Prof Dave Richardson of the Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University is the lead author of a ground-breaking paper that describes a tool to help policy-makers and scientists employ “managed relocation” to move species into “more accommodating habitat” where they are currently absent.

“We hope that the tool will help to reduce the polarity that has emerged in the debate on whether managed relocation should be added to the conservationist’s toolbox,” says Prof Richardson.

“Scientists are, for the first time, objectively evaluating ways to help species cope with rapidly changing climate and other environmental threats by implementing strategies that were considered too radical for serious consideration as recently as five or ten years ago,” explains Prof Richardson, one of the world’s leading minds on matters pertaining to invasive species.

“Our decision-making tool is ground-breaking because managed relocation has traditionally been categorically eschewed by scientists for fear that relocated species would harm receiving habitats by reproducing wildly out of control, causing extinctions of local species,” says Prof Richardson, who cites the way in which invasive alien trees have reduced water production from mountain catchments in the Western Cape as an example of the damage that translocation can do.

Now that is radical. It seems climate change is so rapid, that a more than 2 degrees C average global temperature increase this century is inevitable, that we are going to intervene radically in ecosystem functioning in order to help our fellow species survive. I wonder where we can relocate the polar bears to?

Ralph Pina is an ecoAfrica.com founder

It is claimed that besides those being poached, about 300 have been shot for the trade. Should hunting for the trade not cease, the NGOs will approach CITES to upgrade rhino to Schedule 1, effectively banning legal hunting of the species.

Personally, I cannot get my head around why anyone would want to shoot a rhino – or any animal for sport for that matter. Although hunting proponents will often trumpet the sport’s “indispensable” contribution to the financing of conservation, this practice flies in the face of all such claims. It is a despicable practice and is driven by greed.

WESSA also states that rhino poached in Zimbabwe are being “laundered” by South African landowners and outfitters.

EcoAfrica does not promote hunting. But do note that there is a hunting operation that uses our name, despite it being a registered trademark. I suppose that speaks volumes for the ethics involved. We never have, and never will have anything to do with hunting.

White rhino in Kruger National Park, South Africa

The Times reports that:

The number of rhinos poached within SA National Parks’ land increased by nearly 300% in 2008 (36 rhinos) compared with 2007 (10 rhinos);

An estimated 50 rhinos were poached on private game reserves in 2008 ; and

Thirteen rhinos were shot dead on Christmas Day last year, including six on a private reserve in North West.

(Ignore the comments below The Times report – they are indicative of the mindset of disaffected locals who unfortunately have the time to pollute blogs)

Rhino have been to the brink and back before. When the Imfolozi reserve was proclaimed in 1895 it was the last refuge of the southern white rhino, estimated to be as few as 20 in number. Colonial hunters had shot them out throughout southern Africa. Thanks to the efforts Ian Player and those of his ilk there are now some 14500 white rhinos and 4000 black rhinos in the wild (consider however that there were 100 000 black rhino in the wild in the 1960s).

Through successful translocation programmes they have been distributed across southern Africa in national parks, game reserves and private reserves. The black subspecies is still Critically Endangered while the white rhino is classified as “Lower Risk – Conservation Dependent”. Our Kruger National Park Google Earth layer contains a wildlife census layer which shows some interesting distributions of rhino.

The Times story advances various reasons for the increase in poaching, but most worrying is the apparent lack of protection in formal protected areas such as national parks. SANP and agencies such as Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife need to urgently step up their anti-poaching patrols and look to the integrity of their parks and reserves. But perversely it may be the successful translocation of the animals to private reserves that increases vulnerability, as these protected areas are widely dispersed islands of conservation and will often not have the resources to mount effective anti-poaching operations.

Ralph Pina is one of ecoAfrica.com’s founders

The article’s conclusions are particularly interesting, given the prevailing wisdom in the tourism industry that tourists to Africa are only interested in seeing the “Big 5″ – leopard, lion, elephant, rhino and buffalo. Just recently we have been debating this issue in ecoAfrica, so the research is timeous and topical for us. I for one have always been loathe to accept that only the Big 5 holds any attraction to travellers to our continent.

By way of a brief background, ecotourism is regarded as vitally important to the continued survival and efficacy of protected areas and wilderness – whether owned by the state, private persons or communities – in most African states simply because it promises economic incentives for nature conservation and preservation. Although making conservation dependent on a fickle industry like tourism is extremely dangerous, the reality is that many poor African countries, faced with the developmental demands of burgeoning human populations, lack the funds to meet biodiversity conservation targets.

As the authors point out, if ecotourism is so vital, but simultaneously only caters for tourists’ narrow preferences for viewing “charismatic mega-fauna”, then it potentially skews conservation priorities. Savanna habitats, rather than woodland, deserts or mountain landscapes, would be conserved. Furthermore, only a few protected areas that conserve the Big 5 in adequate habitats would earn the bulk of tourism revenues. This is certainly the case in South Africa, where the Kruger National Park virtually finances the rest of the national park system. Mega-fauna are expensive to conserve, which means that only state protected areas have the resources and the ranges to sustainably maintain their populations. Community conservation areas, for whom ecotourism is touted as an economic solution, would thus be eliminated as viable ecotourism destinations.

Based on scientific surveys of tourists to a few of South Africa’s state and private protected areas, the authors come to some surprising – and hopeful – conclusions:

•  While first-time visitors do have an understandable fixation on the Big Five and the big cats, the more experienced (in viewing wildlife) visitors are, the more they seek the unusual and smaller species and appreciate the greater web of life, the ecosystems.
• Older guests show a greater interest in bird and plant diversity, scenery and rarer species such as wild dog, sable, hyena, cheetah, etc.
• The same holds true to an even greater extent for “African” tourists (here I presume that “African” means local residents and does not refer to ethnic origin). This point perhaps underlines the importance of promoting ecotourism locally and not depending solely on the foreign market.
• 73% of visitors to the Kruger Park are South African, while 34% of respondents in the surveys had visited wildlife areas more than five times in the previous five years.

It is perhaps fortunate that once the Africa bug bites, it gets into your blood. It seems that it is our ancestral landscape and that “nostalgia”, that inexorable pull, keeps bringing people back. We at ecoAfrica see it in the numbers of return visitors over the years, and the numbers of clients who return multiple times.

For us it is important to know that greater experience in nature travel in Africa implies a need to have a “deeper” experience of Africa. ecoAfrica should be able to “track” this depth of experience and ultimately satisfy it by providing deeper and richer experiences of Africa’s unmatched diversity.