A Q&A with Anthony Climpson OBE, tourism manager of the New Forest

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Canoeing in the New Forest

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Exploring beyond the New Forest National Park

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Conservation volunteering in the New Forest

White-fronted Bee-eater

Leading on from my first blog on South Africa, here are the birding highlights of my recent trip with Eco Training. The Mukaleke concession has some of the best bird life in the whole Kruger National Park, and I was lucky enough to see and learn about all of the following (click each image for a larger pic):

Blacksmith Lapwing - which makes a noise like the chinking of a hammer on metal

Yellow-billed Hornbill - with a beautiful, large, curved yellow bill. The female closes herself up inside a tree trunk to lay and hatch her eggs, and they use millipede toxins to keep predators away

Cape Turtle Dove – which chirps “work harrrrrder” in the morning. In the afternoon, it sounds more like “drink laaaaager”, just around sundowner time….

Red-eyed Dove – which sings “I AM a red-eyed dove”

Kingfisher

Oxpeckers – these hang around rhino and buffalo so are useful to follow/avoid as appropriate

Yellow-billed Hornbill

Lesser Honey Guide – which  sings “Victor”

African Palm Swift – which sticks its eggs to tree. It can’t turn the eggs like a bird in a normal nest would (to make sure yolk doesn’t touch the side of the shell), but the wind blowing does the job instead

Little Bee-eater

White-fronted Bee-eater - the term ‘white-fronted’ doesn’t do this one justice; it’s absolutely stunning

Swainson’s Spurfowl – quite chicken-esque with a bright red
ring around the eye

Mosque Swallow

European Swallow

Swainson's Spurfowl

Barn Owl

European Storks – we saw a huge flock getting ready to fly back to Europe

Pin-tailed Whyder – with a long clumsy tail that made him look ridiculously clumsy in flight

Splendid Starling – heaps prettier than the one we see in Britain

Vultures

Hoopoe

Lilac-breasted Roller and the European roller – two of my favourites

African Hawk Eagle - which has lovely feathery legwarmers

European Roller

Orange-breasted Bush Shrike

Grey Goaway Bird – which has a crazy, fluffy mohawk

Grey-headed Parrot

Nightjars - a right pain in the arse. They jump in front of the Landrover’s headlamps at night and mean you have to crawl along so you don’t hurt them

South Africa Tourism: www.southafrica.net
Eco Training: www.ecotraining.za

Splendid Starling

European Storks

Tawny Eagle

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.

When I saw the photo, I thought surely this must be the smallest frog in the world?

Au contraire – it’s only the smallest species discovered in the OLD world .

They’ve found even smaller ones in Brazil and Cuba, though there seems to be some confusion over whether the Brazilian Gold Frog (Brachycephalus didactylus) or Cuba’s Monte Iberia Eleuth (Eleutherodactylus iberia) is the smallest.

Here are pictures of them both, anyhow:

The researchers are out in Borneo searching for the world’s lost amphibians as part of a campaign organized by Conservation International and IUCN’s Amphibians Specialist Group.

It’s worth checking out CI’s Search For the Lost Frogs page if you have a minute….

There’s a special photo group set up on Flickr for you to upload your own frog photos, and I’ve just uploaded a pic I took in Le Perinet rainforest in Madagascar…I’m hoping someone will identify it for me.

Bellamy has come under lots of criticism for his controversial views on climate change – he’s said previously that he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming, and that glaciers are actually advancing, not retreating.

I certainly don’t agree with him on this, but the Green Weekend was more about getting holidaymakers to spot birds and creepycrawlies so I didn’t like to bring it up. And the kids bloody loved him.

While we were chatting about wildlife, one of the main issues he described was way in which conifers have radically changed the British landscape and its biological make-up.

I was aware that conifers are not native to the UK, but hadn’t really appreciated how they came to be here and the threat they pose to our ecosystems, so I did a bit more research.

Apparently, just after the First World War, whole swathes of native woodland were chopped down to replace it with quick-growing conifers like the Sitka spruce from North America. We needed a ready supply of wooden pit props for use in coal-mining; at one point during the war, we’d almost run out of them and couldn’t import them because of the German blockade, and we couldn’t take that same risk again. So the Forestry Commission was set up, and quickly set about intensive tree farming of monoculture conifers.

The Independent’s Michael McCarthy says:

Over the hills of England, Wales and Scotland the great austere blocks of huddled conifers began to spread, 150,000 hectares by 1939, and then at a gathering pace after the Second World War: 310,000 hectares in the Fifties, 365,000 hectares in the Sixties. No matter that nobody liked it. No matter that much of our ancient broadleaved woodland, its value unrecognised, was being cut down at the same time. No matter that sites of beauty and conservation value were being swamped. The dark monoculture advanced remorselessly, until by 1980 the woodland cover of Britain, which in 1919 had been the lowest of any major European country, at less than 5% of the land, had doubled to over two million hectares.

The impact of this (apart from them looking so dark and ominous compared to our native broadleaved forests) is that it changed habitats for wildlife. Conifers don’t let light through to the forest floor. They have also been blamed for acidifying water - making some lakes and rivers un-liveable for fish.

David Bellamy’s answer is to cut down all the conifers and transform our landscape back to how it was a few thousand years ago; I’m not sure the Christmas tree industry would be too pleased.

He also emphasised how radically agriculture has changed the UK landscape. “All the best land is covered with cereals now – that’s why we don’t see bees and butterflies anymore,” he explained.

We also had a good discussion  about the need to get more young people into countryside careers. “Young people don’t know about or don’t want to be farmers and gamekeepers anymore,” he said.

Agriculture was certainly never on my radar as a potential career-path, and I can’t remember a single classmate for whom it was. The growth in sales of locally-sourced produce in the UK is enouraging, but with the number of young people going into agriculture on the decline, who’s going to grow it all? I’ll sit and eat my onions from Lincolnshire and spinach from Kent quite happily – but would I be happy to get out there and do the hard work?

David’s suggestion is some kind of national eco-service: “If I were prime minister, I’d make every child between school and university go and work in the countryside and learn how to look after it”, he says.

One of the six tennets of the RSPB’s ‘Letter To The Future” campaign is for the government to commit more money to getting school children out of the classroom and into the countryside and nature reserves to experience wildlife for themselves.

If so few young people are even familiar with the countryside, we  can’t be surprised if they don’t consider working in it to be a feasible career choice.