Humans Behaving Badly

Came across an interesting Tumblr site geared towards documenting the excesses in our parks and wild places, click here to see photos and also submit.

There's been a lot of issues recently with idiotic jeep drivers in Yala injuring passengers and killing animals including leopards while speeding. You can visit Sri Lankan Wildlife on facebook to see some interesting discussions.

The bottom line is that we who visit are those who are responsible for this. I personally was guilty and will be posting about this shortly as well.

What can YOU do?

1) Ask your jeep driver to switch of their phone and not to speed.

2) Keep in mind the closing time for the park and ask your driver to make sure he is near the exit as the safari ends so he does not have to speed to get out of the park.

3) Keep in mind that a photograph is just a photograph and a leopard does not sum up Yala National Park,

4) Ask your friends to the same.

5) Take photographs of anything that is not being done correctly in the park and post to humans behaving badly

Saman the CDF Tracker; Hope if opportunities used correctly

It was a Wilpattu trip after almost a year’s absence in the park and a quite uncharacteristically late entrance into the park after a 3.30am arrival to Aanawila the night before. With the late entry and an experienced and super jeep driver (Nishantha: 0724125078) we were assigned a less experienced tracker, Saman who clambered in clutching some paperwork.

It was a bit of a surprise to find out that he was a member of the Civil Defense Force, what is thought to be one of the poorest trained and least popular sections of the armed forces in Sri Lanka. Someone had put it fairly accurately to me some time ago, that (rightly or wrongly) the general impression is that the CDF is a bunch of village thugs with guns.

Saman however was completely different from what I expected, very nice and eager. The documents he was clutching as he got into the vehicle turned out to be a bird guide book. As I identified a blue-faced malkoha and a racquet-tailed drongo, he sheepishly admitted that he wasn’t the best at bird ID’s and if he had known I was into birds he would have gotten a better guide from the office. Yet it was refreshing to be with Saman, not only did he look up a bird in the bird every time we saw one but he’s enthusiasm was infectious. I usually just click a photo for ID’ng later and go along my merry way especially with the waders since they are usually quite obscure, small and relatively dull. This time however it was an interesting trip because Saman was quite into trying to ID every bird we came across.

A character like Saman does raise an interesting issue. Every park that I have visited, from Yala to Wasgamuwa to Gal Oya, is understaffed with the majority of staff being temporary. In a park like Gal  Oya, rarely visited and relatively obscure it is somewhat excusable. But in a park like Yala, where turnover has on some days exceeded Rs. 1 million a day and is a frequent stop on the tourist trail, there is simply no excuse.

Yet at the same time while the parks, which generate such vital income, cry out for manpower, the Civil Defense Force is 35,000 strong without any discernible purpose that the army or the police could not fulfill. They are paid salaries and have pension schemes (http://www.lankajournal.com/2012/01/pension-scheme-for-civil-defense-force/) funded by the taxpayer. There has been some talk about the CDF ‘helping’ the DWC with the elephant-man conflict but why not simply reallocate resources?

Saman cannot be the only one of his kind in the CDF. There must be more individuals in entities such as the CDF who have a latent interest in nature, wildlife and who would benefit from being brought into the fold of the DWC, being trained and acquiring skills and pride in protecting a natural heritage. These same people are otherwise pulling a salary, holding a gun and sitting around doing nothing much the whole day. That money could be much better spent on someone who is creating value for the country like Saman is. Our problem is not only limited resources but the poor way in which we use our resources, driven by political expediency and short term gain. We can get around limited resources by thinking smart and acting with principle. Of course the key here is letting go of our apathy and complacency but currently the majority seems intent on not doing that as long as possible. It’s the age old story of Sri Lanka, potential but no will to make good on that potential.

Environment & You - EFL Public Lecture series

EFL's 30th Anniversary lecture series which began on Thursday 24 November continues for the next 3 consecutive Thursdays. More details on the flier below and you can reserve your seat by calling the number on there. The Marine one should be interesting!

Ghost Nets

When a person sits down to a fish curry or a portion of fish and chips, they rarely think of where that fish comes from. We rarely realize that when we consume fish, we are eating the last truly wild caught meat on the planet, our ancient role as hunters reprised in the role of modern day fishermen.

Of course the new age fishermen are a far cry from what they were centuries or even decades ago. With engines, mechanization, longlines that stretch for kilometers with thousands of hooks and nets that could engulf the Empire State Building, the fisheries industry has become almost unrecognizable as has sadly our oceans, rapidly depleted and overfished what we see in our seas now appears to be but a sad remnant of the abundance that was there decades ago.

Our surface interval chats with Uncle Sumathi used to really bring this home, 56 years old, he had seen foreign trawlers come and rape the seas off Colombo, taking so much fish that the numbers have never recovered. Apparently the local fishermen had to gang up and beat up some of the fishermen who came in the trawlers to get rid of them and protect what was left. The discussion about the differences from then and now were frequent and depressing.

We rarely think about the ‘cost’ of the food on our plate except in monetary terms. The reality is that there is a far greater hidden cost to our environment, apart from the incidental catch which kills thousands of marine mammals and birds a year our hunger for fish continues to kill days, weeks, months and even years after the fishermen have moved on. This is done silently, without fan-fare by lost nets, those that escaped the fishermen, taken away by currents or carelessness.

A fish eye view of a derelict net, a net smothering Palagala (shallow reef in Colombo)

We see these nets often on our dives, especially on the inner reefs, carpeting the rock smothering everything in its path. Some are huge and while we try and take off what we can, it is a disheartening process as sea fans and soft corals often crunch away from the rock as we cut the nets. We often find fish entangled, dead or dying and other animals (await a story about a crab rescued from a net) waiting for a slow, inevitable death in the nets.

Dead and beheaded, a fish killed by a ghost net

One of our wrecks, the Medhafaru was literally a tomb for fish being sheathed in nets before some inteprid divers from the Sri Lanka Sub Aqua Club cleared a lot of them from the ship. Research has provided some staggering estimates for kills from these nets, with a  single net in Puget Sound being estimated to have killed over 3,000 seabirds and fish combined. We don’t have any figures from Sri Lanka but it would be safe to assume fish kills are quite high.

Perilously close, fish feed close to a net on the Medhafaru

Divers can of course play a part in removing this menace but with the risk of entanglement it is advisable if only experienced divers working in teams tackle this kind of thing. We can all however try and understand where our seafood comes from and at least appreciate the cost to our natural systems from this harvest.

Cutting a net off the reef (only experienced divers should do this)

The Net Closes

“The noble fish, weighing up to four hundred pounds apiece, swam around and around…We pondered how it would feel to be trapped with the other animals and have to live their tragedy. Dumas and I were the only ones in the creeping, constricting prison who knew the outcome, and we were destined to escape. Perhaps we were oversentimental but we were ashamed of the knowledge. I had an impulse to take my belt knife and cut a hole for a mass break to Freedom.

The death chamber was reduced to a third of its size. The atmosphere grew excited, franctic. The herd swam restlessly faster, but still in formation. Their eyes passed us with almost human expressions of fright.

…Never have I beheld a site lie the death cell in the last moments. The fish were out of control…With the seeming momentum of locomotives, the tuna drove at me, head-on, obliquely, crosswise. It was out of the question for me to dodge them. Frightened out of sense of time, I….surfaced amidst the thrashing bodies. There was not a mark on my body. Even while running amok the giant fish had avoided me by inches, merely massaging me with backwash as they sped past.”

A poignant passage from The Silent World, by that deity of the deep, Jacques Costeau via another brilliant book, Song for the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina about the last moments of some Blue-finned tuna as a seine net closes in on them.

Read both books, especially the Song for the Blue Ocean. It is a moving, accurate, heavily researched account of what we are doing to the ocean. Of how we are destroying on of the life support systems that keeps us human alive on this spaceship earth.