Cranes, planes: saving Africa’s wildlife
TWO decades ago, this patch of Malawian forest was almost emptied of wildlife. The last elephants had been poached. The lions had been caught in snare traps. Other species died off as their range was diced by machete-wielding farmers.
Now the animals have returned in a modern-day Noah’s ark – a bold attempt by private philanthropists and environmentalists to move wildlife from other parts of the continent.
Hundreds of kilometres from this dense forest, the animals were scooped up in harnesses dangling from construction cranes. They were carried into white metal storage containers, with the occasional elephant trunk peeking out. Then they crisscrossed southern Africa in planes and flatbed trucks.
By almost any measure, Africa’s wildlife has suffered immensely. Ninety percent of the continent’s elephants have vanished over the last century. The lion population has crashed by more than 40 percent since 1993. There are fewer than 1,000 mountain gorillas in the wild. There are only three northern white rhinos in existence.
African Parks, the nonprofit organisation that arranges the shipments of the animals, aims to restore populations that once existed in some of the world’s most remote places. It has trucked 520 elephants across Malawi. It flew 20 black rhinos from South Africa to Rwanda. This month, it started bringing rhinos back to Chad, where they were wiped out three decades ago.
And in southern Malawi, on a recent overcast morning, Craig Reid dragged the carcass of a gazelle across a grassy enclosure in Liwonde National Park, north of Majete. Three cheetahs growled at him.
“Craig, what are you doing?” Reid’s wife, Andrea, asked, as the cheetahs inched closer.
The cheetahs had been flown in as part of a process that African Parks has refined in recent years. The group both transports animals to areas devoid of wildlife and works with governments to manage 15 parks across the continent – some of them in war zones. In the course of its work, the organisation learned that in South Africa, privately run wildlife conservancies had protected a once-threatened cheetah population. There were now more of the animals than the conservancies could support.
“We decided it was the right time to bring some back here,” said Reid, Liwonde’s park manager. The cheetahs had arrived sedated at the airport in crates reading “LIVE ANIMALS”.
On the recent morning in the animal enclosure, Reid eventually coaxed the cheetahs to follow the bloody gazelle through an opening in the fence, back into the near-wild: a pristine, verdant 57,000-hectare park that had itself come back from the brink.
Two weeks later, the enclosure would be filled with imported lions, the next set of animals in shipping crates, part of an experiment in turning back the clock to a time of greater biodiversity. After that, rhinos.
African Parks isn’t the first organisation to translocate wildlife, a practice that is decades old and brought grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park from Canada in the 1990s, and reintroduced the giant pandas to China in 2011.
Other groups have moved animals across the continent, but the organisation is the first to do it on such a large scale – while managing parks in some of the most violence-plagued countries in Africa. It operates Chinko National Park in the Central African Republic, where a conflict has left thousands dead and forced displaced families into the wildlife refuge. It runs Garamba National Park in Congo, a nation scarred by a brutal civil war. Last year, four of the park’s rangers were murdered by poachers.
Amid the destruction of species across much of Africa, some subpopulations have nevertheless thrived in certain areas. In South Africa, for example, where the majority of the wildlife live on relatively secure private conservancies, a number of species have flourished, including lions. In Malawi, where the government has turned its attention to conservation, in part to expand its tourism industry, the elephant population has surged.
“We can use these thriving populations to seed other areas,” said Peter Fearnhead, 49, the CEO of African Parks, which is based in Johannesburg.
Fearnhead has been involved in conservation since he was a 13-year-old in Zimbabwe, where he pushed his school to establish an 810-hectare wildlife reserve. After working for South Africa’s national park service, where he focused on expanding the government’s reserves, he turned his sights to the rest of the continent. He founded African Parks in 2000.
Forging relationships with governments, and flying wild animals across the continent, can pose a huge challenge. In Chad, the rhino operation took months of negotiating, piles of import paperwork and a team of lawyers and logisticians.
Translocation is also enormously expensive, and securing the parks requires its own massive investment – the group now has the largest counter-poaching force of any private organisation on the continent, around 1,000 rangers. But it has a pipeline to the world’s wealthiest donors. Last year, Britain’s Prince Harry was named its president. In 2016, the group raised nearly $25 million, mostly from European benefactors.
After the surge of poaching and environmental destruction over the past few decades, some of the continent’s most important parks were left emp- ty. Majete and Liwonde offer a window into the collapse of conservation in Africa.
Majete was established in 1955 and Liwonde in 1973 by government authorities in this former British colony. Both lacked fencing, so elephants wandered freely, destroying crops of farmers and killing dozens of people. There was nothing to stop poachers, either. When African Parks assumed management of Liwonde in 2015, rangers found 27,000 wire snares.
Before African Parks could start importing wildlife, it first had to construct the basic infrastructure of a park. In both Majete and Liwonde, the group erected hundreds of kilometres of fencing; trained large forces of armed wildlife rangers; installed surveillance networks of cameras and sensors; and placed satellite collars on some of the most vulnerable species.
“Very simply, if a park is not being managed then it will be lost,” Fearnhead said.
Overall, the organisation’s track record has been good, according to wildlife experts. Of the 520 elephants it transported across Malawi, only two died in transit. But problems have sometimes come after the animals arrive, if it turns out that the parks are still not very safe.
In the long term, the organisation hopes revenue from tourists will help sustain the costs of managing parks. In places like Liwonde and Majete, that’s still a long way off. Last year, only 10 percent of Liwonde’s $3 million operating budget, for example, came from tourist fees.
“We have two options,” said Fearnhead. “One is we allow these places to disappear. The other is we make our own plan.”