Top honour for Bay lensman
BAY boat-based whale watching operator Lloyd Edwards has won the Wildlife and Environment Society (Wessa) 90th anniversary national photographic competition.
Edwards received his award on Saturday at a Wessa event in the Addo Elephant National Park after beating 200 other entrants.
His photograph of dolphins leaping through an ocean swell off the Alexandria Dunefield east of the Sundays River mouth was judged the best in the professional photographer category.
Four Eastern Cape individuals have, meanwhile, received Wessa awards for outstanding individual contributions to conservation.
Penguin researcher Dr Lorien Pichegru was recognised for her innovative no-fishing zone system devised to gauge overfishing concerns.
She was also praised for efforts to get offshore ship refuelling moved away from the penguin colonies on the Bay islands.
Grahamstown ecologist Dr Roy Lubke and Andrew Muir and Matthew Norval of the Wilderness Foundation also received Wessa 90th anniversary conservation awards.
Edwards and Pichegru, who are married, have now together won six awards this month. Besides the Wessa awards, they won the provincial and then national Lilizela Award for Best Ocean and Beach Experience.
They also won the BirdlifeSA Owl Award for “outstanding contribution to the conservation of birds and their habitats”.
This was for their joint work with the African penguin, ferrying Pichegru’s students to and from the islands and innovative use of a recreational echo-sounder to track and quantify sardines, the penguin’s prey.
Edwards also won the Dendrological Society Award in recognition of “visionary guidance and unselfish voluntary efforts in the conservation of the threatened Eastern Cape wetlands”.