Chthonic Wildlife Ramblings

What Ive found of late, is that it is harder to disconnect from the rest of the world, simply because connecting is now so much easier. It's a world now of tablets, smartphones and computers everywhere. So of late, I've started disconnecting completely- at least one day a week. Sunday is now my day for going feral. I disappear into a local nature reserve with nothing more than a daypack, some supplies and a camera.

The last hike was back into Okura. I figured that the actual rain would keep a lot of people away and I knew the secluded beach had a small population of NZ dotterels (tuturiwhatu). This small shore bird is actually endangered. So, it is kind of a special place to visit. Last weekend I had watched them with my son, from the edge of the beach with binoculars. This time around, I thought I'd try for some photos.

I guessed right with the rain keeping people away. So it was just a matter of hiking through the forest to reach the beach. Along the ridge lines the forest thinned out into manuka and tanekaha trees.


Down at the beach it was close to high tide. This means the shore birds were close enough to photograph, with sufficient patience. The trick so often is to try to shoot at their eye level. That means getting down low- or lying flat on damp sand. The bonus is you look a lot less threatening to the birds.











To start with, there's a couple of dotterel photos. The first is my favourite and required very little cropping.


The mature males are in their breeding colours


The beach also has a thriving population of oyster catchers


While the land contiguous to the beach had a lot of chaffinches...


and even the odd kingfisher

The recent trip to China was focused on the elephant ivory trade in that country. Since 2008 the Chinese government has decided to support and sustain the ivory carving industry. Ostensibly this is because it is recognised as an example of intangible cultural heritage. In 2008 62 tones of raw ivory was legally purchased from four southern African countries, under the auspices of CITES. The shipment arrived in 2009. In background terms the data we have suggest that illegal market in ivory has been growing for about a decade. So there is a lot of concern that about potential links between the legal and illegal markets.

As we were working in China, a side issue to our research did come to light. This is the efforts by some Westerners to research the black market. One tactic is to try to buy illegal ivory from ivory-dealers. (Mostly however, shops are visited to see if they are selling ivory legally or in compliance with regulations).

I’m really baulking at this 'buy illegal ivory' ploy. It took us two years of groundwork to get access to the Chinese ivory-market. The positive is we got superb access to all kinds of people and loads of good information. Imagining you can just drop into China and then start finding out what’s happening by trying to buy illegal ivory is hopelessly naïve.

The problem goes beyond this however. The first is the ethical dimension. Pretending you are interested in illegal ivory is a deliberate deceit. Now, whilst this is an important method to draw people out of the illegal market, it’s something that has to be done with a lot of safeguards. The typical buyer of legal ivory products is a mature, informed collector. It is someone who knows the differences in Shanghai, Guangzhou or Beijing styles. It is someone who can appreciate the differences in clarity, density and hardness of the ivory. It is someone familiar with the actual master carvers. It starts to become an absurd comical farce when Westerners pretend they’re a credible consumer. I was told of some appalling examples of this by dealers. They’re not being fooled.

If you haven’t done your preparation and background research properly then I believe, it is unethical to be posing as a potential buyer of illegal ivory. This is compounded by the risk of entrapment. The interest in buying ivory may cause the person to try to find illegal ivory for you. Again, this is murky ethical ground with potentially dubious consequences.

Not only is the ethics of this method that worries me. I’m also concerned that it can generate misleading information. Given the actual purchase cannot be carried out, the ‘potential buyer’ gambit cannot separate transactions that would:
1) use fake ivory (of which much exists) or
2) legal ivory brought from a registered retailer, and then resold with a markup to the ersatz consumer, or
3) illegal ivory from a genuine black-market source

If someone conspicuously ignorant of the ivory market is giving the impression they have more money than sense, selling them fakes is a pretty low risk way to make a quick return. Perhaps we should not be quite so surprised at "researchers" who find it so easy to get offers of illegal ivory in China.

My last peeve is it makes the work of others researchers harder. We did the ground work. Yet we encountered suspicion over our ‘agenda’ as a consequence of these blundering efforts. That meant information was being held back. It’s something that compromises research by people who do know what they’re doing.

Over half way into expedition at this point. I can recommend the Metropole Hotel in Shanghai. It has the most comfortable beds I've slept in, since I first began traveling in China.

My laptop became deadweight on Tuesday when the screen died. I guess it's a good test of my windows phone's substitute abilities. It's not a perfect substitute alas. No SD card reader, small screen, no ethernet socket.

Internet service in China is still lagging behind West.

After reading many of these over the years, I believe I have discerned the formula for writing the successful news report on wildlife poaching. This is all that it takes:

1) Always support the trade-ban. Trade bans are always the right thing to do. They are a brilliant conservation strategy that creates much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the actual black-markets. Removing legal competition, inflating prices and creating a niche for organised crime always discourages poaching. Because everyone knows that bloating the profits of crime syndicates through a ban, is the last thing these guys want. Rhinos have been subject to an international trade-ban since 1977. Don't question its effectiveness. Making criminals rich has got to deter poaching eventually.

2) Tantalise and shock the reader. Everyone needs to be told that wildlife is poached for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). And TCM is only ever used for one thing of course- aphrodisiacs. Readers love being told this stuff. On no account should you actually tell the readers that wildlife is poached for a myriad of reasons and it is almost always, has nothing to do with aphrodisiacs.

3) Call for more law enforcement. Obviously nobody has since say, 1977 for rhinos, ever thought of this before. The shoot-to-kill policy adopted towards some poachers in African states is just us being soft towards poaching. What we need to do is 'more'. Whatever that means.

4) Call for more education. Anti-consumption 'education' campaigns have been running in many Asian countries since the 1990s. We're not entirely sure where the consumers are or what their motives are, so broach-brush approaches are being used. Because nothing kills off demand faster than the constant reminder to people that the wildlife products have medicinal properties in their culture.

5) Make proposals to reduce value of the wildlife. For example, dehorning rhinos was started in the late 1980s as a way to discourage poachers. With barely any horn left, poachers would have little desire to hunt the rhinos. We've been waiting for this to work for two decades of course.

6) Mock anyone who expresses doubt. The trade-ban is the corner-stone of a brilliant conservation strategy. The collapse of rhino numbers due to poaching, the extinction of the Western Black subspecies, the loss of all wild rhinos in Vietnam- are all utterly minor setbacks. Anyone who wonders if we should be considering legal trade isn't a "true" conservationist. They're in the pay of the Chinese or the hunting fraternity or something. The trade-ban is brilliant so there's nothing to debate. We just need to spend more money on doing what's been failing for over 30 years.

(Sorry, I'm in a slightly dark mood)

I've done some updating of various photo albums on my zenfolio website. One of the ones that's had a makeover is the 'Coastal Birds" album. The intent of these makeovers is to just keep some good representative shots on public view, and move a lot of the less optimal photos into storage. This album has white-faced herons, royal spoonbills, pied stilts and the endangered NZ dotterel.