Brian Gratwicke: Endangered Ferrets Born From Father Who Died 9 Years Ago

This little ball of fluff is a marvel of modern science. It was born in June at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo as part of a species-breeding program that has produced more than 500 animals for reintroduction into the wild. Blackfooted ferrets faced extinction in the 1980’s due to the eradication of prairie dog towns by cattlemen and loss of prairie habitat to agriculture and disease. In order to prevent their extinction, conservationists embarked on an ambitious recovery program that grew the population of wild ferrets from 18 in 1981 to more than 700 wild animals today.

Realizing the potential risks of inbreeding depression resulting from a population bottleneck like this, scientists took the added precaution of freezing sperm from valuable founding fathers in 1997 (Yes, I know it’s a horrible pun). These samples were retrieved to reintroduce some poorly represented genes back into the population. Modern reproductive science has effectively extended the sex life of this little guy’s father by 9 years. And the ferrets are lucky that scientists had both the foresight to store the sperm in a gene bank back in 1997, and the cutting-edge means to use it today.

Still not convinced that ferrets are cute? Try this ferret cam!

Brian Gratwicke: Known Western Lowland Gorilla Population Estimates Double

It’s an announcement that shocked the conservation community: In a world of satellite imagery, where there are no longer any blank spots on maps, wildlife conservationists discovered a new population of 100,000 Western Lowland Gorillas in the swamp forests around Lake Tele Community Reserve in the Republic of the Congo. Their find effectively doubles the previous global population estimates. 

Acting on rumors from local hunters, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society hiked 50 miles from the nearest road, and stumbled across hundreds of critically endangered animals going about their every day lives. They counted the gorillas’ nighttime nests, coming up with densities as high as 8 animals per square km, which are extraordinary densities for this species.

“We knew from our own observations that there were a lot of gorillas out there, but we had no idea there were so many,” said Dr. Emma Stokes, who led the survey efforts in Ndoki-Likouala. “We hope that the results of this survey will allow us to work with the Congolese government to establish and protect the new Ntokou-Pikounda protected area.”

This is very refreshing news from a beleaguered part of the world and reflects the work of truly dedicated individuals who are already working on securing protection for these magnificent animals.

The picture above and the video below are among the first from the Congo region. Rejoice and enjoy.

Brian Gratwicke: Name A Species After Yourself!

Here is something you won’t find in a Neiman Marcus catalogue this Christmas. How would you like to immortalize a friend by naming a species after him or her? It is an idea that appeals to many people, but the honor is usually only bestowed on people who have devoted a lifetime of inquiry and service to taxonomy or conservation.

With 1/3 to ½ of all the world’s amphibians facing extinction, some innovative scientists are desperately trying to build financial capacity to tackle the extinction crisis by auctioning off the right to name several newly discovered frog species. Jeff Corwin and Amphibian Ark hope to raise crucial conservation funds to help build a captive breeding facility for the most highly endangered species of amphibians in Ecuador.

This unnamed frog species belongs to the genus Osornophryne a genus endemic to mountains in Columbia and Ecuador. Right now it’s going for a steal at $1,700. But with two weeks left on the bidding, I don’t think this one will come cheap. Anyone fancy naming it Osornophryne mixneri? Or how about an activist frog, Osornophryne equalrights? Place your bid here

Brian Gratwicke: The Importance of Urban Wildlife

Since the age of 9, I knew that I was going to grow up to be a wildlife conservationist. This is largely because some of my very first, most formative experiences were spent with my best friend catching mosquito fish from a pond at the bottom of our road. Wildlife was easy to come by in my hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe. Each morning on my way to school, I cycled past zebras and impala living in Delta Park, a property housing several corporate banking headquarters. Elephants and giraffe were never more than a 20 minute bike-ride from my back door, and my first birding experiences were spent mist-netting black coucals and fire-crowned bishops in Marlborough vlei. In my own back yard I had built 8 fish ponds where African toads flourished and croaked incessantly, keeping my parents awake all night.

You can imagine, therefore, that adjusting to super-urban Washington DC was tough for an African boy. Initially, I spent most of my time at the National Zoo, comforted by the incredible Amazonia exhibit. This indoor rainforest is a sensory overload, with free-ranging monkeys, tanagers and sloths swinging in the canopy above your head while giant Amazon fishes swim in pools below. While I was walking through the Zoo I would often see wild deer wandering around the grounds, and when I discovered the nesting colony of black-crowned night herons, my zoo experience became transformed into a wildlife experience. I began visiting the zoo as much to see the wild animals as the exotic creatures assigned to keepers.

Intrigued by the native wildlife, I began to explore other parts of the city. To my surprise, I discovered foxes hunting ducks on Roosevelt Island, white squirrels emerging from hibernation on the Mall, and hawks hunting pigeons above the Dupont Circle Metro stop. I later learned that my hero, E.O. Wilson, had his formative wildlife experiences in Rock Creek Park. Frederick Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture designed this incredible National Park. It extends like a green finger, right into the heart of downtown Washington DC. Today it is a wildlife corridor for coyotes, deer, foxes, migrating songbirds, and each spring thousands of herring migrate up the river to breed.

Few people living in Washington DC will ever have the privilege of seeing polar bears in Churchill, or tigers in Kanha National Park, but with very little effort they can observe fat cormorants on the banks of the Potomac River as they scarf down the bounty of migrating spring herrings. It is these personal encounters that make people value wildlife. And if wildlife becomes a priority in people’s personal value systems, then it makes life easier for conservationists working to save the tigers and polar bears. This is why a group of my friends got together and created a web based photography project www.dcnature.com that showcases the incredible wildlife living in the Nation’s Capital. Hopefully we’ll be able to engage a few budding E.O. Wilson’s out there and give them a venue to share their passion for nature with others, or touch someone who may consider making a donation to a wildlife charity.

Click here to share your own wildlife photos taken in the nation’s capital.

Brian Gratwicke: Mugabe, Zimbabwe and Wildlife

For the last 10 years, Zimbabwe has been in the grip of a downward economic vortex. Most citizens set aside their desires to make Zimbabwe a better place, focusing instead on surviving to the next day when basic political conditions like property rights, the rule of law, freedom of expression, and an independent judiciary were undermined.

Yesterday, however, Zimbabweans voted in a general election that is one of the first windows of opportunity for political change in the last 8 years. In spite of the fact that the pre-election conditions have been grossly unfair, early results are pointing to an MDC (opposition) landslide win and it appears that Mugabe is having more trouble than he anticipated subverting the will of the people. According to the BBC:

An MDC spokesperson] said the electoral commission was planning to announce that Mr Mugabe had won 52% of the vote - just enough to avoid a run-off. The MDC would not accept these results, he said. Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga denied the polls would be rigged and said the president would accept defeat. "We don't expect to lose... It's going to be a very tight contest and if he loses, you have to accept," he told the BBC. Mr Matonga also denied rumours that Mr Mugabe had gone to Malaysia or was planning to impose a state of emergency. Riot police have been patrolling the capital, Harare, and other urban areas and residents have been told to stay indoors. A senior Zanu-PF source has told a BBC contributor that security officials met on Sunday to decide who should tell Mr Mugabe he had lost, with some refusing to take the job.

Apart from the immediate humanitarian issues, political change is particularly important to Zimbabwe’s wildlife, much of which has been poached and destroyed over the last 10 years. In a country where the commercial agricultural sector has been decimated, wildlife through tourism and hunting operations has the potential to form up to 16% of the GDP. This economic sector requires very little financial outlay, just restoration of the rule of law and good wildlife management practices. Restoring populations of Zimbabwe’s rich mammal fauna like giraffes, zebras, eland, impala, wild dogs and rhinos will take time, and so will tourists' bruised confidence in the country. Compared to the other economic sectors which may require years of complex legal battles and unresolved disputes to sort out, however, the 5-10 year timeframe and minimal investments needed for recovery of this economic sector should be a no-brainer for the new government.

Help is also available from the foreign conservation NGO’s that are eyeing out a ‘virgin’ African country with good infrastructure and a great potential ‘bang for their conservation buck’ if they can quickly establish an on-the-ground presence. They can see that Zimbabwe has a huge amount of potential and they are eager to take credit for re-building what was the continent’s greatest conservation success story. Should Mugabe have the good sense to relinquish his 28-year grip on power, the new government led by Morgan Tsvangirai should make recovery of Zimbabwe’s rich wildlife heritage an early priority. For the last 4 years I have worked with a group of 200+ conservationists from Zimbabwe established to document the decline of Zimbabwe’s wildlife populations and to conduct initial policy assessments for recovering the wildlife industry.

Brian Gratwicke is a regular contributor to davidmixner.com. Gratwicke is a Rhodes Scholar who is in exile from Zimbabwe.

Brian Gratwicke: Can captive-bred lions ever be released into the wild?

The latest trend in Southern Africa is farming large cats so that their cubs can be hand-raised by humans, enabling tourists can walk with them. While I have no fundamental objection to people getting their Joy Adamson fix from captive animals and paying for it, I do object to these walk-with-the lions outfits posing as conservation organizations.

A recent exposé in the Sunday Times found that one of these outfits claiming to raise lions for release back into the wild are actually rearing them to sell to hunters who pay nearly $40,000 for a canned hunt. I personally find the idea of paying $40,000 to shoot a tame lion distasteful, but it falls so far outside the realms of conservation that I don’t like to waste too much time fretting about what other people do for kicks.

The notion that lions and tigers can be captive bred and released into the wild is very popular; there are even some South China Tigers being ‘re-wilded’ in South Africa as we speak. The fact that these outfits claim to release their animals into the wild for conservation benefit does, however, beg the question -“how realistic is it to re-introduce wild lions into the wild?” In fact, a group of real conservationists has encountered these issues so frequently that they officially voiced their own concerns about the practice. Paula White, Craig Packer and Luke Hunter write in this letter arguing against lion farming:

… hand rearing of lion cubs will ensure that these animals are imprinted to humans, and that they will thereafter lack natural avoidance behaviors. Teaching hand reared cubs to hunt as sub-adults will not decrease their dependence on humans, nor will it alter their imprinted behaviors. Indeed, semi-tame lions may be as dangerous as wild lions. Recently (August, 2006) in South Africa, three 2½ year-old lions escaped from a game farm and killed two workers. The lions were obtained as cubs and raised by hand. In Tanzania, wild lions kill nearly one hundred people each year, the majority of them villagers. Alteration of lion behavior through captive breeding, hand rearing, and release of semi-tame animals or their habituated offspring is both dangerous and irresponsible when considering the safety and welfare of humans and their livestock in Zambia.

In Kenya, even Joy Adamson’s famous lions proved to be too much to handle. Elsa – the star of the book BORN FREE - raised her own cubs having no fear of humans. They turned into serial cattle raiders. At best, re-introduced lions will be killed out of revenge in human-wildlife conflict episodes. At worst, a human becomes easy prey and someone dies. Neither of these scenarios is good for human-wildlife relations. They even fall short on the conservation equation. My take on the matter is to focus the conservation efforts and funds on real wild lions. The ‘walk with lions’ schemes should be taken at face value - they are basically circus shows with a twist.

Brian Gratwicke: Human-Jaguar Conflict in Uaxactún

I was lucky enough to escape to a hot place for Christmas—a country where they speak a different language, name their money after a bird and have an abundance of sunshine, washed-up hippies, and give away bundles of glossy, USAID–funded ‘official’ travel guides that resemble the classified sections of a phone book.

As we were stepping of a plane in the town of Flores, Guatemala, One of the first images that greeted us was a billboard displaying a jaguar, a keel-billed toucan and blue-morpho butterfly that had been photo-shopped onto an image of a Mayan temple. Although they adorn most of the signs to hotels and are heavily advertised on theoretical wildlife lists for special $10 nighttime tours of the temples, these large cats are notoriously elusive creatures. Most people will never encounter even a track in the wild.

Our first full day at Tikal was spent rubbing elbows with backpackers and wiry-haired, self-proclaimed gringo ‘shamans’ who were performing ceremonies on some pretty spectacular Mayan temples and tramping through forests filled with spider monkeys and the exotic bird sounds of the Montezuma Oropendula. The temples were spectacular, but we had envisioned a vacation a bit more off-the-beaten-track, so we hitched a ride with some curio sellers another 20km further into the jungle. We arrived in a little frontier town called Uaxactún (sounds like “Washington”) which consisted of a sawmill and about 200 families living on either side of an abandoned airstrip once used by archaeologists to excavate an extensive complex of Mayan ruins.

We received wonderful hospitality at an old archaeological research station turned hotel and the next day we were delighted to find that we had the ruins to ourselves. After a blissful day of leisurely walks among the ruins and twitching birds, we bought some sweet, cold sodas in glass bottles that were being sold from a little store plastered with faded Wildlife Conservation Society posters telling the inhabitants that they should protect their jaguars. That night, at about 3 AM, afterthe crackle of Christmas fire-works from the village had long died down, we were awoken by a loud almost barking sound followed by a continuous growl made on inhaling and exhaling breaths that sounded like a saw being drawn through a dry plank. After several minutes of keen listening I realized it was in fact a jaguar calling from the ruins that we had been wondering around earlier in the day. I lay in bed, listening blissfully to the sound of a wild place and imagined the magnificent cat perched on a temple silhouetted against the brilliant disc of the full moon.

The next day, still exhilarated from the previous night’s chorus, we spoke to our host, Doña Neria. She shrugged off what we had heard and followed with a story about how she was walking her black Labrador one evening on the outskirts of the airstrip and a jaguar leapt out and killed it in right front of her. She was clearly still upset, and it was no isolated incident: in the last year alone, jaguars had killed 26 of the village dogs and occasionally some of the pigs.

It dawned on me that this was indeed a frontier town of subsistence hunters and foresters. The laws made in Guatemala City to protecting these magnificent cats mean little to the villagers here. Once again, I thought of the faded Wildlife Conservation Society poster peeling off the side of the bottle-store and prayed that the conservation message had sunk in deep enough to create some tolerance for this predator. Unfortunately it’s the big predators that tend to disappear from frontier settlements first--either they are hunted out of revenge in relation to a conflict situation, they are poached by accident in snares set for other wildlife, or their natural prey-base becomes so depleted from subsistence hunters that they starve or switch to becoming dog-snatchers. While attempts can be made to build tolerant attitudes in places like Uaxactún, the best thing for large predators are vast landscapes devoid of people—an increasingly rare phenomenon in today’s crowded world.

Brian Gratwicke: Tigers Bounce Back in the Indian Terai

Reading the news headlines about tiger conservation can sometimes be a depressing exercise. In the last six months, a gloomy picture has been painted for tigers, particularly in India where a new census revealed that only 1,300 to 1,500 tigers remain- about half of the previous official estimates.

What these reports don’t reveal is that tiger populations have not actually declined by 50 percent; rather, it is more likely that the old census numbers were inaccurate due to the use of pug-mark (footprint) counts, where often the same tiger is counted more than once. Eric Dinerstein, WWF’s chief scientist, summed up the problem of pug-mark counting by saying: “Tiger footprints are as difficult to tell apart as human footprints on a beach.” The new tiger census tools – occupancy surveys and camera-trap counts – which were used in India’s latest census are far more reliable and are much more likely to yield accurate results than pug-mark counts.

If India can more accurately measure its tiger populations with these new census tools, then it can conduct better conservation that is informed by good science. And while India continues to face serious tiger conservation challenges, it also has some amazing success stories that often miss the mainstream press.

I recently spoke with Bivash Pandav, a talented conservationist working in the Terai region at the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. He told me that tigers are returning to the Chilla Range in Rajaji National Park, where in 2004, the Indian government completed a voluntary resettlement program to move the park’s residents to new smallholdings outside the park. Once the people were gone, tigers almost immediately returned to the vacated area and Bivash was lucky to have photographed a lactating tiger in this area (bottom), “This was particularly exciting to me,” said Bivash “because it meant that tigers had not only returned, but they were breeding too.” Later he was rewarded with a photo of the same tigress who wandered past one of his camera traps, as if showing off her two beautiful cubs (top). In all, Bivash estimates that the Chilla range now is inhabited by six tigers.

Further down the Terai landscape, Bivash drew my attention to another success story in the forest corridor designed to link Bardia National Park in Nepal to the Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary in India. His camera traps captured photos of tigers, and even rhinos, regularly using this corridor as a ‘wildlife highway’ between the protected areas in India and Nepal.

These two success stories illustrate that tigers are a resilient species and that simple conservation actions such as removing disturbances from core protected areas or joining core areas together with habitat corridors will allow tiger numbers to increase rapidly. And with the new census tools, scientists are now well-equipped to accurately measure these population resurgences.

Brian Gratwicke is our regular environmental contributer to this site. He was a Rhodes Scholar. He was originally from Zimbabwe and now resides in Washington, DC.