Yolandi Sutherland, 25, a game ranger at Madikwe Game Reserve in the North West, described on Monday how maternal instinct drove her to jump into the river to save the little elephant.

On Saturday morning, a worker informed her that the calf was drowning. When Sutherland reached the river, the calf’s trunk and face were under water. “His little trunk came out every now and then.”

The calf’s anxious mother stood on the other side of the river.

Stuck

Sutherland jumped into the river. “The little elephant was entangled in branches. I called out to his mother; ‘Old girl, it’s okay, I will look after your baby.”

Sutherland lifted the calf, who weighed at least 125kg, up from the branches and swam with him to the shore. “He couldn’t come up the bank, swam back and got stuck in the branches again.”

His mother had meanwhile disappeared.

Another ranger, Francois Kroon, came to help.

“I pushed my body underneath the calf so that Francois could push him forward,” said Sutherland. “At the shore the little elephant slipped in the mud and got stuck in a log. I freed him.”

A third ranger, Paul Slyer, meanwhile brought some rope, which was how the three finally managed to get the calf out.

“He was too weak to walk over the branches back into the bush,” said Sutherland.

Trunk

“We stood around him in a triangle. When he got his breath back, he walked over to me and lifted his little trunk. I bent over to him and held my hand in front of my face. He pressed his little trunk in my hand.”

The elephant calf also walked over to Kroon and Slyer and pressed his trunk against them. “I slapped my thigh and said: ‘Come, boy’ and walked into the bush. He followed me.’”

Sutherland called out “Old girl!” and then the calf also started calling for his mother.

Susan Cilliers, Beeld
Sourced via News24.com for ecoAfrica Travel

In a nine-hour operation at the reserve yesterday, the three rhino, two males and a female, were darted separately, had holes drilled into their horns, and poison injected into them.

Inverdoorn owner Damian Vergnaud hopes this will deter poachers, who have begun targeting Western Cape rhino.

The poison will not kill, but is designed to make anyone who consumes the ground-up horn feel sick. Most poached horn is smuggled into Asia where it fetches sky-high prices in the traditional medicine trade, although it has no proven medicinal qualities.

The horns were also injected with a bright-red dye that effectively defaced their interior, making them unusable as dagger handles or other ornamentation. Rhino horn has been used, particularly in Yemen, for dagger handles. The dye and poison combination was developed by Denel and has been designed to bind with keratin, the substance horn, hair and nails are made of.

The third part of the anti-poaching cocktail was barium, injected into smaller holes, which will show up on X-rays if the horns are smuggled through airport security.

Inverdoorn owner Damian Vergnaud, who was present throughout the operations that began before dawn yesterday, said yesterday: “I wanted to destroy the market value of the horns, and I hope other game reserve owners will follow what we’ve done. That way we can destroy rhino horn as a product. I think it will work if many people do it. I want everyone to know that we have done this to the horns.”

Wildlife vet and consultant Alex Lewis flew from Hoedspruit to do the operation, assisted by Ceres vet Mark Walton. “When poachers attacked the rhino at Aquila, I thought it might be a one-off, but we increased security. Then when Fairy Glen was attacked we took it very seriously. But I don’t have the funds for this level of anti-poaching.” He contacted Lewis, who has spent a week at Inverdoorn discussing options which included cutting off and burning the horns and inserting tracking devices in them. Eventually, he decided on the dye and poison option.

They made a wooden horn replica and experimented with injecting the cocktail.

They also made a circular metal device, which screws on to the horn and allows the dye to be pumped in under pressure, so that it penetrates the horn.

Around noon, the vets and rangers headed out to search for the male.

Lewis and ranger Gert Bobbeje tracked it and darted the animal.

The Cape Times followed and saw the rhino “high-stepping” as the drug took effect, and then it sank to its feet. As soon as it was down rangers tied a blanket around its eyes to protect them and reduce stress. While some trickled water over it to keep it cool, others off-loaded the small generator to power Lewis’s drill.

He measured the horn, started the generator and used a grinder to flatten a section. The air was filled with the smell of diesel and burning hair. When he used the drill to bore a large hole into the horn, little white flakes spun off and fell into the dust like flakes of dried coconut. Then he attached the metal circle around the horn and put the nozzle of the pump through a hole in the metal. Bobbeje then pumped the dye-poison mix into the horn.

Meanwhile, Walton took blood samples and then drilled smaller holes to inject a combination of glue and barium, which shows up on X-ray. Then they filled the holes with glue, and bound the horn in tape to allow the glue to dry. The rhino will rub the tape off eventually.

The operation took about 40 minutes. Lewis gave the animal the antidote to the immobilising drug, everyone got on the vehicles, and the bull stood up. It looked a little whoozy, but then trotted off.

Two rhinos were dehorned at Aquila Game Reserve in August, one of which died. Two were dehorned at Fairy Glen, near Worcester, two weeks ago. The male is still on the danger list. – Cape Times

Sourced for ecoAfrica Travel via IOL News

Click on the photo to view the encounter on YouTube

Touched by a Wild Mountain Gorilla

Known as Crossways Farm Village, the new town is spectacularly located on the edge of the Van Staden’s River Gorge outside Port Elizabeth. On 2 December in the presence of Mr Gugile Nkwinti, Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, work will start on the installation of all services for the first residential and industrial phases. All the industrial stands and 70% of the residential stands in these phases have been sold. Construction of the first houses was expected to start by April next year.

The industrial stands, located some distance from the residential nodes, are intended for light cottage industries with a strong artisanal and agri-processing character.

design, planning and implementation

CMAI, the firm of Dr Chris Mulder, is responsible for the design, planning and implementation of the R3,4bn project. Dr Mulder, whose Thesen Islands project in the Knysna lagoon won two CNBC International Property Development Awards in 2007, said Crossways Farm Village would combine the benefits of a healthy rural existence with all the conveniences of sophisticated urban living.

The town consists of 747 residential stands of varying sizes divided into neighbourhoods spread throughout the 563 ha site of which more than half would be a conservation area. The plans for the development were approved earlier without any preconditions by the Department of Economic Affairs, Environment and Tourism of the Eastern Cape as well as by the national Department of Agriculture.

Mulder said Crossways was expected to set the benchmark for green building practises and would be the most advanced town in South Africa because of its high-tech infrastructure. “We plan to take the entire town of almost 800 stands off the national grid by means of photovoltaic technology which will provide us with a total alternative energy plan.

“The implementation of this technology will be made possible by the fibre-optic data communication network we will be installing throughout the development. The alternative energy and energy-saving technology will be built into the town’s infrastructure from the outset which means all owners will enjoy these benefits as standard features.”

80 solar panels on each roof

Mulder said the design of one of the new houses well illustrated this approach “Some 80 solar roof panels will provide the full energy requirements of the house, storing the excess produced in an integrated bank of photovoltaic batteries with the capacity to provide the energy needs of the house for three days. Additional excess can be fed into the town’s own energy grid and be sold be the owner for use elsewhere.

“Rainwater harvested from the roof will be stored in three 1000 litre tanks built into the structure of the house while a unique heat-pump system will circulate pool water through the flooring system to heat or cool the building to reduce seasonal temperature variances.”

Mulder said the fibre-optic technology will serve as infrastructure for a wide range of services, from regulating the town’s energy grid to controlling infra-red security systems and providing high-speed connectivity. “As the telephone system is also imbedded in this technology, all calls within the town will be free.”

Mulder said once the upgraded dairy farm with its stud herd was fully operational and generating profits, it would be ceded, debt-free, to the town. “The town’s people will have access not only to the range of dairy products but also to an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables which will be commercially grown on the property.”

Sourced for ecoAfrica Travel via The Green Times.

Not so long ago, the media carried reports of Chinese nationals in Mushumbi, a remote previously wildlife-rich area in the Lower Guruve District, who were allegedly poisoning elephants in the area for their tusks.

We also recently received reports from the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force (ZCTF), that illegal hunters in the Charara area of Kariba have come up with a plan to try and prevent the authorities from discovering their activities.

It has come to their attention that when they shoot an animal, vultures circling in the sky above have been giving them away. So in order to avoid detection, they are now shooting animals and spraying them with a poison such as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — a deadly synthetic pesticide).

When the vultures feed off the carcass, they die from the poison, hence reducing the number of vultures available to give them away.

From such reports, it is clear that poaching is not going anywhere anytime soon as the illegal hunters have evidently upped their game in their relentless bid to self-enrich at the expense of the country’s wildlife  and overall ecological balance.

Poachers are mainly targeting the rhinoceros and the elephants for the ivory and reports show that if the poaching continues at the current pace, the rhinoceros will especially become extinct, and soon. Already there are very few left.

There are no exact statistics to show how much wildlife Zimbabwe still has as the Ministry of Environment and Human Resources Management and the department of National Parks have not conducted an audit that would take stock of the animals.

Self-enrichment behind rhino poaching

Johnny Rodrigues, the chairman for ZCTF, a non-profit organisation that strives to save the country’s wildlife, said the Environment ministry has not carried out audits because it is fully aware that the country has been cleared of most of its wildlife, partly for the pot but mostly for the ivory and skin.
Rodrigues insisted the estimated figures that the responsible authorities are currently basing their strategies and policies on are not a true reflection of the situation on the ground.

The ZCTF website says more than 90% of the game in private game ranches has been lost to poachers and illegal hunters in the past five years.
One only has to travel to a place like Gonarezhou National Park that was previously infested with elephants, to tell that the wildlife numbers have drastically depleted, said Rodrigues.

The problem would not have been so grave were it not for the get-rich-quick attitude that seems to have pervaded Zimbabwe. Curbing the gruesome practice would be easier if more people were willing to put the country’s wildlife ahead of personal gain.

The arrests of poachers are rare instances and reports of some police officers that are allegedly working in cahoots with the poachers are rife.
It is therefore of paramount importance that the responsible ministry puts proper measures in place that will transmit in a clear manner the message that poaching will not be tolerated. Those that are caught on the wrong side of the law must be dealt with accordingly.

Considering the rate of poaching in Zimbabwe, curbing the practice will take a lot more than just occasional public rebuke as the class of poachers that we are dealing with now requires smarter and sterner measures.

Wildlife is a major part of Zimbabwe and has since time immemorial added to the country’s appeal, which at one time made it a worthy destination for many tourists.

Article at the following link:
http://www.thestandard.co.zw/local/31344-poachers-devise-new-tricks-to-evade-detection.html

Sourced via Save The Elephants for ecoAfrica Travel

“We need to capture the attention of international governments, particularly those who have influence over China. Through massive public and governmental pressure on the major importers of the horn, we have a chance to save these animals,” says director of the Wilderness Foundation, Andrew Muir. “Escalating poaching figures and continuing brutal attacks on rhinos show that an inter-continental effort is needed to fight back.”

The Wilderness Foundation will be presenting a petition against rhino poaching to the US congress this September. “The petition will be presented to the highest governmental powers and is a vital part of the lobbying campaign which is needed to change the laws regarding the importation of rhino horn into foreign countries,” says Muir.

It is crucial that the petition conveys a powerful message to international authorities. “We need as many signatures as possible to highlight the severity of the issue, and thus secure the full weight of support from the US in joining the fight to save the rhino,” says Muir.

The Wilderness Foundation is a project-driven conservation and leadership organisation that encourages, plans and protects wild lands and wilderness, uplifts the knowledge and lives of citizens and stimulates an environmental ethos among current and future leaders. It envisages a world that has sufficient intact natural ecosystems and wilderness areas that are valued and efectively protected for the benefit of all species.

Join the fight and help us gather signatures by encouraging people to sing up:
http://wildernessfoundation.co.za/savetherhinos/

Sourced via Tourism Update Online for ecoAfrica Travel

Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi said the incidents occurred on Rietvley Farm in Polokwane and Welgevonden Farm just outside Modimolle in the late afternoon.

“The man was shot at Rietvley Farm after he and his four accomplices allegedly failed to heed police instructions to surrender,” Hangwani said.

He allegedly pointed a R5 automatic rifle at police, who then retaliated with gunfire. Another suspect was shot in the buttocks and taken to hospital under police guard. Three others then surrendered.

“In Welgevoden Farm, two suspects, one who is an employee of the Limpopo provincial government, were cornered by police, and laid down their arms without any resistance,” he said.

During both operations, police managed to recover a police-issued R5 automatic rifle with 34 live rounds, a silencer, a Toyota van, two axes, and a .307 rifle with a silencer.

The alleged poachers, excluding the Limpopo government employee, were Mozambican and Zimbabwean nationals, who were residing in Tembisa and Soshanguve townships in Gauteng.

Limpopo provincial commissioner Lieutenant General Amon Mashigo said: “I hope this will be a lesson to other poachers that police are serious about their work and will not hesitate to protect themselves and arrest anyone including government officials who are fuelling this criminal act.”

All suspects would appear in the Modimolle and Polokwane Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday.

- SAPA

Sourced via news24 for ecoAfrica Travel

Within the last year, Aquila’s anti poaching team has deterred two attempted rhino poaching attempts. In this weekend’s case, Aquila’s anti-poaching team is said to have surprised the poachers as the first rhino was found with its front horn sawn off with a chain saw and they left having only had time to get half way through the second horn before retreating.

This rhino has lost a lot of blood and is fighting for his life. The loss of blood and position it was lying in while drugged could have caused massive muscle and organ damage which could be fatal. This rhino was the first rhino reintroduced to Aquila and to the Western Cape in over 250 years since shot out by hunters.

The second rhino that was found was still alive and is recovering well.

A third rhino died in the attacks; its face literally hacked off with pangas and machetes proving that there were two active teams attacking the Aquila rhinos, one using a chain saw, the other using pangas and machetes to dehorn the rhino.

Aquila’s remaining three rhino are safe and fine.

The security team has been briefed and 24 guards have been positioned at strategic points along the boundaries and on higher ground to keep guard.

Rhino poachers are well equipped, heavily armed with automatic weapons, night and thermal vision equipment and well trained their modus operandi is to fly at night with thermal vision.

They can spot a rhino through bushes and mist over four miles away, they GPS the location of the rhino and drop their poaching teams off several kilometers away to walk in and normally dart the baby first so that the mother and father stay to protect and don’t run away.

These teams are ruthless and will stop at nothing to kill and maim for financial gain. In this case they got away with a street value of over 4 million rand in rhino horn.

Aquila is offering R100 000 reward for information leading to an arrest and prosecution of these poachers. Informants details, which will be kept confidential,can contact searl@aquilasafari.com.

Anyone wanting to monitor the progress of the rhino and the anti poaching campaign can follow Aquila on Facebook  (www.facebook.com/aquilasafari) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/aquilasafaris) pages.

Sourced via Tourism Update Online for ecoAfrica Travel

She mentions the fact that much of the blame for fracking has thus far been attributed to Shell (seen as the greedy corporate giant) as well as the Department of Mineral Resources. But have we considered that these parties are simply stepping up to fulfil a demand – which starts with us?

In today’s society, we focus on the easiest and most convenient way of living. Which means many people live in a consumerist and materialistic way on the one hand, and yet on the other they demand that companies like Shell focus on protecting the environment. It seems that the responsibility must start with us – through everyday environmental acts and increasing the demand for sustainable energy sources while decreasing the demand that Shell is trying to fill. Simply boycotting Shell is not enough – soon enough the other mining companies will step up to fulfil the increased demand placed upon them.

As van Hoogstraten says, “Do we really expect to be able to indulge our bad habits on the one hand and call for a pristine environment on the other? This is the demand of a petulant child, not a responsible citizen. It may not seem like it, but any intelligent response to fracking has to include a change in the way we live our daily lives.”

Definately a new way of thinking – what are your thoughts? Read the full article – it is very eye opening: click here.

Sourced via All4Women.co.za for ecoAfrica Travel

Evidence of the syndicate’s modus operandi emerged this week from a statement made to the police that led to the recent arrest of its leader, Chemlong Lemtongthai (43). The syndicate is alleged to have traded at least 40 rhino horns and placed an “order” for 50 more to be supplied in the next few months.

The evidence brings to light a growing trend among organised syndicates that are using hunting permits to export illegal rhino horns to the Far East. Almost a quarter of the 222 rhinos killed in South Africa this year have been “hunts” authorised by provincial conservation authorities.

A statement made to the police by Tim Smith* who worked with the syndicate, led to the arrest of Lemtongthai and five Thai “hunters” in Edenvale on July 9. He described how Lemtongthai and his sidekick, Punpitak Chunchom, paid millions of rands in cash for live rhinos.

Smith claims in his statement to the police that Marnus Steyl, a wildlife trader based in Brits, North West, bought the rhinos from auctions and private owners.

Steyl is then alleged to have moved the rhinos to a farm in North West and soon after that they would be “hunted”, in contravention of regulations that the animals must be given time to acclimatise.

“Once the rhinos were established on Steyl’s farm he would call Lemtongthai and tell him how many animals were in place for a ‘hunt’ … [If] Steyl had supplied three rhinos Lemtongthai would call Chunchom and tell him that he needed three ‘hunters’ and Chunchom would know that he needed to find three Thai nationals to hunt the rhinos,” Smith said in the statement.

Usually friends were called in, or Thai women working as strippers and prostitutes were paid R5 000 to do the job. They were provided by a Midrand, Gauteng, woman wanted in Thailand for human trafficking. Their passports and fingerprints were needed to complete the necessary hunting permits and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species paperwork.

Smith claims in the statement that “once the fingerprinting is done, the ladies are taken out to Steyl’s farm, where they are made comfortable and then introduced to the professional hunter.

“[He] would show them the rifle and even take the girls to a quiet spot where they could let off one or two shots so that they can later say that they have at least fired the weapon.”

An official from North West Parks would be called out to witness the “hunt”, measure the horn, scan the microchip and put the details in the professional hunting register. “I believe he would also get a kickback for being so cooperative,” Smith’s statement said.

After the rhino was dehorned and the carcass chopped up for delivery to a butcher in Vryburg, where the meat was sold off in boerewors and burgers, the horn was taken to a taxidermist who mounted it on a shield to look like a hunting trophy.

“The trophy is just a cover for getting the horn out of South Africa and into Asia. Once in Asia, it obviously would enter the black market as rhino horn for ‘medicinal purposes’. The person allegedly ‘hunting’ the rhino would never see the animal or its horn again.”

Lemtongthai argued with some of the rhino traders about the prices they were charging upfront, saying he would prefer to pay after the horns had been weighed, Smith’s statement said.

He felt he had paid too much for two rhinos shot in September or October last year — about R575 000 for one and R450 000 for the second — and told Smith that in future it would be done in a different way. “I remember his actual words: ‘We shoot, we cut, we weigh, then pay.’”

Smith said in the statement that Lemtongthai paid R65 000 a kilogram for the horns and sold them for $55 000 (R380 000) a kilogram. With the average horn weighing 5kg, he had made more than R60-million in profit on the 40 rhinos shot to date.

Smith said he decided to expose the syndicate after discovering an order to Steyl for 50 more rhinos from Lemtongthai’s company, Xaysavang Trading Export-Import Company.

“The receipt of this order made me realise he is just hellbent on killing as many rhinos as possible, for no other reason than harvesting the horn,” Smith said.

Xaysavang Trading Export-Import Company is based in Laos, a tiny country bordered by China, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia. It openly sells monkeys to a Chinese laboratory for use in experiments and in July 2009 was linked to the illegal sale of ivory and 18kg of rhino horn in Kenya.

According to forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan, who assisted in Lemtongthai’s arrest, he is number two in the syndicate, which is headed by a Vietnamese resident, Vixay Keovang, also known as Vixay Xaysavang.

Before it moved into rhino poaching in South Africa the company traded in large quantities of lion carcasses and bones supplied by breeders in the North West and the Free State. Days before Lemtongthai’s arrest, Chunchom, his man on the ground in South Africa, was deported for the illegal possession of lion claws and teeth.

Steyl and the professional hunters have not been charged. Steyl did not respond to questions from the Mail & Guardian.

State okayed ‘hunts’
Recent figures indicate that at least 60 of the 222 rhinos killed in South Africa this year were “hunts” authorised by provincial conservation bodies.

The department of environmental affairs did not answer the M&G’s questions about the number of permits that had been issued for rhino hunts this year.

When the M&G first reported, in July 2008, that wildlife traffickers were laundering hunting permits to smuggle horns to the Far East, figures available showed that 205 rhino hunting permits had been issued in 2006.

Hawks spokesperson McIntosh Polela said this week that the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, a collaborative task team set up in May to deal with rhino poaching, had so far focused on the Kruger National Park because of the high density of its rhino population and because it made up 80% of poaching incidents. The Kruger would remain the focus “until we get things under control”, but the task team was spreading out to provinces affected by rhino poaching activities.

Cases included those of Chemlong Lemtongthai, the alleged leader of a Thai syndicate, and an alleged Limpopo syndicate headed by hunter Dawie Groenewald, Polela said.

Groenewald and 10 others were arrested last September. They face charges that include fraud, corruption, assault, defeating the ends of justice and contravening the Organised Crime Act.

Despite the charges, Limpopo conservation officials have issued Groenewald with 12 rhino hunting permits in recent months and at least 17 transport permits.

The permits came to light after the Democratic Alliance’s Limpopo leader, Desiree van der Walt, posed questions to Pitsi Moloto, the province’s environment minister. Moloto said the magistrate had prohibited Groenewald from engaging in any activity related to rhinos on his farm, but that “the period set by the magistrate expired and he was allowed to conduct his business as usual”.

Last week Groenewald offered to buy nine white rhinos from a private sanctuary in Limpopo. He backed down in the face of an outcry from conservationists and the rhinos were sold to Mpumalanga game rancher John Hume. Paul O’Sullivan, an investigator who worked with the anti-poaching task team to expose Lemtongthai and the Xaysavang Trading Export-Import Company, admitted that a link existed between Groenewald and the Thai syndicate.

In response to questions about whether Groenewald was supplying rhinos for the Thai syndicate’s “canned hunts” O’Sullivan said: “Yes, he’s at it as well, just with another syndicate that also traces back to Lemtongthai’s boss.”

Groenewald’s lawyer, Thomas Grobler, said Groenewald denied any connection with Lemtongthai, the Xaysavang Trading Export-Import Company, or its owner, Vixay Xaysavang. Polela also said there was no indication of a link.

* Name has been changed

Stripping national assets.  The company of Thai resident Chemlong Lemtongthai (left) is accused of ordering 50 rhinos to be killed in ‘canned’ hunts.

Sourced via Mail & Guardian online for ecoAfrica Travel