TANZANIA: Fight Against Silent Poaching In Serengeti

For the first time in history, the tour and hotel operators have officially committed themselves to become responsible tourism players by supporting conservation initiatives in the country’s national parks.

They started walking their rhetoric by contributing a patrol vehicle worth $90,000 (about TSh200 million) to a conservation initiative dubbed Serengeti De-Snaring, the brainchild of Mr. Willbard Chambulo, the owner of Tanganyika Wilderness Camps (TWC).

“This program will spread all over the 16 national parks, but we’ve started here in Serengeti where snaring has become yet another major threat to our wildlife,” explained Mr. Chambulo, who doubles as the Chairman of the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators (TATO).

Snaring is a small-scale poaching method targeting wildlife species for bush meat, including the abundant wildebeest.

Deadly traps in use, however, catch many other wild animals, mostly elephants and predators waylaying the wildebeest.

The Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) is, along with other stakeholders, carrying out the De-Snaring program in Serengeti – the Tanzania’s flagship national park – to suppress the new fatal poaching method.

With the stakeholders’ initial contributions, the program has already set up 2 anti-snaring teams currently operating in the national park.

“The physical ground operations have been very successful, as over 350 snares have been discovered and dismantled in 3 weeks of ‘training’ operations, and 5 poachers’ camps have been reported to Tanzania National Parks’ (TANAPA) anti-poaching unit,” Mr. Erik Winberg from FZS said.

The magnitude of the challenge demonstrates the need for acting fast, given the high rate of snaring and losses incurred during the annual migration season, which is under way.

Mr. Winberg said that May, June, and July were critical months, as poachers actively set snares along well-established migration pathways leading to the north, particularly at the Kogatende and other hot spots in the northwestern part of the Serengeti.

“The de-snaring initiative can mitigate huge losses of migrants and also give TANAPA rangers space to apprehend poachers,” he stressed.

The hatched plan is to have 8 teams deployed within the Serengeti ecosystem alone.

At the helm of the teams with members from villages surrounding the Serengeti ecosystem, mostly ex-small-scale poachers themselves, is a retired ranger with the TANAPA, explained the FZS Program Manager for the Africa Region, Mr. Gerald Bigurube.

The teams zoom around the ecosystem in collaboration with the Serengeti National Park’s rangers to collect the snares before they cause harm to wildlife animals.

The gains the de-snaring initiative has so far registered call for the backing of various stakeholders for it to cover other areas of the Serengeti ecosystem as well, noted the Program Coordinator, Ms. Vesna Glamocanin.

Much as the tour operators’ activities heavily rely on the welfare of the Serengeti ecosystem, concerted efforts towards conservation of the ecology is the surest way of sustaining both the Tanzania’s wildlife heritage and the tourism industry, said the Chief Executive Officer with TATO, Mr. Sirili Akko.

It is in this backdrop that the TANAPA, FZS, and members of the private sector operating in the ecosystem have penned a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a view of flagging off the ambitious de-snaring campaign.

Voluntary donations and those accrued from hoteliers’ bed night fees as well as camp operators’ charges will also contribute to the funding of the unique and useful conservation cause with a sustainable future for the tourism value chain.

The plan is also expected to reduce rampant poaching in the western Serengeti where the TANAPA Director General, Mr. Allan Kijazi, said between 200 and 300 wildebeests were slaughtered annually.

“This is the minimum figure, but the number can be even higher. We’re worried that if this trend goes unabated, the wildlife survival will be at great risk,” Mr. Kijazi noted.

A UN Conservation Program (UNEP) and World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) joint report indicates that at least 200,000 various animal species are killed annually in the western Serengeti.

The document says the rise in demand for meat has also been partly driven by the growing local population.

Official statistics show that the Serengeti’s sprawling western boundary is densely populated with the number of farmers and herders settling on the buffer zone estimated at 3,329,199 in 2011.

Agriculture has encroached on the park’s boundaries, and consequently what once was subsistence poaching has now turned into a large-scale commercialized vice.

TANZANIA: TANAPA Deploys Surveillance Aircraft In Serengeti National Park

German Ambassador to Tanzania handed over a surveillance aircraft to the Tanzanian Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism which was donated a few months ago during an official visit of the German Foreign Minister to the country. The Husky aircraft will be operated by the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) for surveillance of the Serengeti National Park to support TANAPA’s fight against poaching.

'We are seeing the large mammals of our protected areas under a severe threat of local extinction because of poaching' said the Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism Prof. Jumanne Maghembe on the occasion of the handover in Seronera. He thanked the German government for the support in countering the recent upsurge in poaching.

'Stringent law enforcement, community involvement and ecosystem management are key in the fight against poaching', said the German Ambassador Mr. Egon Kochanke before adding: 'I am very proud to be able to hand this aircraft over to the Tanzanian authorities and FZS. This is an important cornerstone of our close and longstanding cooperation'.

It is the Frankfurt Zoological Society which will operate the aircraft in close cooperation with the Serengeti National Park Authority. With aerial support, poacher camps and illegal activities can be detected and the pilots can provide critical information to reaction forces on the ground.

Tanzanian wildlife authorities are faced with a dramatic upsurge of poaching threatening the country’s populations of elephants and rhinos. To counter this threat and to support wildlife and habitat monitoring, the German Government through the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has provided funding for the acquisition of overall three aircraft.

The other two Husky A-1C Aircraft will be deployed in the Tanzanian Selous Game Reserve, one of the hardest hit areas by elephant poaching gangs and the Zambian North Luangwa National Park. The Husky is well suited for monitoring and anti-poaching surveys as it operates at low heights and slow speeds.

This support is part of longer-term financial and technical development cooperation measures implemented by FZS, GIZ, KfW, in collaboration with Tanzania Wildlife Authority TAWA, Tanzania National Parks TANAPA, and the Zambian Department of National Parks and Wildlife DNPW.

TANZANIA: Ruaha Elephants Accounted For

A TOTAL of 7,564 elephants that were presumed lost in the Ruaha-Rungwa Ecosystem during the countrywide wildlife census of last yea r, have been accounted for.

Tabling the new results of the 2015 Wildlife Census at the ongoing 10th Scientific Conference organized by the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI), the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, Dr Adelhem Meru, showed that fresh counts have upped the total number of elephants in Ruaha-Rungwa eco-system to 15,836.

“In the previous (2014) wildlife census, the population of the elephants in the area stood at 8,000, a figure which raised alarm considering that the first count made in 2013, indicated that Ruaha-Rungwa had more than 20,000 elephants,” Dr Meru told the 250 scientists from all over the world attending the TAWIRI Scientific Conference here.

The government, Wildlife Experts and Conservationists were baffled by the sudden disappearance of more than 12,000 elephants from the Southern Tanzania precinct.

With such shocking discovery of the disappearance of elephants at the rate of 1,000 a month, or 34 elephants a day, the government, through the Arusha-based Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI) decided to run a fresh census focused in Ruaha-Rungwa to satisfy themselves over the matter.

That was especially because wildlife experts who conducted the early counting did not find carcass es to indicate whether the animals could have succumbed to natural deaths or were killed.

“Were the jumbos killed, stolen or simply wandered out of the area? Usually when such large number of giant mammals go missing, comparable numbers of carcasses are observed but in this case there were none,” wondered research experts.

Dr Meru was of view that the 2015 aerial census provided an estimate of 15,836 which means out of the 12,000 elephants initially reported lost, 7,564 of them are now back, leaving the other 4,500 jumbos still at large.

Still, the same 2014 Census, whose results were tabled in Arusha last June, indicated that there was a total of 43,521 jumbos in Tanzania and the precinct seems to have lost nearly 70,000 mammals in the last five years.

The 2009 estimates documented that Tanzania had around 110,000 jumbos, placing the country in the second position after Botswana, which by then had close to 150,000 elephants.

However, the number of trumpeting Jumbos in Tanzania, according to the census report, has drastically dropped from over 100,000 estimated five years ago, down to the current 45,000 average, indicating a loss of more than 60 per cent in the country’s elephant’s population.

Costing US $ 900,000 to undertake, the previous ‘Great Elephant Census’ covered all of Tanzania’s key elephant eco-systems as part of the initiative funded by Paul G. Allen to assess the current state of elephant populations across the African Continent.

The Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI) conducted the exercise in conjunction with the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS). The Malagarasi-Muyovozi eco-system has the highest Jumbo disappearance at 81 per cent, followed by Ruaha-Rungwa at 76 per cent and Selous Mikumi with a 66 per cent loss.

In the 70s the Selous eco-system was home to 100,000 elephants but now the number is down to 15,217 jumbos.

The Serengeti-Mara ecosystem recorded significant increase in Jumbos’ population with 6,087 elephants, Tarangire-Manyara has 4,400 Jumbos, Arusha National Park has 200 elephants, Mount-Kilimanjaro has 100, Ruaha-Rungwa has 8,000, Malagarasi-Muyovosi with 2,950 jumbos, Rubondo Island 102 elephants and Katavi-Rukwa 6,396 jumbos.