POSITION(S) WANTED
Tailpiece
Hi again,
Herewith, some snippets from various sources.
We have the Gameranger website up and have updated the information on it. Again I appeal to you to send me items to distribute to our members for both the Cleft Stick and to be posted on the web site. If we can make it interesting more people will look at it and we will become a better known association. It is your magazine and website, so ensure it gets the news that you would like to see in it.
Please let me have any changes to your physical address, phone no. or e-mail address to keep the database up to date.
Thanks to all of you who have made the effort. Please will any of you who know of members who do not get this “electric” Cleft~Stick, & have access to e-mail, pass their address along to me.
News From The Ivory Coast
News from Joachim Kouame from the Ivory Coast
Dear Tim and all
Think for your attention. Now I can check my emails every days, because there is now a cybercafé in the town where I work. So I could respond to all your mails promptly.
I you all know, the resolution of the ivorian crisis is now in the hands of President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. A summit has been held in Pretoria the last days and we hope that this time peace come back. The implication of Thabo Mbeki in the resolution of this crisis is very appreciated and I would like to think all the people of South Africa for their support and help.
As I told you I am now the head of the Forest Police Unit of the Eastern part of the country.
I hope I could meet all of you very soon.
Regards.
Joachim.
Large Predatop Workshops
Tim Snow asks for any members who can attend these large predators workshops.
Please if necessary put out a special bulletin of the Cleft Stick to request members in the Polekwane, Potchefstroom and Bloemfontein areas to attend these workshops if possible. We need them to make contact so we can send them some background information.
Thanks
Tim
The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism hereby invites interested and affected parties to attend the following workshops to discuss the norms and standards and regulations relating to large predators, published in Government Gazette no. 27214.
The dates, venues and times for the three large predator workshops are as follows: 18 April 2005 - Polokwane @ Bolivia Lodge. Time: 09:00 Tel. (015) 263 6206
20 April 2005 - Potchefstroom @ Elgro Hotel Convention Centre, 60 Wolmerans Street. Time: 09:00 Tel. (018) 297 5411
22 April 2005 - Bloemfontein @ Protea Hotel, Landmark Lodge – Sanlam Plaza, East Burger Street. Time: 09:00 Tel. (051) 403 8000
To facilitate the finalisation of arrangements relating to the venues and lunch you are required to register with Ms Sonja Meintjes by means of an e-mail: smeintjes@deat.gov.za or fax: (012) 320 7026 on or before 14 April 2005. Please do not reply to largepredator@deat.gov.za
Travel and accommodation costs will be for participants own accounts. Lunch will be provided.
Giant Sable Sighted
The picture is the first known picture of the Giant sable taken for about 25 years. It was taken by Pedro vaz Pinto using a trailmaster camera positioned over a salt lick in Cangandala National Park in Angola. The species is now known to survive in both Cangandala Special reserve and Luando where spoor and fresh dung were found last year by an expedition led by vaz Pinto.
The picture can be viewed or downloaded from gameranger.org.
News From Keith Roberts
Hi Tim
Unfortunately I won’t be in SA at the time of the meeting so would like to make my apologies.
Been very busy with all the poaching here and making some head way now that the teams have some training and better equipment. Will put together an article on each one of our areas over this next year. Will proberly start with Maswa Game Reserve which borders on the western boundary of the Serengeti . Poaching is extremely high both in Maswa and Serengeti at the moment as the migration moves through so keeping us all busy.
Been chatting to a few more likely candidates about GRAA membership so hopefully will have a few more applications from up here.
Cheers
Keith Roberts
Warnings from the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment
Warnings from the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment....
Visit: www.futureworks.co.za
A landmark study released 30 March 2005 reveals that approximately 60 % of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth – such as fresh water, capture fisheries, air and water regulation, and the regulation of regional climate, natural hazards and pests – are being degraded or used unsustainably. Scientists warn that the harmful consequences of this degradation could grow significantly worse in the next 50 years.
“Any progress achieved in addressing the goals of poverty and hunger eradication, improved health, and environmental protection is unlikely to be sustained if most of the ecosystem services on which humanity relies continue to be degraded,” said the study, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) Synthesis Report, conducted by 1,300 experts from 95 countries. It specifically states that the ongoing degradation of ecosystem services is a road block to the Millennium Development Goals agreed to by the world leaders at the United Nations in 2000.
Although evidence remains incomplete, there is enough for the experts to warn that the ongoing degradation of 15 of the 24 ecosystem services examined is increasing the likelihood of potentially abrupt changes that will seriously affect human well-being. This includes the emergence of new diseases, sudden changes in water quality, creation of “dead zones” along the coasts, the collapse of fisheries, and shifts in regional climate.
The MA Synthesis Report highlights four main findings:
A number of Municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, have taken a significant proactive step towards managing the supplies of ecosystem services in their areas of jurisdiction:
FutureWorks! has assisted these Municipalities in the development of these plans and policies - which are some of the first of their kind in the world.
Check these projects out on our website and give us a call to find out how you can manage the supply of ecosystem services in your area !
www.futureworks.co.za
Regards,
Nicci Diederichs, Khulile Mavundla, Tony Markewicz, Myles Mander & Mava Ntanta
The Futureworks! Team
Making Environments Work for People.
Workshop on conserving our biodiversity heritage
Hi All
Please accept this invitation to investigate a new approach to conserving our biodiversity heritage. The workshop will be held at the Biodiversity Centre, South African National Biodiversity institute, Pretoria, the 16th and 17th of May 2005.
Yours sincerely
Brenda Daly
Conservation Breeding Specialist Group Southern Africa
Endangered Wildlife Trust
Email: brendad@ewt.org.za
Tel: 011 4861102
Fax: 011 4861506
War and Politics Threaten Congo`s Endangered Rhinos By MARC LACEY , March 28, 2005
ULU, Congo - If the endangered northern white rhinos are driven to extinction, which many experts predict, it will be politics, and not just poachers, that finishes them off.
With fewer than a dozen still alive in the wild, the northern white rhinoceros is considered by conservationists to be the most endangered large mammal on earth. Besides those found in zoos in San Diego and the Czech Republic, where they have not reproduced well, the rhinos are believed to exist only in Garamba National Park, a rugged place near the border with Sudan that is full of wildlife and lush vegetation but also men with guns.
"I do not believe that any rhinos will survive the year," predicted Thomas J. Foose, program director at the International Rhino Foundation, which is based in the United States and has been working for years in Garamba, the last refuge for the northern white rhino. The immediate culprits, according to conservation groups, are poachers from an offshoot of the janjaweed, the Arab militia groups that have been pillaging villages in the Darfur region of Sudan. Rather than attacking people, these militias are on a mission to make money. They steal over the border to kill elephants and rhinos, leaving the carcasses and taking the valuable tusks and horns, which are carried back in long donkey trains.
These militias have proved particularly violent and, as a result, difficult to combat. But the greatest threat to the rhinos is political, specifically a growing Congolese nationalism that has undercut protection efforts, including a last-ditch program to move five of the remaining animals to safety in Kenya.
That plan set off an anti-colonial uproar, with opponents likening it to the days when Congo exported its wealth to European nations, by force. Rumors circulated that foreigners were buying up the rhinos at low prices, paying off corrupt officials and spiriting the animals out of the country. One newspaper in Kinshasa, the capital, described the Western conservationists as "modern-day poachers," and Congolese politicians seized on the white rhino as a symbol of national pride, off limits to exploitive outsiders.
A decades-old Western-financed project to train and pay Congolese park rangers to fight off the poachers was abandoned after similar accusations surfaced that the Westerners were stealing the animals and selling them abroad, a charge that the Western conservation groups strongly deny.
"It is sad that politics, not poaching, will probably kill these rhinos," said Emmanuel de Merode, who was running the European Union project before it was shut down. White rhinos, known scientifically as Ceratotherium simum, weigh up to 6,000 pounds and are the second-largest land mammal species, behind the elephant. They get their name not from their color, experts say, but from the Afrikaans word weit, meaning wide, which was used to describe their mouths.
South Africa has a white rhino population of about 11,000, making them the most abundant kind of rhino in the world. But the going has been much tougher for the northern subspecies, which used to be found in several countries in eastern and central Africa.
The animals' decline has closely tracked Congo's chaotic past. There were anywhere from a thousand to several thousand of them when the country, then Zaire, gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Their numbers fell steadily over the decades, partly because of a long civil war in neighboring Sudan. As two armed insurrections ravaged eastern Congo in the 1990's, the population plummeted to around 30.
Other unique animals found in Congo have managed to endure the fighting. The population of mountain gorillas, also found in neighboring Uganda and Rwanda, has actually grown in recent years. The okapi, a bizarre-looking relative of the giraffe that is found here in Epulu, about 150 miles south of Garamba, is hanging on.
The fact that the northern rhinos survived this long is the result of an international conservation effort, now collapsed, that for decades had supported Congolese rangers, who had acted as bodyguards for the rhinos. The rhinos' horns are a valuable prize, sought after in Asia for their medicinal value, and in the Middle East, where they are carved into dagger handles.
The latest troubles began in 2003, with the outbreak of the Darfur conflict and the appearance of the Arab militias, which presented a new, more organized and far more deadly threat than did previous poachers. Last year, two South Africans who had been brought in as trainers for the rangers were wounded in their first clash with the poachers.
Three French security experts were then hired by the European Union last fall to lend the experience they had gained fighting poachers in the Central African Republic. But the last of them pulled out in recent weeks in the furor surrounding the failed attempt to send five of the animals to Kenya.
That deal, struck in January between conservationists and officials at the Congolese Institute for Conservation of Nature, was intended to give the rhinos a chance to breed in peace. The plan was to return them to Congo sometime in the future, to a more stable park.
"We believed the translocation of the rhino to a more secure locale in Kenya was absolutely vital," Mr. Foose said in a telephone interview from Indonesia.
But that plan is now as dead as the rhino carcasses that have been turning up regularly in Garamba.
Vice President Abdoulaye Yerodia had indicated that the government would support the plan, conservationists say, but there are four vice presidents in the country's transitional government as well as numerous ministers from an array of parties. Rarely do they agree on anything, and this was no exception.
Before a deal had been signed, groups like Fauna and Flora International and the International Rhino Foundation began trumpeting the relocation in press releases. Some Congolese politicians saw that as presumptuous.
"There was no official decision on this," said the information minister, Henri Mova Sakanyi, in a recent telephone interview. "There was a suggestion. Nobody should be announcing a government decision until there is a government decision."
With the prodding of political leaders, Congolese began to see the long-neglected rhino as a symbol of sovereignty that ought to remain on Congolese soil, dead or alive.
To make their point, angry residents living near Garamba grabbed machetes and joined mutinous rangers in roughing up the small group of foreigners working there. They disarmed the French security officers and briefly detained Kes Hillman-Smith and Fraser Smith, a couple who have worked for decades at the park, which Unesco has named a World Heritage Site.
Mr. Sakanyi said the government was hoping donors would put the same resources that were set aside to move the animals - more than $1 million - into protecting them in Garamba. "This country has to show that it is a sovereign nation able to protect its own wildlife as well as its own people and its cultural heritage," he said.
But conservationists, who maintain that the government has shown little commitment to the animals in the past, are wary about pumping money into Congo's notoriously corrupt government. The losers in the dispute are the rhinos, which remain for now "at the mercy of the poachers," Mr. Foose said.
India To Ban Vulture Death drug
The Indian government has confirmed their intent to phase out a veterinary drug responsible for the massive decline in vulture numbers, within the next six months. Diclofenac, used in southern Asia as a livestock treatment, is toxic to vultures when they feed on contaminated carcasses, causing kidney failure and death.
The drug is now proven to have been responsible for the near-total collapse of three species of vulture in south Asia – White-rumped Gyps bengalensis, Indian G. indicus and Slender-billed G. tenuirostris. The species are already locally extinct in several parts of the region, but were formerly among the commonest large birds of prey in the world.
Dr Debbie Pain, Head of International Research at the RSPB, commented, "An alternative livestock treatment needs to be found as soon as possible. Initial trials conducted in South Africa have raised hope that a drug already available on the Indian market may be a viable alternative to diclofenac, and of comparatively low toxicity to vultures."
Dr Asad Rahmani, Director of Bombay Natural History Society (BirdLife in India) added, "In taking the decision to phase out diclofenac, Prime Minister Mr Manmohan Singh has taken the most important step yet to save these fast-disappearing vultures. However, the battle is not yet over. We have to develop conservation breeding centres as a further safeguard for these magnificent lords of the sky."
BirdLife is appealing to the governments of Pakistan and Nepal to follow the lead of the Indian government in banning diclofenac. Without further concerted conservation efforts, we could soon be witnessing one of the most dramatic bird extinctions since the previously abundant Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius was lost at the beginning of the twentieth century.
POSITION(s) AVAILABLE
VACANCIES FOR PART-TIME STAFF, AT LAPALALA WILDERNESS SCHOOL, LIMPOPO
The Lapalala Wilderness School, which was founded by Clive Walker in 1985, and which has gained international recognition for the outstanding contribution it has made to enriching the lives of thousands of children through a greater knowledge and understanding of nature, wildlife and cultural heritage, is reopening in April 2005 with new staff and new facilities. Learners visiting the 36,000 ha malaria-free Lapalala Wilderness Reserve in the Waterberg Mountains in Limpopo Province will once again have an unrivalled opportunity to experience and enjoy spectacular scenery, towering krantzes and 90 km of rivers with crystal-clear water winding through the natural wilderness. There is a rich diversity of fauna and flora, with over 280 species of birds and a well-established population of both black and white rhino. From every point of view, it is an ideal outdoor classroom, situated in one of South Africa’s genuinely untransformed and unspoilt wilderness areas. The educational experience can be enhanced at the nearby Waterberg Environmental Centre with its cultural, natural history and rhino museum.
Vacancies exist for part-time trails guides and teachers to work at Lapalala for periods of five to eight days throughout the year. Candidates must have a genuine commitment to working with children of all age groups, particularly from previously disadvantaged communities, and should ideally have experience of leading and teaching adult groups.
Trail Guides: Preference will be given to candidates who are registered as nature guides with DEAT and have at least three years experience of leading small groups in the field. The candidates must be prepared to sleep out in the wilderness area.
Teachers based at the Wilderness School: The successful candidates should either be registered as a nature guide with DEAT with good verbal and written communication skills, or be a qualified teacher with at least two years experience in running environmental education programmes in the field.
Candidates are requested to submit, at any time during the year, a comprehensive CV with the names and addresses of three referees by post, fax or e-mail to Dr John Hanks, International Conservation Services, P.O. Box 254, Greyton 7233.
Phone & Fax: 028.254-9792; hanksppt@iafrica.com.
Job opening: Forest certification manager
Dear all,
Juliane Lemcke, our current Forest Certification Manager for Southern Africa has decided to relocate to Cape Town. She will be working for SGS on a sub-contract basis, focusing primarily on business development in Africa and conducting CoC audits in the Cape.
We would like to fill the vacancy for Forest Certification Manager as from May/June and would appreciate if you could distribute this email as widely as possible. Attached is a short job description for the position.
Any interested candidates can send their CV to
Many thanks
Michal Brink
Director: Qualifor
Short job description for FOREST CERTIFICATION MANAGER
The Forest Certification Manager will be responsible for:
Qualifications:
Relevant Tertiary Qualification (preferably forestry graduate)
Experience/Exposure required:
10 years industry and related experience ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 formal qualification is preferable
POSITION(s) WANTED
Sydney Nkhensani Shibambu
HI all
The EWT is trying to assist one of our Conservation Leadership Group graduates, Sydney Nkhensani Shibambu (please see CV attached), to find employment (temporary or otherwise). Sydney has obtained business admin and conservation diplomas through one our capacity building programmes (with the Makuleke Community) and he now urgently seeks employment and / or experiential training.
The work need not be in a conservation-related environment as he has business admin skills and has done well in this diploma. We can highly recommend Sydney and know he will be an asset to an organisation able and willing to give young people a chance.
Please contact Andre van Zyl of the Conservation Leadership Group on clg@ewt.org.za or myself if you can assist or know of someone else who can.
kind regards
Yolan Friedmann
Conservation Manager: Endangered Wildlife Trust
Programme Manager: Conservation Breeding Specialist Group (SSC/IUCN)
Southern Africa
Tel: + 27 (0) 11 486 1102 ext.234 / 082 990 3534
Fax: + (0) 11 486 1506
yolanf@ewt.org.za
www.ewt.org.za
Tailpiece-
An Irishman by the name of Paul McLean moves into a tiny hamlet in County Kerry, walks into the pub and promptly orders three beers. The bartender raises his eyebrows, but serves the man three beers, which he drinks quietly at a table, alone.
An hour later, the man has finished the three beers and orders three more. This happens yet again. The next evening the man again orders and drinks three beers at a time, several times. Soon the entire town is whispering about the Man Who Orders Three Beers.
Finally, a week later, the bartender broaches the subject on behalf of the town. "I don't mean to pry, but folks around here are wondering why you always order three beers."
"'Tis odd, isn't it?" the man replies. "You see, I have two brothers, and one went to America, and the other to Australia. We promised each other that we would always order an extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond."
The bartender and the whole town was pleased with this answer, and soon the Man Who Orders Three Beers became a local celebrity and source of pride to the hamlet, even to the extent that out-of-towners would come to watch him drink.
Then, one day, the man comes in and orders only two beers. The bartender pours them with a heavy heart. This continues for the rest of the evening -- he orders only two beers. Word flies around town. Prayers are offered for the soul of one of the brothers.
The next day, the bartender says to the man, "Folks around here, me first of all, want to offer condolences to you for the death of your brother. You know -- the two beers and all..."
The man ponders this for a moment, then replies, "You'll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well. It's just that I, meself, have decided to give up drinking."
Matter of Fact
This is an electronic newsletter of the Game Rangers' Association of Africa. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the Association, nor of the Editor. This is intended to be an exchange of news snips, ideas and communication between members. Newsletter content may be copied and re-distributed without authorisation. Correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at dyunnie@xsinet.co.za
