South Africa is only 1% of the world's land mass, which is quite insignificant. However, it is home to 10% of the world's mammals, birds and reptiles, now that puts South Africa on the "take notice" list.
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| My most favorite raptor, the Bateleur |
How much does South Africa care about it's wildlife. In talking to locals like Avril who owns and operates Wylde Ride (a cycling tour company) and Sleepy Hollow Backpackers (a hostel) in Pietermaritzburg, KZN in years past wildlife was the main South African tourist attraction. From an economic point of view wildlife was on top of the list as people thronged to the game parks. Today, with the population explosion and never ending poverty the wildlife has slipped way down in priority. Which puts it at risk not only because of less funding, but more critically less protection. Protection not just of the various species themselves but their ever shrinking habitat.
However, take a look at most any advertisement from South Africa. Be it for a car or a vacation you can almost count on seeing one of the Big Five included. Pick up a South African coin or rand note and you'll see one of wildlife's beauties.
Leon, a banker and avid bird watcher, thought that with as little homage that is paid the wildlife (especially the rhino right now) maybe the powers that be need should replace these icons that better reflect current reality, "the one with the most stuff wins".
It's so easy not to care! After all the lions don't organize a strike that impacts the car we drive. Nor do the elephants launch a huge campaign that makes a difference to our pocket book. The rapidly disappearing vultures don't have the slights effect on our garbage pick up. So why care?
It took me many years to start listening to what is happening to the wildlife in South Africa and I was born in South Africa! So I can't point any fingers.
What made me care?
Nature, the marvels of it have always been the greatest source of fascination for me. As I write this sitting on the patio of our cabin in Kwalala Nature Reserve, KZN a large woodpecker size bird I'm unfamiliar with flies into the tree above me, while a small Duiker (buck) with a hoof missing (probably caught in a poacher's snare) forages below, and vervet monkeys call to each other in the jungle like forest to the left.
Sunrise found us on the beach watching sea snails, shore birds and crabs along the magnificent South African coastline. All this in contrast to our drive here yesterday through miles of hills and vales that were totally void of any natural habitiat. Sugar cane and tree farms stretched for miles interuppted by about 30 miles of rural housing dotting the hills and valleys for as far as the eye could see. Trees and vegetation was almost gone leaving little but parched earth and rough brick homes. Livestock was sparse seemingly limited to a few skinny cows and herds of scrappy goats.
Why do I care? Because so much has changed since I was a girl here more than 40 years ago. The natural habitat is shrinking much too fast and with it the wildlife. More than half of the large mammals have disappeared from the African game parks since 1970! Disappeared from the very refuges that are meant to protect them!
2002 thru 2007 found Russ and I in the Philippians. On our flight over there I read a National Geographic article that only 5% of the rain forest in the Philippines remained and that by 2010 it would be gone. The Philippines could be an absolute tropical paradise for both wildlife and humans, but it has been devasted and exploited (or eaten, every thing that moves is either eaten or strung upside down and sold on the road side.)
A friend, Brother Reyes, told us how when he was a boy 40 years earlier their were eagles in the sky and monkeys and buck in the forests. The only Filipino eagles remaining (about 120 in 2004) were in two poorly financed sanctuaries south of Manila and in Mindanau. What a magnificent creature! What a loss not to see it soaring in the skies above the Philippine Islands any longer.
That five year experience seeing the lack of understanding for the part wildlife and it's habitat plays in our lives was a fast-forward of South Africa if we don't care now.
What makes you care? Wildlife's hope for a future is you and me.
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| My other most favorite bird of prey, the Secretary Bird |
Every time you take a breath your life depends on the combined metabolic activity of millions of species of living things. The biosphere that sustains us is the result of biological, not geological, processes. Preserving wildlife is to preserve the community of which we are a part. The problem is that people have not been educated to have an ecological perspective.
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