In a country where primates are valued for the amount of meat on their bones it is not an obvious choice to become a primate keeper. Fortunately there are Cameroonians who want to make a difference and who dedicate their lives to the protection of wildlife. Jonathan Kang, head keeper of the Limbe Wildlife Centre, is one of them and his remarkable career has not gone unnoticed. Nominated by PASA (Pan African Sanctuary Alliance), Jonathan has been selected as a Disney Conservation Hero for 2007. This awards program recognizes that conservation initiatives can only be as successful as the local people involved in the project. On 27th October Jonathan received the award from the Divisional Delegate of the Ministry of Forest and Wildlife. We are all extremely proud of him and Jonathan feels very honoured. . The Limbe Wildlife Centre is very lucky to have staff members like Jonathan, as it is through their dedication and hard work that the high standards that we have set for ourselves can be met.  In the past six months Jonathan and all the other LWC staff have accomplished a great deal, the highlights of which you can read in this update:

Animal news

The ‘Taiping Four’ Gorillas

Six years after they were illegally captured in Cameroon the ‘Taiping Four’ gorillas have finally returned to their home country. On 30th November, they were moved from South Africa to the Limbe Wildlife Centre.

These four famous gorillas, Oyin, Abbey, Tinu and the lone male Izan, were smuggled to Nigeria at the end of 2001 and from there sent to Malaysia to be put on display at the Taiping Zoo. Since then the conservation community and the Cameroonian Government campaigned vigorously to have these gorillas returned to Cameroon. However, in April 2004, a decision was made by the Government of Malaysia to send them to South Africa to live in the National Zoo in Pretoria. After a further three and a half years of negotiations and discussions, all parties involved finally agreed that the gorillas should be send back to Cameroon.

To prepare a warm welcome for the gorillas we gave part of our quarantine facility a face lift. We refurbished the designated enclosure, leveled the ground in the surrounding area and painted the buildings. The Nature Club students put up welcome banners and gorilla drawings, so the LWC looked its best on the big day.

With a large group of journalists accompanying the gorillas and local media waiting their arrival in Douala and Limbe, no aspect of the transfer went unreported.  Fortunately the journey, supervised by LWC’s project manager Felix Lankester, went very smoothly. 
The importance of this event was also reflected by the delegation from the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, including the Minister himself that had come to celebrate the arrival of the four gorillas.

The gorillas are healthy and strong and it is clear that the National Zoo in Pretoria took good care of them. However the return of these gorillas to their home country was an important achievement, because it sent out a very clear message that the international community will not tolerate endangered species being removed from their wild homes and smuggled in to zoos for the entertainment of humans. 

Currently the four gorillas are doing well in their new enclosure. Although the long travel and all the attention must have been stressful for them, they have been at ease and eating well from the very first day. They love fresh branches and browse with which they show us that they have not forgotten what it is to be a gorilla as they carefully extract the succulent pith of the Afromomum plant and make nests from the remains, just like their families would have done back in the forest of Cameroon.

Once they clear quarantine the long and delicate process of introducing them to our resident gorilla group will begin.


Parrots

A week before the arrival of the ‘Taiping Four’ gorillas the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife (MINFOF), assisted by the NGO Last Great Ape, confiscated 493 African grey parrots at Douala International Airport.  The birds were packed in to 8 small wooden boxes and were being shipped illegally to Bahrain.   MINFOF asked if we could assist in the rehabilitation of the birds and, despite the fact that everyone was extremely busy with the preparations for the gorilla’s arrival, we gladly accepted to help.

Not being equipped to take care of so many birds at once we had to improvise. During the first days we had parrots literally everywhere; quarantine cages needed to be turned in to aviaries, and even old storage cupboards became temporary enclosures.  The plan was to give the birds a few days rest, with high energy feed, before individually assessing the immediately releasable birds from those with damaged wing feathers and those that were sick.  Hunters catch African grey parrots by coating a fruiting tree in the forest with glue; they then sit and wait for a flock of parrots to come and feed from the tree.  Consequently many of the birds caught in this way are traumatised with severely damaged feathers that preclude them from being released until their feathers have had a chance to re-grow.

After a week the situation was slowly coming under control when we were alerted to a second confiscation of parrots.  Once again, being the only wildlife project in the region, it was our duty to take the confiscated birds in.  This second group numbered 727 birds, squashed into a few wooden boxes.  The LWC was now at breaking point, having received 1220 parrots in less than 10 days. So to cope with the situation we quickly designed and constructed two new flight cages that could house those birds with damaged feathers that could not be released.  Once these cages were built the pressure eased as we were able to sort the birds out, release those birds that were strong fliers and house the sick birds in flight cages that would be appropriate for their rehabilitation.  We were very grateful to the World Parrot Trust, the Born Free Foundation and the Humane Society for the emergency funding that they gave to help us with this ongoing situation. 

Currently we still have over 400 parrots that are not able to be released who will require long term rehabilitation throughout 2008. 

The people responsible for smuggling the parrots are currently being prosecuted by MINFOF under the wildlife laws of Cameroon and we are eagerly awaiting their convictions.  The Minister of MINFOF showed his support for wildlife protection by releasing the first 5 parrots in the Limbe Botanic Gardens.

This story can be followed on a blog posted on the World Parrot Trust website; a site that is able to receive donations which will be forward on to us to help with the ongoing rehabilitation of the remaining parrots.


Link to email campaign – FlockTalk WPT eNewsletter
http://www.parrots.org/index.php/newsletter/pendinghtml

Link to appeal page at parrots.org
http://www.parrots.org/index.php/ourwork/african_grey_appeal


Another new gorilla

Just as we thought life could not get any more complicated it did.  On Thursday 20th December Felix Lankester received a call from the LWC’s long term supporter Selma Forotti from the Netherlands.  Selma had received a call from one of her contacts, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Adjibolo, in Batouri, in the east of Cameroon, to say that he had seized an infant gorilla from a hunter who had been trying to sell her.  During her annual visits to the east of Cameroon Selma has been sensitizing the residents of Batouri about the damaging effects of the trade in wildlife so she was understandably pleased that such a senior figure had heeded her words and had seized the gorilla from the hunter.  Unfortunately the damage had been done and the infant’s family most probably had been shot, but at least the infant was safe and the townspeople of Batouri were given a lesson in wildlife protection from a senior government official.

We had to act quickly as infant gorillas are extremely vulnerable to the effects of stress.  A call was made to CWAF in Yaoundé who immediately dispatched an army escort to collect the infant from Batouri.  On the Friday morning Felix Lankester with a volunteer who would become the infant’s surrogate mother drove to Yaoundé and returned on Saturday with the female gorilla.  The gorilla, now named Adjibolo (or ‘bolo’), is now recovering from her ordeal and is slowly bonding with the volunteer. 

This new addition, together with the Taiping Four, takes the LWC’s gorilla group to 16 gorillas.


Mystery monkeys

One night in October two men from Bobende, a village a few kilometres away from Limbe, brought two baby monkeys to the Limbe Wildlife Centre.  The mother of the two babies had been killed, the men admitted, by their senior brother.

We named the monkeys Bobo and Bende. Unfortunately Bende was very weak and died after a few days. Bobo, however, is very strong and is doing well. He now shares an enclosure with Ebo, the baby red eared guenon (Cercopithecus erythrotis) that came to the LWC in early August.

There was one small problem: nobody knew what species Bobo was.  His fur was orange flecked with black and he did not look like any of the guenon or mangabey species that typically come from this region.  However, slowly he started to change colour, developing a white throat and black around the eyes.  We now are pretty certain that he is a Preuss’s guenon (C.preussi). What is incredible about this story is that Preuss’s guenons are so rare and so little is known about them that, as far as we could ascertain, new born Preuss’s guenons have not been recorded before and there is no record of them being orange in colour.  We think that this may be (one of) the only photographs of an infant Preuss’s guenon in existence.  It is very sad that so little is known about species that are so close to extinction. 


Gabon

As August came to a close it seemed that a mild raining season was passing without too many problems, but, just as we thought we were through the worst, we were hit by a deluge.  Such damp conditions often lead to respiratory infections and this year was no exception.  The infection, which was probably brought into the LWC by a member of the public or a staff member, first affected the adult chimpanzees and quickly spread to other groups.  Many chimpanzees developed broncho-pneumonia and required intravenous fluids and antibiotic therapy before recovering.  However one female infant chimpanzee, Gabon, quickly developed severe pneumonia that overwhelmed her.  Within 24 hours twice she stopped breathing and twice she was resuscitated, but on the third time our best efforts were in vain and Gabon died. 

Gabon had been with us for almost two years. She was named Gabon because she was smuggled from Gabon to Cameroon. The smuggler wanted to sell Gabon to the LWC, bringing her in a small plastic shopping bag. Instead of being sold, Gabon was confiscated.  On arrival Gabon weighed 2kg and was severely emaciated.  However over the past few years she has grown steadily although she suffered recurrent pulmonary problems (probably stemming from the months she spent starving in the care of a hunter).  Despite her diminutive stunted size and weak lungs, Gabon was a very gregarious chimpanzee and she will be missed.

 
Education

Outreach and Nature Club

In October we started with a new school year for our Outreach and Nature Club program. Our Saturday Nature Club has been very popular in the first months, with more then a hundred weekly participants. As we cannot seat so many students in our education hall at one time we had to split up the group. Half the group started outside with a special field program and halfway through the day we swapped. It is a bit of extra work, but of course we are very happy that the Nature Club is growing.

The Outreach Program has continued with new schools being added to the list of schools that we teach.  The Outreach Program is now a regular fixture in many local schools, which means that all students will participate in our program during one of their school years.


Workshops and staff training

In the last week of October the Limbe Wildlife Centre was hosting the PASA education workshop. The theme of this year’s workshop was ‘the reintroduction of primates and the role of communication’. Delegates from all over Africa came to Limbe to exchange ideas and learn from each other during the five day program. As we hosted the workshop the whole LWC Education Team could attend the course, instead of just one representative. This was a valuable experience especially for our younger team members for whom it was their first taste of such an event.

In the following week the PASA meeting for veterinarians was held in Yaoundé, the capitol of Cameroon. Dr. John Kyang and our veterinary nurse Akih Emmanuel participated in this workshop that dealt with veterinary aspects of reintroduction.

At the PASA education workshop we made arrangements with CWAF to do an exchange program for education officers. CWAF, Cameroon Wildlife Aid Fund, runs a sanctuary for primates just south of Yaoundé. Kenneth, who has recently been added to our education team, spent a week at CWAF in November and came back with lots of new ideas. One of our colleagues from CWAF came to Limbe to experience how we organise our education program. In January we will continue this program with more visits.

In December we held our third hunter’s workshop, with twenty hunters from Ebo forest coming for our two day program, jointly organised by Conservation Research Endangered Species (CRES) and LWC. These workshops are very popular with the hunters and we are delighted that funding has been secured from San Diego Zoological Society for the continuation of this important outreach program. 


Construction

The construction of the new Born Free Chimpanzee Enclosure is nearing its completion. The inside enclosure is completely ready and, following a  generous donation of steel pipes from Pecten Cameroon Company/Shell, we have been able to start work on the fence.   The estimated completion time now is early 2008. 

 
Media

Throughout the last quarter of 2007 filming has been taking place for the second series of ‘Going Ape’, filmed by Tigress Productions, UK.  The series, which will be broadcast sometime in mid-late 2008 on Animal Planet, is an observational documentary about the daily goings on at the three Cameroonian rescue and rehabilitation centres (LWC, CWAF and Sanaga Yong).  As so much was going on at the LWC during the three filming months I am sure that our project will be featured heavily and you will be able to see for yourselves the arrival of the Taiping Four, the spectacle of the parrots and the rescue of little Adjibolo.


New fund raising blog

The LWC now has a new blog site on the Wildlife Direct website.  Wildlife Direct was set up by Richard Leakey to enable conservation projects to raise funds through internet donations.  Each project, if selected, is invited to write a regular blog on their own Wildlife Direct page.  We were successful in our application and have since started our new blog.  Please do visit the site and read our on going reports and if you are feeling a little flush do feel free to make a handsome donation!  The benefit of donating through this site is that 100% of your donation will reach us as Wildlife Direct do not charge any handling fee for their overheads. 

The link to our site is:   www.wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/limbewildlifecentre  


Conclusion

With 1220 African grey parrots, 5 gorillas, 1 Preuss’s guenon, 1 drill, several tortoises, 1 dwarf crocodile, 1 civet cat, 2 mongoose and a barn owl all arriving at the LWC during the last third of 2007 it has been an extremely busy period and we are all looking forward to some rest.  However, as always, Christmas day and New Year ’s Day will be our busiest days of the year and so we all have to be on duty throughout the holiday period. 
 
The past few months have been very challenging and very expensive and we are extremely grateful to our many friends and supporters who have helped us through this period.  We would like to thank you all sincerely for the help you have given us.

Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year to all.


Written by Simone de Vries (Assistant Project Manager) and Felix Lankester (Project Manager)
December 2007