James and Thibaud Aronson post the second of four blogposts on their recent field trip to Namibia and South Africa.
Africa is famous for its megafauna. Most foreign visitors, who only ever see them on safaris inside protected areas, may think that Africa has managed something every other continent has failed at: a harmonious relationship between people and entire trophic chains including large animals. In fact, many if not most interactions between humans and large animals in Africa, just as elsewhere, are conflictual and complex. Nothing illustrates the problem better than fences.
A legacy of European agricultural practices, long fences have become ubiquitous in Africa. They primarily serve to delineate property, control the movements of livestock, and in some cases limit the spread of epidemic diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease and bovine TB, and their spread to and from wild animals such a wildebeest and lions.
A typical small livestock herd in the Pro-Namib.
There are also the other kind of fences, the ones around protected areas, which often serve as effective protection for wildlife. However, there is no doubt that livestock and veterinary fences have had and still have severe impacts on wild animal populations.
In particular, large mammals tend to range widely in search of food or water. Fences severely restrict their movements, with dramatic effects on populations in drought years. And mammals aren’t the only ones affected: large birds such as bustards suffer lethal collisions with power lines and fences, and tortoises are sometimes killed by electric fences.
The amazingly camouflaged Rüppell’s bustard (Eupodotis rueppellii), which is endemic to the Namib. Like other members of the bustard family, it occasionally collides with fences.
In Windhoek, we met with Dr. Chris Brown, chairperson of the Greater Fish River Canyon Landscape (GFRCL), a mosaic of diverse properties, from private reserves to working cattle farms united in an association, whose working motto is “What can we do better together?” It is one of five such associations in Namibia today that are part of the NAM-PLACE project, started by the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, and now supported by the United Nations Development Program.
Dr. Brown is also a director in a Namibian company, Gondwana Collection. Chris told us “We have a triple bottom line approach to business, with both environment and social investment playing central roles.” The strategy is to buy land in marginal, overworked farming areas, “re-wild it” by taking off the livestock and taking down the fences, and then reintroduce indigenous mammals and reinforce populations that have dwindled. Next, they build lodges to attract medium- and high-end tourists interested in seeing wild nature. Their largest property to date – among 14 throughout the country – is a private, protected area of 130,000 ha on the east side of the Fish River Canyon, which is the largest canyon in Africa.
The Fish River canyon. The river only flows like this after heavy rains.
An Aloe dichotoma (Kokerboom in Afrikaans, or Quiver tree), one of the few trees in the southern Namib. In the past, Bushmen fashioned quivers for their arrows from the soft branches, hence the tree’s common name.
We were fortunate enough to spend two nights at one GFRCL partner’s lodge, a 40,000 ha reserve on the western rim of the canyon. This remarkable landscape has been inhabited by humans for millennia, as illustrated by the tools and rock engravings still found throughout, but ill-adapted sheep farming, along with the eradication of many species by white settlers over the last 150 years, had a massive impact on the landscape, which is only now beginning to heal.
‘Pecked’ rock engraving and associated stone tools near the Fish River Lodge.
Through Chris Brown, we also met Nils Odendaal, CEO of the NamibRand Nature Reserve, which is part of the Greater Sossusvlei-Namib Landscape, another of the five current NAM-PLACE projects. Nils was upbeat, citing serious prospects for addressing conservation and human well-being issues simultaneously. This group focuses on the Pro-Namib, the transition zone between the arid Namib and the more mesic escarpments to the East. Much of the land there was given to white South Africans after World War II as a reward for fighting in the war and for voting for the South African National Party. However, after two generations of unsustainable sheep grazing on these already nutrient- and moisture-poor lands, the area became known as the ‘bankruptcy belt’, when farms began to fail one after the other in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982, a Namibian businessman bought up a large tract of land and made it into a nature reserve. From this initiative, NamibRand has expanded and now includes 202,000 ha, comprising several properties linked by a common constitution that stipulates, among other things, the removal of internal fences. High-quality, low-impact tourism at ‘ecolodges’ built on concessions inside the reserve provide part of the funds for its conservation activities and “sustainable utilization of its resources”.
A typical NamibRand landscape. Like most of the country, it has suffered a 4-year drought, which may now finally be breaking.
During our journey, we were able to stay one night at the flagship ecolodge, whose revenues help support an environmental education and sustainable living center called NaDeet (Namib Desert Environmental Education Trust), which aims to contribute to the hugely important task of teaching and capacity-building.
The pro-Namib is of critical importance for animals moving out of the Namib proper during droughts. Therefore the reserve is working on an agreement to take down part of its fences on its border with the massive Namib-Naukluft National Park, allowing mammals such as gemsbok to reach the highlands in times of drought.
The gemsbok (Oryx gazella), is perhaps the most characteristic large mammal of the southern Namib, and one of the most supremely adapted ungulates to desert living. Despite the drought, about 2000 of them thrive on the reserve.
In sum, these are two remarkable initiatives in two of the driest parts of Namibia. Both focus on large wild animals and high-end tourism. Neither has any direct support from the government, and they both are in difficult, arid lands. On the other hand, the very low human populations limit the potential for social conflict so common around conservation areas elsewhere in Africa.
Unquestionably, one major priority for Namibia is more and better environmental education, in classrooms and, above all, outdoors. Both GFRCL and NamibRand undertake detailed monitoring of the wild animals for which they are the stewards and defenders. They are also stellar communicators for wildlife and nature conservation through all their activities and presence on the internet. But what about training in the science and practice of ecological restoration?
As mentioned in our previous post, we were able to visit the Gobabeb Research and Training Center, in the central Namib, as we noted in our previous post. This Center has been operating continuously for over 50 years, and has produced a large body of research on many facets of the Namib, including hydrology, geology, paleohistory and of course ecology. Since 2012, it houses the NEMRU (Namib Ecological Restoration and Monitoring Unit), headed by Dr. Theo Wassenaar. This group has been doing research on restoration of arid lands in the country and training Namibian students, and lobbying for more research and training in restoration ecology at various universities in the country as well. The Gobabeb Training and Research Internship Programme (GTRIP) a five-month field course now in its seventh year. It is intended for young Namibian scientists interested in the fields of conservation, land and ecosystem management and ecological restoration. Under the guidance of researchers and staff, students have the opportunity to design and implement independent research projects that should “contribute to Namibia’s ability to manage and restore degraded ecosystems”. Posts from the GTRIP 2016 trainees are well worth looking at. Hopefully, this generation of Namibians will be the one to make the difference.
One obvious source of inspiration should be its neighbor, South Africa, which has been doing world-class restoration for over two decades. We spent three weeks on the other side of the border, meeting some of the key people and visiting cutting-edge restoration projects, as we’ll discuss and illustrate in our next two posts.
This year’s GTRIP students at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre : Mathias Mwaetako, Fransiska Otto, Ailla-Tessa Iiyambula, and Kauna Kapitango, taken on the dunes south of the Kuiseb River. 15 February, 2016. Photo: Meg Schmitt.
Natural History of Ecological Restoration 