Dinner in Semliki

Thursday, 12th August, Semliki Time: 9:48

One problem that plagues Semliki and many other national parks is that of poaching. On one of our first nights in camp, we were greeted by the spectacle of a ring of fire on a nearby hill. Edson told us, with gloomy resignation, that the fire had been started by locals in order to drive out wild animals which could either be caught or sold as bushmeat. Various signs of poaching are visible throughout the park and the remnants of camp fires on out-of-the-way hillsides are a regular occurrence. A less regular, but still common, sight are the little pits dug for animal traps, and these snares pop up often in out-of-the-way places. Some of them are large enough to trap buffalo or even chimpanzee and, while the rangers do their best to find and arrest poachers, the size of the park and the proportion of the total area covered by trails renders the problem similar to that of finding a needle in a haystack. Just now, from outside, I heard something that sounded very much like a gunshot and it is more than likely that some unfortunate rare creature was just sent on an all expenses paid holiday to meet its maker.

The worst thing about poaching is that it is not only very difficult to combat, but completely understandable. If you were living below the poverty line and one of the only ways to get a decent meal for yourself and your next of kin was to go into the forest and bump off a few buffalo, would you care too much about whether the land you were stealing from was protected by law? If an Elephant tusk could fetch as much as you would otherwise earn in a month and elephants regularly marauded past your village, wouldn’t you be tempted take a few pot shots? It is for this exact reason that many of the worlds endangered species are fast making the transition from ‘endless forms most beautiful’ to ‘limited meals most scrumptious’ and, as far as I can see it, there’s absolutely no solution. Depressing, I know, hopefully I’ll think of something more uplifting to write tomorrow.