In each place that we went on our safari trip, our guides were amazingly knowledgeable, helpful, and patient, and they always ended by asking us to please share what we had learned with our friends, so we could spread the news and desire to save and protect these amazing animals.
I was hoping that my trip would help me re-fall in love with Uganda, since I have been feeling frustrated with it lately. I loved the beautiful scenery, and I found one very valuable reason to be proud of my current country: they are doing amazing work to preserve and protect their natural resources. For a third-world country, this is rare and commendable. For instance, my parents said that when they were in Cameroon, they didn't see any monkeys in the forests because they had all been killed for meat, and even in the national parks the game was thinly spread. So I am sharing some of these valuable stories with you.
Entebbe Wildlife Education Center:
Once upon a time, this was a zoo, but at this point it is designed for rescue and education. The animals are mostly rescued from poachers or other disasters, so there are no non-Ugandan animals, and no Ugandan animals which haven't needed rescue (for instance, no elephants). They work to help them live a natural life, and engage the visitors in understanding their lifestyle and needs. On our first visit, a guide came over to our little group and accompanied us for our whole visit, sharing many stories about the animals and keeping the kids engaged and learning.
Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary:
Rhinos became extinct in Uganda during the unstable years of dictatorship. This group has imported six white rhinos and provided them with a huge natural space, and is monitoring them as they breed. They have had seven babies so far. When they get to 14, they will start re-introducing them to the National Parks where they would have naturally lived.
Rhinos are currently being killed at the rate of one per day. Their meat is inedible and they are peaceful animals, so the only reason for their murder is their horns. They are actually made of the exact same material as fingernails and hair, so all of the "magic" potions made from their horns would be the same if they were made from fingernail clippings!
Rhinos have a social order, but spend most of their time alone, because otherwise they would fight for dominance. However, the children might still stay close to their mother. When she has a new baby, she will chase the older children away while she takes care of the new one.
We were able to get very close to four rhinos as they were grazing. They were surprisingly graceful animals, and just magnificent to be near.
Chimp Tracking in the Budongo Forest:
It is amazing how similar chimpanzees are to our own selves! Their faces and hands are expressive. They live in groups of 40 to 130 individuals, which proves that they are very intelligent to be able to understand that many inter-relationships. Another proof of their intelligence is that the babies are still juveniles and stay with their mother until they are about 10 years old, which is about a quarter of their entire lives. Both of those are about the same proportions as human beings! The mothers are loving and attentive, and play games with their babies and educate them. If a mother chimp dies, other chimps in her group will adopt the babies and take care of them as their own. A mother might have another baby every 2-4 years, and have up to five babies in her lifetime, and she continues to take care of all her different-aged children -- again, strikingly similar to our own biology! Chimps do not pair up in permanent partnerships, and different male chimps are allowed to present themselves to a female in heat, and then she can chose whom to mate with and in what order. (Hopefully not an exact human parallel!) If a male chimp gets mad about being scorned and decides to hit the spurning female instead, the other males in the group will come and rescue her.
Chimps live in large communities, but during the day they go out in different groups to feed, which might only be a few individuals. They had many different calls to communicate with each other, including drumming on certain trees to report to each other across the forest. For instance, while we were there, five chimps came across the road, called and discussed with other groups, and soon 18 of them came back to the first side!
Chimps eat primarily fruit and leaves, but also a small percentage of meat. I had known that, but assumed that it was small rodents or birds. It turns out that the group we visited really loves to hunt the colobus monkeys, and different groups have complicated and specific ways that they hunt their game and then share it with the group. For instance, in one group only the hunters get to share the meat, and in another they might share first with the dominant males or the juveniles.
Chimps are still hunted for their meat, and because African witch doctors like to use their teeth and bones in their potions. Also, people capture the young chimps as pets or for display. Several chimps in the non-zoo were captured from the wild and put in small cages in someone's house, and they charged people to come into their living room and see them.
They were beautiful, graceful and powerful animals. It was a privilege to be able to spend time near them.
Murchison Falls National Park:
This has been a national park for some time, since before the dictatorship years. But I am not writing a history of the park, but about some of the things that they do to protect and build pride in the animals and the heritage.
For instance, 25% of the park entrance fees goes to the villages in and around the park. This money is allocated to help them raise livestock, put up water treatment facilities, or whatever other projects the village deems useful. They do this so the local people will see the park itself as a resource worth protecting, instead of poaching game for meat or for sale, or killing the majestic predators to protect their livestock. It is a long, slow road to change traditional ways of thinking about the animals. Like many poor people, it is easy to think about having meat for today and tomorrow, and more difficult to think about preserving income for years and generations.
They are also trying very hard to education visitors about things like not feeding the animals, taking things out of the park, and littering. These are VERY difficult concepts for the African mentality! Every game drive has a ranger accompanying the party, and visitors are not allowed out of the main areas. They frame this as protection for the visitors, but I suspect it is just as much to protect the animals from human stupidity.
They have recently discovered oil within the park's boundaries, and we saw a couple of oil wells. When we asked the ranger about it, she said that she doesn't know if the oil wells will be able to coexist successfully with nature, but that the company did a lot of research and worked very hard with the locals and the experts to try and make it fit in with the park's needs. In a place like America, this would be expected, but here in a poor country like Uganda, even making the attempt is commendable.
Animals like giraffes have disappeared from most of the other national parks, including Queen Elizabeth which we had visited earlier. They are working on figuring out how to reintroduce them to their previous native habitats.
There are many National Parks and National Forests in Uganda, and they seem to be working very hard to protect the areas, education the locals, and welcome national and international visitors and give them pride in their natural resources. Hotels are carefully limited in the parks, and all of the ones we saw or heard about were careful with their resources, blending in to the surroundings, hiring locally, and supporting artisans and workers who helped the park. For instance, the gift shop in the Budongo Forest sold greeting cards decorated with wire from snares set all over the forest. The income from projects like this allows the de-snaring projects to continue.
Our safari trip was very expensive by Ugandan standards, and a big investment even by our American ones. First of all, I felt like it was worth it to give the girls -- and all three children, actually -- pride and joy in Uganda, and to give them a chance to have memories of something very special about their country. However, as we made our journey, I felt like it was money well spent for other reasons as well. A poor country like Uganda cannot support its natural resources on its own, like the US does (at least in part). It is us, the visitors and the people who care, who keep everything going. Our fees are literally saving the lives of animals and even entire species! For instance, we paid over $100 for the group of us to go track the rhinos. You can buy a lot of groceries for that kind of money around here! Was it worth it for an hour or two? It was an incredible experience, and I do think we will remember it for a long time, but it is also keeping those 14 incredible animals from being killed for their horns, and hopefully eventually bringing rhinos back into the wild all over Uganda.
And on a final note, just an interesting fact about birds. Over 1,000 species have been identified in Uganda, including many that live only here, and more are being discovered all the time. The fascinating part is that this is MORE THAN HALF of all the bird species identified in Africa!
No comments:
Post a Comment