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| credit: John Newby/Sahara Conservation Fund |
A decade of conservation effort has been rewarded with the establishment of one the biggest wildlife reserves in Africa. The Termit & Tin Toumma National Reserve is 38,610 square miles intended to preserve rare Saharan species such as the addax antelope, Dama and Dorcas gazelle
[photo], Saharan cheetah, and Barbary sheep. These animals are under threat from human development and climate change. The severe drought of 2009 was a blow to even the desert adapted addax
[photo below]. It rarely drinks, obtaining moisture from sparse vegetation. Surviving animals are faced with the impacts of oil exploration in the desert which keep them from using critical pasture areas. Besides starvation, poor grazing reduces the birth rate. The addax is highly adapted, but very sensitive to disturbance of its isolated desert home. In August of 2008 Chinese and Nigerian oilmen began exploring the region and building infrastructure, one of the remotest in the already remote Sahara. With human presence, poaching inevitably increases.
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| credit: Sahara Conservation Fund |
The Saharan cheetah is an incredibly rare sighting with only a handful of direct observations. Their presence in the landscape is indicated by spoor and territorial markings. A guess of their population size is fewer than 200 throughout the Sahara and perhaps ten in the Termit Mountains. Regardless of their scarcity they are persecuted by desert nomads like the Tuareg who believe them responsible for taking goats and baby camels. Part of the conservation effort is to work with locals to put together an accurate assessment of predation and stop indiscriminate slaughter of carnivores. Law enforcement will be a huge challenge in such a remote and inhospitable desert, and necessarily must depend on local cooperation.
GREEN KUDOS to Niger and the Sahara Conservation Fund!
