My first heroes were animal people.  When I went to zoos my heroes were the zoo keepers and when I watched animal documentaries the researchers were my heroes.  We all need amazing people to inspire us and that is why the new book Wildlife Heroes is so wonderful. 

The book includes 40 people overcoming impossible odds to save endangered species all over the world.  If you are looking for real heroes for your children to look up to look now further! 

The unique stories in this book of local communities becoming involved in anti-poaching, education and research efforts for wildlife in their own back yard are immeasurably inspiring!  In one story a young boy, Thia grew up in Northern Vietnam watching his village hunt the very species he fights to save today.  His passion to help a unique species called the pangolin will warm your heart!
 
I have had the honor of meeting many of the heroes in this book (including the authors) over the years and they inspire me to move forward in my own wildlife conservation work.  These are real people making a real difference! 

This book introduces readers to pollinator and amphibian decline and other environment issues that continue to threaten our world.  But it also offers great messages of hope.  In the last chapter Jack Hannah suggests ways the reader can help, and the good news is that by purchasing the Wildlife Heroes book you are already helping- 100 % of the proceeds go to the projects featured in the book.  A win for everyone!

Hope to see you at the Houston Zoo for our Wildlife Heroes weekend May 19th and 20th!

Cell phones have become a permanent fixture in our everyday lives. It’s one of the first things you look at in the morning, and the last thing you look at before sleeping. They keep us connected and help us in almost everything we do, but have you ever wondered about their impact on the environment?  

 Columbite-tantalite, or Coltan for short, is an essential element in the production of cell  phones,laptops, and many other electrical devices. This element is mined in the Congo, rapidly depleting the habitat of endangered gorillas and elephants.

In fact, eighty percent of the world’s known Coltan supply is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But fear not! There is something you can do to help. With technology constantly evolving, it is estimated that there may be around 500 million unused cell phones floating around the United States alone, with as many as 100 million added each year. Bring those outdated cellular devices to the Aeros game on Sunday, March 18 for Conservation Night and participate in our Cell Phone Recycling Program! Find the Houston Zoo table, turn in your old cell phone, and you will receive four tickets to the Aeros game on Sunday, April 15 and a kid’s pass to the Zoo!

Parts of your old devices can be reused to reduce the amount of Coltan that is mined in the Congo, preserving what is left of the depleted habitat of these amazing animals as well as reducing waste that ends up in landfills. You can also recycle old cell phones year-round by dropping them in our Cell Phone Recycling Bins at the front entrance of the Zoo! Not only will you be relieving yourself of some extra clutter, but the proceeds from all devices collected benefit the Houston Zoo’s Wildlife Conservation Fund. So come out and see us at the Aeros game on Sunday, March 18! We’ll see you there!

As told to me by a colleague in Malaysia:

The origins of the orang-utan

Long ago, human beings (or orangs) lived in the virgin jungles of Borneo. They stayed in groups, sharing their long houses, subsisting on plants and animals provided by Mother Nature. Within the different groups, this peaceful way of life was however troubled by all sorts of troubles and conflicts involving treacheries, malices, gossips and other problems that are specific to our species.

A peace-loving minority of orangs decided to split from the major group in order to escape the clamors of the village life and went deep into the jungle. They established a new home and lived happily for years. More and more orangs from their former community decided to join this idyllic existence, up to a point that the newly created village became overcrowded and full with problems that follow humans at all times and places (pollution, noise, habitat destruction, cruelty and meanness).

The original group decided to break up from their conspecifics one more time and wandered far away from this place. They established themselves on the mountains where life was paradise. Of course they didn’t stay on their own for long: more and more people joined them and troubled this peaceful existence. Fed up beyond belief, the original oranges decided that enough was enough: because they wouldn’t be able to find peace below the trees, they decided to climb up to the treetop and to settle down in the forest canopy. They also decided to not have any kind of relations with ground-dwelling orangs any more.

From this day on, this group became the orang-utans, or “people of the forest”.

Join us March 10th at The G Gallery in The Heights in support of orangutan conservation. http://www.houstonzoo.org/php/

Learn more about the effects of Palm Oil on Orangutan habitat: http://www.houstonzoo.org/palm-oil/

Livestock movement through the national forest has served to familiarize predators to new prey opportunities.  Bells that are placed on livestock for the purpose of locating them also alert predators that food is in the area.  Some predators that prefer to hunt at night have learned to follow these animals home only to threaten them once they are secured in the corral for the night.  Unthrifty animals which are experiencing some level of disease, some structural problem, physical injury, or giving birth are likely to not remain with the group thus singling themselves out and creating an ideal opportunity for the predator to act instinctually. 
As the culture rises from the economic struggles of recent years, a greater portion of the community are actually able to find employment.  When cultural shifts occur that result in greater levels of disposable income the people of that culture have a tendency to move away from agriculture.  Herders who were once respected and admired were also the livestock owners.  Now, ownership is likely to be by individuals with outside employment and the herding duties have been passed on to children or whatever adults are available and who will work for very low wages.  These herders are not as concerned as if the animals were actually their own.  Because of this, some livestock does get left behind in the forest, some are caught in snares, and some become unthrifty for extended periods before their problems are addressed.  All of these situations can result in an increased likelihood for predation.

Naturally, when predation occurs, the predator is the blame.  In reality, poor management is the most often the culprit and the predator is simply being opportunistic and instinctual.  Unfortunately, when animals are kept as a form of status or simply as a bank account, minimal management seems to be the norm.  This concept holds true even in developed countries.  There are two scenarios which by improved livestock management practices are adopted.  One of these is when livestock ownership is viewed as a business.  In this case you will find record keeping, selection, and culling to complement the improved animal husbandry.  The other case is when successful herding improves ones social status such as the case with the Maasai people of East Africa.
Many efforts have been made to identify challenges for the subsistence farmers and a variety of resources have been utilized in attempting to transition those farmers into more sustainable practices.  For the most part, these efforts are destined to fail because the problems are identified by people from outside of the targeted area.  Imagine if a stranger from a strange land visited you in your home and told you that what you are doing is wrong and you should change your daily life to adopt some new idea.  You are likely to agree while resources are being passed about but once the handouts stop you will quickly return to your familiar ways.  It is a comfort zone aspect that most people do not realize.  Like a horse that returns to a burning barn, people will revert back to their habits unless the desire to change lies within themselves.

Improvements with animal husbandry take extended periods of time before advantages are realized.  Initially you have the production cycle which spans the variety of seasons.  You also have the generational interval.  In the case of cattle from these more traditional parts of the world, the cattle generational interval can span eight years.  If the average age of puberty for female cattle is 36 months and the range can be 48 months, it might be as long as 12 years before a heifer calf born under a new management approach is grown, reproduces a female offspring, and the heifer calf reaches reproductive age herself.  This is a long time to wait and see if a foreign concept is worthwhile.  Most likely, the ideas will be abandoned long before any change can impact the business model.
A novel idea for addressing the wildlife/human/livestock conflict that exists proximal to the Sikumi Forest outside of Hwenge National Park is to develop a social status associated with successful herding and improved animal husbandry.  Creating status among a community can be almost immediate.  Providing recognition among peers for quality work identifies individuals as role models that others may aspire towards.  In addition, recognition among peers can create an atmosphere of friendly competition.  An award system that targets vanity and modernization such as an iPod or a laptop computer will appeal to the majority of individuals. 
Other efforts such as providing a hat or item of clothing which identifies individuals as being members of a social organization such as a cattlemen’s association is an opportunity for recruitment.  Once recruited, the individuals form a captive audience that has some willingness to address change and entertain new ideas.  Once the captive audience has been created, the direction and prioritization can and should be established from a governing body that was developed within the group.  This association can then entertain a variety of presentations from local conservation groups so that a more symbiotic relationship can exist with wildlife.  This association can also establish a relationship with anti-poaching units and create a greater conservation presence. 

John with local kids

From a business perspective, the organized livestock owners will have purchasing power due to the quantity of use that they represent.  This purchasing power can be applied towards vaccinations, antibiotics, pest control, animal identification materials, etc.  Another business aspect is through improved marketing potential associated with the volume of livestock that the group represents.
There are no easy answers.  People will need to want change before any change can be made.  Ideas that are new will need to be introduced to the community.  This introduction will need to be enthusiastic and have a leadership presence.  Once introduced, all ideas must be flexible enough to adapt to the local culture.  Regardless of the potential benefit, the livestock owners themselves must believe and commit to the ideas if the potential is to be realized.

Elephant in Hwange National Park. Credit P. Riger

Well, there is a first time for everything. I went to the store and purchased the August issue of Vanity Fair. Not for that perfumy smell we all enjoy, Society, Hollywood or event Style news. I am quite stylish as I am. This months magazine though features a quite good, and lengthy article on illegal poaching of african elephants for their tusks for the just as illegal ivory market.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/08/elephants-201108

It is hard enough to find solutions to protecting wildlife and habitat among the ever growing human population and our need for increased use of natural resources but poaching of elephants and rhinos for cosmopolitan uses leaves us with that shake your head helpless kind of feeling. And it would all come to a stop if certain cultures would realize they do not need an ivory necklace to match their evening gown or to take rhino horn to cure their medical ailments when an aspirin or the latest ED medication will do just fine.

The victims are not only the wildlife but the local people who are employed to do the killing. Many local cultures typically coexist with native wildlife. The article notes directly that the Maasai ”rarely killed elephants, because they revered them and regarded them as almost human, as having souls like us“. But the need, and promise of, money has turned native cultures into hunters of wildlife they once revered. When you live below the poverty level and at times on $1,000USD or less and people are paying you to hunt wildlife, the financial security of your family comes first.

Poaching will continue to grow as long as people living among these species live below the poverty level with little food or water for their families. But not if the product is worthless on the consumer market.

Frolicking in Hwange National Park. Credit P. Riger

The Vanity Fair article touches on the complex problem from user demand to politically sidestepping of the issues and some may not agree with the numbers and discussions but that someone has decided to print such a detailed piece on the trade, in such a widely circulated magazine is applaudable.  Zimbabwe, the Congo, Kenya, Sudan, Central African Republic – all mythical places in many people mind still, those of deepest darkest Africa. Well, there are people and wildlife both struggling to survive in these places and even knowing a little of their struggles could help.

Separate photo piece here: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/08/agony-and-ivory-slide-show-201108#slide=1

What can you do? Buy the magazine, read the article and then find a elephant conservation project to support either through the Houston Zoo or our friends at Save the Elephants.

I may not stray far from reading National Geographic or Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine often, but I did manage to shuffle a copy of Vanity Fair through the Krogers check-out line hidden between my Gatorade and cupcakes while mumbling to myself about my favorite color of nail polish and only half the line noticed. And I also learned what Kate and Will were up to on their latest  US visit…

Here are a list of the cities and institutions who have cast shame upon you and will probably do so again in 2011 if you do not go home and empty your drawers of all unneeded cell phones immediately. Numbers to the right are how many they collected for recycling.

1. Cincinnati Zoo, 10365
2. Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, 5061
3. San Diego Zoo, 2611
4. Calgary Zoo, 2510
5. Louisville Zoo, 2484
6. Philadelphia Zoo, 1904
7. Lion Country Safari, 1626
8. Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, 1626
9. Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (Zoo Atlanta), 1535
10. Bluegrass PRIDE, 1482

How is it that a canadian city, someone who has pride in Bluegrass and a handful of zoos in cities smaller than ours managed to collect more cell phones than Houston – we were around #15 at 1,150 phones recycled in 2010 by the way. There are 2 million of you living outside our doors, and everyone of you has a phone!

Well, Houston can do better and our zoo has a special drop box at the front gate for your unwanted cell phones, digital cameras, iPods, laptops, MP3′s, portable hard drives and handheld game systems or you can simply mail them to the Houston Zoo. How about running a company cell phone drive? Boy Scouts? Summer Camp Program? Come on, I know these broken electornics are just lying around in your house reminding you about that bad purchase or how you dropped your phone in a bowl of tomato soup!

I will say this one time and one time only Houstonians:

We are hoping after two to three years we will able to visualize the age structure for the elephant population in Lower Kinabatangan.

More great elephant stories will come from Sabah, but for now it is the best time to enjoy the giant prawn in Kinabatangan, so good bye for now!!

April: Benoit Goossens (right) and Baharudin Resake (left) setting up the satellite collar on Aqeela’s neck.

However, sometimes we are forced to work extra hard to find the elephant, just like now when most of forest part is covered with water. The elephant like to spend their time deep in the forest where we cannot access them during flooding season. We believe the reason they avoid being near the river is because the water is plenty inside the forest thus they can avoid human presence and disturbance by being in the forest.

Following elephants in the forest waist deep in water

Through our experience and after a long observation, we found out that the group size during the flooding season is also smaller compared to the dry season. Not much feeding signs and foot prints along the fresh tracks and it seems the elephant were continuously moving without stopping for feeding. We assume due the small number of individuals in the group, the elephants have less protection and this drives them to avoid the places that are not safe for them.

May 23rd: Aqeela and Liun, two adult elephant females which were collared on 3 October 2010 and 15 April 2011 respectively, are now together in Lot 3 of the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary

Bornean Elephant, Kinabtangan River

This week we will begin featuring updates from two very important projects on the island of Borneo focusing on Bornean elephants and a wild species of cattle called Banteng. These two species along with the Rhinoceros are the three largest animals on the island and act as “landscape architects” for the forest and surrounding wetlands.

The Houston Zoo has worked with the Danau Girang Field Centre in Sabah (Borneo), Malaysia since 2009 in support of a program to determine the social structure, migration corridors and habitat use of the Bornean Elephant. The field researcher, Nurzhafarina (“Farina”) follows radio collared elephants and their herds as part of the effort and this week, we follow Farina:

Farina radiotracking along the river corridor

Warm greetings from Sabah, Malaysia.

Usually my working hour will start at 7am, depending on the elephant location and sighting from the previous day. If the elephant are in Abai that is 33 km or 45 minutes from Sukau, we will go for an expedition where we will camp along the river to save some travelling time and fuel. We will use the latest position from the satellite to find out the elephant’s position and we will start tracking them from there. I would say the chances of finding the elephant in the forest is 70% except if they decided to go into swampy area or behind the oxbow lake. There are two females that are collared for now, Aqeela and Liun. We are still identifying Aqeela’s group and for Liun, we are sure that she has a juvenile female and a sub-adult male that always move along with her.

It is flooding in most parts of Lower Kinabatangan this time. Villages such as at Pengkalan Bukit Garam that is situated upriver Kinabatangan is the most heavily flooded part and many have been evacuated from their homes as the water has reached a dangereous level. Although Sukau is not as bad, it is still affected by the flooding and most part of the forest is covered with water. So, this means another wet week for my friends from Elephant Conservation Unit (ECU) and myself.

The World Conservation Union recently posted an article debating the issue. As the battle between poachers and park rangers escalates, what’s needed to protect the people who put their lives on the line for nature?

The article opens: Two AK-47 rifles and 30 rounds of ammunition; one ranger shot in the shoulder; three suspected poachers and five elephants killed: just another day for the Kenya Wildlife Service, in a nation where more rangers have been killed since the beginning of 2011 than in the same period of any other year. Further west, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), at least 12 rangers are murdered each year protecting gorillas, reflecting a worrying increasing global trend in ranger deaths.

True conservation heroes continue to fight, and die, for the survival of their native wildlife. This is an open debate with comments welcome. Read the article and comment if you like : http://www.iucn.org/knowledge/publications_doc/world_conservation_debate/?7206