By Steve Winter
Well we made it! And, it’s been kind of a tough trip. My assistant Jonathan Fleming and I flew into Delhi – got through customs with our 26 bags with no problems. Whew. After grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep, we headed to the domestic airport for our flight to Guwahati, in Assam, jumped off that plane and drove five hours to Kaziranga.
Working on stories in national parks abroad often require many special permits that take months to obtain. So I spent my first few days meeting with the Kaziranga National Park director and other officials getting final permissions and trying to learn whatever I could from them about the area and the wildlife. We also drove around the park, getting to know the lay of the land.
<BR>By Steve WinterOur first day here, we drove by a group of people in a tea
plantation and I spied
a group of about 20 men crowding around something. Many of them were
from Center for Wildlife
Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC), a local organization that rescues wild
animals in trouble, like during the recent monsoon flooding. The “something”
they were gathered around turned out to be a young rhino whose mother was
killed by poachers when she fled the park because of high water. The rhino calf
escaped, and luckily, was found the previous day. CWRC people kept watch over
it until their veterinarian arrived on elephant back to tranquilize it. Then
it could be moved to the Center to be raised—and ultimately, reintroduced to
the park.
Our
work with wildlife organizations continued the next day after meeting some folks
from Wildlife SOS, an Indian organization working with many different wildlife
issues in India.
One of their major
campaigns is the humane retirement of dancing bears. They had come to Kaziranga
to help with animals displaced from the park by monsoon floods. Wildlife is at
great risk from traffic; SOS workers were constructing brightly-painted barrier
signs on the main road so drivers would be forced to slow down in areas where
rhinos, elephants and other animals cross the road. We encountered them
vaccinating local livestock for foot and mouth disease. Wildlife that have fled
the flooded Brahmaputra River are now encountering livestock as they wander
through villages; an outbreak of foot and mouth would decimate hoofed wild
animal populations.
Every
day is wild!
Some people have asked me to photograph a camera trap so you all can see exactly what I am talking about. So we will do that once we put one up in a week or so.
More tomorrow or soon.
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Comments
Sep 29, 2007 9AM #
Steve,
at Tyler Cowen's "Marginal Revolution" blog I found this story:
Unintended Consequences meet Tragedy of the Commons
from Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok
A decade ago, the saiga antelope seemed so secure that conservationists fighting to save the rhino from poaching suggested using saiga horn in traditional Chinese medicines as a substitute for rhino horn.
Research commissioned by WWF at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the late 1980s found it to be as effective as rhino horn in fighting fevers, and in 1991 WWF began a campaign in Hong Kong to publicise it as an alternative. The following year, the UN Environment Programme appointed WWF ecologist Esmond Bradley Martin as its "special envoy" to persuade pharmacists across Asia to adopt saiga horn (New Scientist print edition, 9 March 1991 and 3 October 1992).
And the result?
In 1993, over a million saiga antelopes roamed the steppes of Russia and Kazakhstan. Today, fewer than 30,000 remain, most of them females. So many males have been shot for their horns, which are exported to China to be used in traditional fever cures, that the antelope may not be able to recover unaided.
The tragedy here is that diversion would have been a good idea had the WWF understood some economics - for diversion to work you must divert to a privately owned resource.
Hat tip to MetaFilter.
Cheers, Rolf M.
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