A WALK IN THE PARK
The Port Moresby Nature Park is home to over 550 native animals, hundreds of plant species and is one of PNG’s leading destinations for tourists and Port Moresby residents.
It’s also a world leader in conservation, and the park’s chief executive officer, Michelle McGeorge, says its goal is to be the guardian of PNG’s natural biodiversity.
“Our logo is three symbols, we have a feather, a leaf and a tattoo, so it’s plants, animals and culture. Our logo is the connection of those three circles and without one, the others will also suffer so it’s important that they’re all nurtured.”
McGeorge says a focus of the park is providing care to injured and endangered animals, and rehabilitating animals for release into the wild.
“We get a lot of rescues, and we get a lot of surrenders, a lot of people’s unwanted pets, people who thought it’d be a good idea to have a crocodile as a pet and then it grew big and then they realised actually, it’s not a fun pet,” says McGeorge.
The park is now part of an exciting mission to help save the world’s frog population from a deadly fungus that has ravaged frog species worldwide.
“There’s a fungus called chytrid fungus and its actually estimated about 50 per cent of the world’s frogs have been wiped out from this fungus over the last few decades, including a number of species becoming extinct.
“Papua New Guinea is home to seven to eight per cent of all the world’s frogs, so in terms of
biodiversity,
we have an amazing number of frogs.”
McGeorge says the fungus has not yet reached PNG, and this provides a great opportunity for researching how to protect the wildlife against destruction.
“We’re going to get as much
DNA as we can from as many frog species across the country, and then we will essentially freeze that DNA in a sperm bank so if and when chytrid fungus comes to the country, we will effectively have the gene bank for all of the frogs.”
It’s a long-term project, and one of many conservation projects the park is leading.
A major priority of the park is giving back to the PNG community through education and training, and it does this through holding regular community education events for children and adults.
It offers programs such as ‘City Kids Don’t Eat Bush Meat’, ‘Don’t Buy Native Animals as Pets’ and ‘Lukautim Bilus Bilong Yu’.
“Lukautim Bilus Bilong Yu focuses on how to look after your traditional headdresses, how to look after your traditional feathers, your furs, so that you can get as much life out of them (as possible). You don’t necessarily need to go and buy more or hunt more feathers to still maintain your cultural connections,” McGeorge says.
She is proud of the park’s campaigns that resulted in the park being awarded the prestigious International Zoo Educators
Award by the Zoo and Aquarium Association of Australasia in 2018.
The park also trains university students, with the majority from the neighbouring University of Papua New Guinea.
“What gets me excited is over the years, we’ve seen lots of researchers coming from other countries, but what the nature park can do is actually get Papua New Guineans doing the research and that’s really what inspires us,” McGeorge says.
A priority of the park is to give back to the
PNG community through education and training.