulf were furious.

For despite the sheikhs’ support (in principle that is) for the U.S war in Afghanistan, they were not at all convinced that the bombing should originate from one of their own private, hunting airfields. And even though the airport in Dalbandin had been built originally by the British, during the Second World War, it had been expanded and modernized by the Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan, not to accommodate the war in Afghanistan, but to accommodate the Saudi royal hunters, whose numbers had increased over recent years, as had the number of houbara they bagged and shipped back to the kingdom, in specially designed refrigerated trucks, aboard C-130s, which had been reconfigured expressly for the houbara hunts.

Yet now, at the very time that the houbara should be arriving in Pakistan, its numbers had been dramatically reduced. And, despite contrary claims of conservationists, many sheikhs were convinced that the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan had disoriented it.

©2003 Mary Anne Weaver