New homes all over Africa
Continent’s animals being saved through efforts of African Parks
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 snares and other species had died off, as their range had been curtailed by machete-wielding farmers.
Now the animals have returned in a modern-day Noah’s ark story – a bold attempt by private philanthropists and environmentalists to move wildlife from other parts of the continent. Hundreds of miles from this dense forest, the animals were transported across southern Africa in commercial planes and flatbed trucks.
Africa’s wildlife has suffered immensely in recent decades. Ninety percent of the continent’s elephants have vanished over the last century. The lion population has crashed by more than 40% since 1993. There are fewer than 1 000 mountain gorillas in the wild. There are only three northern white rhino in existence.
African Parks, the non-profit organisation that arranges shipments of 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 back rhinos to Chad, where they were wiped out three decades ago.
Meanwhile, in southern Malawi, Liwonde National Park manager Craig Reid, who works for African Parks, was dragging the carcass of a gazelle across a grassy enclosure in the park, north of Majete.
Three cheetahs growled at him from about a foot away, showing their teeth. They had been flown in recently.
African Parks 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. During the course of its work, it learned that, in South Africa, private wildlife conservancies protected the once-threatened cheetah population – now there are more than the conservancies can support.
“We decided it was the right time to bring some back here,” said Reid.
He eventually coaxed the cats to follow the bloody gazelle through an opening in the fence, back into the near-wild – a verdant 570km2 park that had itself been rehabilitated. Two weeks later, the enclosure would be filled with lions, the next set of animals to come out of shipping crates – part of the experiment to turn back the clock to a time of greater biodiversity. After that, rhinos were expected to arrive.
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.
It is, however, the first to do it on such a large scale, while also managing parks in some of the most violence-plagued countries in Africa. It operates Chinko National Park in the Central African Republic, where 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, who hack off elephant tusks that can fetch $1 000 a pound in the ivory market in China.
Amid the destruction of species across much of Africa, some sub-populations have nevertheless thrived in certain areas. In South Africa, for example, where most of the wildlife live on relatively secure private conservancies, lions are flourishing. 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, chief executive of African Parks.
Fearnhead has been involved in conservation since he was a 13 year old in Zimbabwe, where he helped establish a 809ha wildlife reserve. After working for South Africa’s national park service, where he focused on expanding government reserves, he turned his sights to the rest of the continent and, in 2000, founded African Parks.
Forging relationships with governments and flying wild animals across the continent often poses enormous challenges. In Chad, the rhino operation took months of negotiation, piles of import paperwork and a team of lawyers and logisticians.
The group now has the largest counter-poaching force of any private organisation in Africa, with around 1 000 rangers, and has a substantial 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 donors.
In the long term, African Parks hopes that revenue from tourists will help sustain the cost of managing parks: “We have two options,” said Fearnhead. “One is we allow these places to disappear. The other is we make our own plan.” – Washington Post