Serengeti Story by Sinclair Anthony;

Author:Sinclair, Anthony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

15

Bandits

THE decline in buffalo numbers had been due to extensive, systematic poaching by gangs of up to fifty people who herded buffalo into snare lines set in the riverine forest. These drives could kill as many as 200 animals at a time. There was a factory-like process of dismembering the carcases, the porters carrying meat out at night on foot as far as 30 miles. The heads were piled under brush and burnt.233 Poison was set out for predators to stop them eating the carcases.

Law and order hardly existed, the rangers had no vehicles, and it was a free-for-all for the ivory and bushmeat hunters. Ivory was being stockpiled before being smuggled out to Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, and Japan. The bushmeat went to Kenya. All of this was well known to the park authorities, especially the anti-poaching warden Justin Hando. Nevertheless other authorities were still claiming, against the advice of Hando, that rinderpest was the cause of the buffalo collapse. In 1986, after the censuses, a team of virologists and veterinarians—Euan Anderson and Mark Jago from Britain, and Titus Mlengeya from the Arusha Veterinary Centre234—arrived to take serum samples from wildebeest and buffalo to test for rinderpest antibodies. Stan Boutin and I helped them collect the samples from buffalo by immobilizing animals. In 1987 we obtained further samples and the results showed conclusively that rinderpest, though previously present, was not the cause of the decline in buffalo numbers.235 In fact the poaching had occurred almost a decade earlier, between 1978 and 1984. In those years, when there was no food or other commodities in Tanzania, the only place to find them was Kenya, and that required Kenya currency. The Wakuria tribe, who were responsible for most of this poaching, had members living on both sides of the Tanzania–Kenya border. So it was a simple matter for them to carry the meat across the border and sell it for Kenya shillings—monies that could then be used to purchase other essentials. This was the bushmeat trade that was now to affect Serengeti and our research so significantly.

* * *

By 1987 we had some indication from the behaviour of the smaller resident antelopes that predators may be having a much larger influence on their numbers than we had observed for buffalo and wildebeest (see Chapter 13).236 To test the theory that small antelopes were regulated by predators we needed to find out what was killing them. Large species were easy to find when they died. Their carcases lay around and we were able to conduct autopsies. Small species, however, were dismembered and eaten fast by scavengers such as hyenas, jackals, and vultures, and nothing remained of the carcase within an hour. We knew very little about the causes of their deaths.

However, newly developed techniques were coming to our aid. In particular, radios attached to collars signalled both where an animal was and when it died; we could hear the signal on a receiver and we could detect the direction from which it came.

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