The Bluefields Bay reserve is now a year old, and it seems that fish stocks have gone from strength to strength since my visit at the start of the year. The wardens who patrol the sanctuary are now seeing a return of sea-birds too, especially the blue pelican – which does not heed the no-fishing zone!

Click here to watch the video in full.

Click here to read my blog from January.

It has three camps in South Africa, but what makes the camp I visited at Makuleke special is that it’s within a unique part of Kruger that has been given back to the tribe which originally owned the land.

In 1969, the Makuleke people were forcibly removed from the land under the apartheid system, and it was only in 1994 that they made a successful claim to have the land (which by then formed part of Kruger) returned to them. I had the opportunity to visit the Makuleke people in the town just outside the park where they now live, and heard firsthand about the difficult decisions the tribe has had to make, and the challenges it currently faces.

When the land was returned in ‘94, the Makuleke considered selling the land for mining or for cattle-farming, but were thankfully persuaded by Eco Training and NGOs that the land should continue being used for conservation and eco-tourism. Three different safari camps within the Makuleke concession now pay the tribe a rental fee for the land, and also employ local people.

Tribal leaders said that the decision to go with conservation had been the right one, but admitted it has been far from easy.

Lemson Maluleke, operating officer for the Makuleke marketing board, told us that Makuleke’s remote location makes it a difficult sell from a tourism point, and that the three camps are not generating as much revenue as expected. Crucially – the tribe feels it must consider hunting on the land again:

“Initially, after engaging with the concessionaires, we decided that hunting was not compatible with the conservation aims. But we haven’t been able to generate the same revenue, so we do want to explore the issue of hunting again,” he explained.

Since the Mukaleke people have the rights to the land, they are entitled to hunt if they wish, despite it being illegal elsewhere in Kruger National Park. Lemson insisted that the hunting would be done in a sustainable manner, only during certain weeks in certain zones.

But conservationists are concerned that even limited, regulated hunting cannot sit alongside the park’s conservation aims, particularly when Kruger has such a problem with illegal poaching.

On the other hand, with 20,000 mouths to feed, I can well understand the Makuleke’s desire to make best use of the resources available to them. Whether they hunt themselves, or grant hunting permits for controversial biltong-hunting, it would prove very profitable.

Thinking back to the marine reserve I visited in the Caribbean last month, what I found so inspiring about the project in Jamaica was the level of buy-in that the scheme had from the local community. The campaign was led by a local fisherman and had the community’s full support. At Mukaleke, on the other hand, the conservation is driven by outside parties, and I’d question how engaged the community really is.

It’s hard to see how tourism alone will be able to generate the kind of revenue the tribe says it needs, without allowing further camps to be built.

The tribe’s leaders have now begun a study to determine just how feasible it is for them to rely on the income from conservation and ecotourism in future years: I hope the results prove positive enough that the Makuleke can fully commit to conservation for the long-term.

• South Africa Tourism: www.southafrica.net

• Eco Training: www.ecotraining.co.za

Experts from the Born Free Foundation and other bodies met in London following the International Tiger Forum in St Petersburg in November. It was interesting to hear their take on the outcome of the international forum, and how we must now proceed if we’re to stand a chance of saving the 3,200 tigers remaining in the wild.

Debbie Banks, head of the tiger campaign at the Environmental Investigation Agency, said the summit had had some degree of success in that £208m has been pledged by world leaders to tackle tiger poaching in countries like Nepal, India and Bhutan.

But she said that what is needed now is increased police presence, covert operations and improved customs so that more information on the smuggling of illegal tiger products can be gathered. “It needs to be intelligence-led, not money-led,” she argued. “Many governments have focussed too much on celebrated, isolated, seizures of tiger skins and bones – within their own locality. Information is not shared cross-border, and the possibility of integrated efforts is lost,” she explained.

She added that China must now show that it really is committed to tackling the problem in its own country. “If the Chinese president is serious, then he will now send advocates to the army, engage the anti-corruption bureau, have meetings with the police and launch a media campaign,” she said. “If the government of China can spend $31 million on the Olympics, it can take the right action here too if it really wants to,” she added.

Steve Trent of innovative campaigning body Wild Aid, argued that reducing demand for tiger products is the most important factor. I was fascinated to hear about Wild Aid’s recent advertising campaign in China which used well-known celebrities like Jackie Chan to hit home the message that “when the buying stops, the killing stops”.

He argued against the idea of farming tigers in captivity for their body parts (some people have suggested this as a way of meeting demand without taking tigers from the wild). “Tiger farms stimulate demand for tiger products; it’s saying that you can make some money from this. So we need to kill off demand,” he said. With up to 10,000 tigers now held in farms, circuses and attractions around the world, I agree with Steve that any tiger held in captivity sends the wrong message.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom at the conference: Will Travers of the Born Free Foundation sounded a cautious note of optimism about our potential to save the species from extinction. He drew an interesting parallel between the plight of the elephant in Kenya in the 1980s and that of the tiger in Asia. “Since the Kenyan government burned its ivory stockpile in 1989, the number of elephants in Kenya has doubled. We can turn things around,” he said.

Let’s hope so.

In many ways, I think aquaculture sounds like a sensible idea.

• Natural fish stocks around the world are now dangerously low because of overfishing. By farming fish in giant tanks, we can reduce the pressure on natural stocks while ensuring man’s food supply.

• As the fish nutritionist in this story points out, farmed fish on a controlled diet are free of the mercury and other contaminants found in fish taken from the sea.

• The story also suggets fish-farmers can charge more for farmed fish as they are more standardised in size, and the fish can reach the plate much faster (catching them really is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel…).

• Researchers are also trying to make the practise sustainable, by using waste-water to feel algae, which feeds plankton, which in turn feeds the fish.

But I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about aquaculture – or at least, in the form in which it is described here.

• The description of how the fish eggs are extracted is pretty gross in itself: “Flounder specialist Troy Rezek demonstrated “strip-spawning” on an anesthetized female, harvesting her eggs by pressing them out in a fluid-looking stream.“

• The fish might be free of mercury, but you can bet they require a lot of antibiotics and other medication because they’re kept in such close proximity.

• The story also says that a local company is now “air-expressing” fillets from North Carolina to other major cities in the US. A model built on air-freighting can hardly be the way forward – we’d certainly need to investigate inland fish farms as opposed to flying it inland from the coast.

• The journalist says that, because commercial fishmeal is expensive, the research centre has been experimenting with substitute protein sources such as soybeans. Considering the massive Amazon deforestation that is already taking place to make way for soya plantations, developing yet another industry which depends upon it does not sound good.

That said, the fish do have to be fed on something, and soya would be preferable to smaller fish being taken from the ocean to feed them – a practise which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb mentioned in his lecture in December.

I didn’t have a clue how big the global aquaculture industry is, but when I looked into it, I realised it’s huge:  WWF says almost half the seafood we eat have been artificially farmed, and that aquaculture is the fastest growing food industry in the world.

SeaWeb and WWF are extremely concerned about damaging aquaculture practises – but I see that both organisations are currently helping set up the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) – a new body expected to be in operation by 2011. Furthermore, new global standards for the farming of tilapia were released just a few weeks ago, with several other species guidelines to come, so I’m hopeful that aquaculture will develop in a responsible and sustainable way in the future.

Discarded plastic bags were causing the deaths of birds, turtles, dolphins and other marine creatures which swallowed or became entangled in the rubbish blown out to sea. I’ve dived the Red Sea a couple of times and been disappointed to see litter – it really makes your heart sink.

But the governor of the Red Sea brought in legislation in January, and the campaign seems to be doing extremely well.

HEPCA (Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association) has now given out 50,000 cloth bags free-of-charge; most local restaurants and shops have started giving out paper bags instead, and people are re-using their plastic ones.

In a perfect example of how going green usually has even wider benefits, the making of these fabric bags has generated much-needed employment for local women.

It’s a lovely ‘good-news’ story, but what a contrast to the photo-story on The Guardian site yesterday that highlighted the monstrous swathes of plastic floating around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A mass of plastic bottles, caps and beer can loops the size of Texas is hidden beneath the surface of the water, breaking down into tiny parts that get into the food chain at the lowest level.

The effect on bird life is also catastrophic. Albatrosses pick up the litter and feed it to their young, thinking it’s food. On the nearby coral atoll known as Midway are the corpses of thousands of albatross chicks which have died from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

The photographer, Chris Jordan, did not interfere with the corpses in any way – the photos show the exact contents of the chick’s stomach when it died what must have been its very painful death. There are more photos in all their technicolour glory on his website.

You don’t see so much about ‘Keeping Britain Tidy’ any more. It’s perhaps a less pressing concern in the face of irreversible climate change, but these photos have been a chilling reminder to me of why litter is still very much something we should be worrying about.

They’re much cuter in real life than in the Looney Tunes cartoon. They’re not fussy eaters, and have one of the strongest jaws in the world so will chomp down bones and all, but they’re actually quite a shy marsupial, and an icon the Tasmanians are very proud of.

Problem is, the Devils have developed a lethal form of facial tumour that distorts their face (see gross photo below) and eventually kills them. Unusually for a cancer, it’s contagious, and spreading fast. It’s predicted they might die out all together in the next 20 years if the rate of Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) infection cannot be slowed.

The Tasmanian government has brought in a fantastic volunteering programme to get people involved in helping to save the Devil though. You can join the DFDT team on 11 or 12-day field monitoring trips into the Tasmanian countryside, helping to clean and maintain traps, and record the details of trapped Devils.

Greg Irons, head-keeper at Bonorong Wildlife Centre, has also been telling me about how locals and holidaymakers alike can get involved in feeding and caring for orphaned Devils at his centre, as well as helping build enclosures and educating visitors to the centre.

With all hands on deck, and enough money spent on research, perhaps a cure or vaccination for DFTD will be found. But Australia’s track record is not good – it has the worst record in the world in terms of mammal extinction. There is also a massive risk that the disease could jump from the Tassie Devil to another species….There’s a great little video on the Save the Tasmanian Devil website if you want to find out more.

I’d been looking forward to seeing the film since I first heard about it but was also bracing myself for a very harrowing 94 minutes. The crucial footage of the dolphins being killed – which had never been caught on film before – does not come until near the end but there are plenty of other weepy moments in the build up to the bloody finale.

One thing I didn’t anticipate was to find any humour in the film, but there were actually some funny moments, particularly the absurd Japanese official dubbed ‘Private Space’ who brandished his video camera at the activists like a crucifix at a vampire.

It was fascinating to hear how Japan has been paying tiny Caribbean countries to join the International Whaling Committee in order that they then vote in favour of Japan being allowed to continue whaling.

I’m a big fan of the Caribbean and they definitely need the money right now. But islands like St Kitts, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines try to promote themselves as birdwatching, diving and wildlife destinations, and selling their integrity to the Japanese is going to backfire on them sooner or later.

The film ends with some positive notes, including the removal of dolphin meat from school lunches. But the bigger victory has been since the film’s launch – in September, 70 dolphins were captured but not a single one was killed. Almost all were released again, with just some sent to aquariums.

That’s good news but there’s still more work to be done, to raise awareness of the risks of mercury poisoning and to stop Japan’s wider pursuit of whales and dolphins for meat and to put in captivity. The Cove’s website makes it really easy to sign a petition and write letters – you can also buy the DVD if you missed it at the cinema. It’s definitely the film of the year for me.

“Executives from the Shell Oil Company blasted a floundering, oil-covered sea otter Monday, accusing the small aquatic mammal of grossly exaggerating the effects of last week’s hazardous petroleum spill.

According to Shell president Marvin Odum, the otter has been putting on “quite a show” in front of rescue workers and clean-up crews, and is making the 860,000-gallon, three-mile-wide toxic slick seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is.

“He’s fine,” said Odum, referring to the 40-pound sea creature, who was found washed ashore and appeared to be suffering from anaphylactic shock. “Trust me, before all of the cameras and reporters showed up, our little buddy here was having no problem at all cleaning himself off. Now, all of a sudden, it’s severe spastic convulsions this and complete kidney failure that.”

“Seriously, come on,” the Shell executive continued. “Talk about laying it on thick.”

Odum, who was alerted to the massive petroleum spill early Monday morning, claimed that the attention-seeking otter was not only overdoing it with his frantic and anguished squealing, but that his habit of gasping desperately for oxygen was “melodramatic.”

In addition, Odum claimed that the otter’s rapidly fluctuating body temperature and growing heart palpitations were nothing more than a sad attempt to curry favor with Coast Guard officials, Greenpeace volunteers, and anybody else not smart enough to see right through his “little ploy.

“Give me a break,” Odum said as rescue crews tried to remove hazardous waste from the mammal’s pelt. “Clearly, this otter has some weird, personal vendetta against Shell and large corporations in general, and wants everyone to cry at his pathetic sob story.”

“Just look at him out there,” Odum added while volunteers tried to keep the sea creature from losing consciousness. “The sick bastard’s loving every minute of this.”

Odum also downplayed claims by rescue workers that the otter may not be able to handle the stress of the clean-off process, saying that the animal is “acting ridiculous” and is just doing an impression of what he thinks an otter affected by a massive oil spill is supposed to act like.

“The extreme shivering, the wheezing, the prolonged dehydration, it’s all part of the same gaudy burlesque,” Shell CEO Peter Voser said. “It’s simple: The otter gets some oil on his body, and he thinks that gives him carte blanche to play the victim. Don’t you people get it? This is exactly what he wants. You’re all playing right into his twisted little game.”

Voser even called into question the otter’s mental stability, citing the sea pup’s early attempts to drink the highly contaminated water around him as an example of just how far the publicity-hungry mammal was willing to go to make the Shell Oil Company look like “the bad guy.”

On Saturday, Shell chairman Jorma J. Ollila issued a statement accusing the sea mammal of being a master manipulator, and said that what the otter really needs to do is grow up.

Ollila went on to praise a number of petroleum-soaked seals, pelicans, and sea turtles in the contaminated area, commending them for remaining completely still and silent, and not “making a big production” out of the environmental disaster when rescue and camera crews arrived at the scene.

The one-page document, however, focused largely on the single otter, who as of press time was in critical condition.

“Rescue crews have to stop coddling him and giving him everything he wants,” Ollila said. “Because if they don’t, other otters are just going to pull the exact same crap the next time one of our tankers ruptures and we spill crude oil everywhere.”

For cereal and porridge, I’ve had to swap from soya milk to rice milk, which is much more drinkable. And I’ve had to allow myself one cup of tea with real milk per morning, as I couldn’t finish a mugful made with either soya or rice milk, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge me one cuppa a day.

Entirely by chance I happened to give up dairy at the same time as Natural Soya Week, and I came across a website with lots of useful info.

Unfortunately it’s also confused things for me rather, as I’ve been reading that not all soya products are created equal….unscrupulous soya companies use unsustainable practices, clearing the Amazon rainforest for their plantations almost as quickly as the cattle farmers are.

The European Natural Soya Association (ENSA) which is behind Soya Week has a charter which ensures its members do not buy soya grown on land that was previously rainforest, do not use GM ingredients, and use only natural manufacturing processes – that is, using the whole soya bean rather than ‘isolates’.

Alpro is the only ENSA member that sells products in the UK, so if I stick to that (expensive as it is), I should be assured that my blueberry yoghurt is ethically sound. I saw some infinitely cheaper Sainsbury’s no-frills soya milk for just 60p, but I doubt it meets the rigorous ENSA criteria if it can be produced that cheaply.

Once I’ve got through my box of rice milk, the next variety I’ve bought to test is….oat milk. How they manage to squeeze milk out of an oat – surely one of our driest foodstuffs – is beyond me. I’m rather hoping the milk will taste like flapjack.

So in terms of milk and yoghurt, I’m fairly happy, but the lack of cheese could prove my undoing.

I wondered if goat’s cheese (feta, mmmmm) would be an acceptable alternative, but from what I can gather, goats bred for milking tend to be kept in similar production-line conditions to dairy cows.

Even if you bought organic goat’s milk products, from goats who led the life of Riley, you can’t escape the fact that the goat spends most of its adult life pregnant, so the milk is still full of hormones, and there’s still the question of what they do with all the huge number of unwanted male goats that are born.

So I’m currently in search of some soya-based alternatives.

Soya cheese was a little beyond Sainsbury’s means, so I’m going to have to head down to Mother Earth. I’m not relishing the sound of products like ‘sheese’ though, I’ll be honest……

Hoping she’d made it up, I launched a full-scale Google investigation as soon as I got home. Alas, it does appear to be true – PETA has an entire campaign about it.

The problem seems to be this: because they are farmed so intensively, dairy cows get mastitis, a painful udder infection which creates loads of pus. Around a third of dairy cows will have the infection at any one time, so a lot of it ends up in the milk we drink.

There can legally be up to 400 million pus cells in every litre of milk in the UK. It also contains antibiotics and growth factors given to the cows, and since a dairy cow spends most of its life pregnant, it’s full of cow hormones.

I’ve always thought of milk as one of the most natural and healthy foodstuffs there is, and vital for strong bones and all that jazz. But the more I think about it, the stranger the idea of drinking milk sounds. As Heather McCartney (patron of the Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation) says:

“No other mammal drinks milk after weaning – and certainly not the milk of another species. Would you drink the milk of a cat, dog or elephant?”

It’s not just veggies and treehuggers who are anti-dairy. Some medical practitioners say it has health risks too.

The ethical implications are also massive. PETA’s Milk Sucks website says:

“Male calves, the “byproducts” of the dairy industry, endure 14 to 17 weeks of torment in veal crates so small that they can’t even turn around. Female calves often replace their old, worn-out mothers, or are slaughtered soon after birth for the rennet in their stomachs (an ingredient of most commercial cheeses). They are often kept in tiny crates or tethered in stalls for the first few months of their lives, only to grow up to become “milk machines” like their mothers.”

I’m still looking into it – there are bound to be some good counter-arguments – but in the meantime I’m going to have a go at cutting dairy out of my diet.

I do eat an awful lot of yogurt and cheese so it’s going to be tricky. I’ve already invested in some soya milk: the unsweetened version tastes like crap, to be honest, but the sweetened version is a bit more drinkable.

It ruins a cup of tea, mind. So let’s see how long I last…….