Venturing off the coast of Africa
Jason Houston’s 5th post from Africa as he transitions from Kenya to the Republic of Seychelles – the site of Terence Vel’s Pride campaign.
Our second location on this two-part trip to eastern Africa is to the remote Republic of Seychelles. This eden look-a-like, widely-scattered collection of islands located just a few degrees south of the equator, far out in the Indian Ocean is a global tourist destination (names of celebrity visitors are dropped with too much frequency—but, shhh, don’t tell anyone). The water’s warm and clear, and palms and other broad-, thick-leafed trees lean out over the powder-soft, white sand beaches. In the mornings you can see the fishermen headed out to sea, in the evening the flying foxes return to their roosts flying higher, slower and lumbering with more effort than one would expect of a flier that size, and at night you see stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres in the same glance. At times like this I don’t think my job sucks too badly…
A beautiful view from the beach
But the Seychelles is more than just an elite tourist destination. It’s a remote, small, tropical island with matching tropical biodiversity and a number of indigenous (native here by their own means) and endemic (found no where else) species, including the world’s largest nut, the coco-de-mer, and maybe most notably, some of the most amazing bird life in the world. When Chip Blake, Orion’s Editor in Chief, my boss, and an expert birder, found out I was going he looked at me with a seriousness that was almost scary and more or less ordered me to get a bird book for the islands. A light traveler and not one prone to keep lists, I didn’t, but I’ll be with others who know these islands well and will count on that…
This campaign is distinctly different from the three other Pride locations that I have visited in the past two years (Nicaragua, Mexico, and just last week Kenya) in that it is focused on a much more traditional conservation effort designed specifically to help restore the critically endangered (IUCN Red Listed) Seychelles Black Paradise Flycatcher (Terpsiphone corvina). The main cause leading to its status is habitat loss due to development. This is the rarest bird in the Seychelles- extinct now on all but one small island, La Digue, where it maintains a dangerously low population of only about 250 birds. While the current conservation effort on behalf of these birds has been going on for nearly 10 years, it has struggled with a lack of appropriate community support. Diguois love their unique bird and that’s part of the problem. They don’t want to share it. For Diguois it’s part of what defines their island. But with such a low population on a small island that’s already at carrying capacity for this species, the Flycatcher is at serious risk for even a single natural disaster (fire, tsunami, etc.) completing wiping it out in one event.
Nature Seychelles, the organization Terence Vel (this site’s campaign manager) works for wants to translocate a small number of breeding pairs to another (and the most) suitable island about 50km away in hopes that they can establish a second viable population. Nature Seychelles has a good track record with such projects and has recently helped to move three other bird species (the Seychelles Magpie Robin, the Seychelles Fody, and the Seychelles Warbler) off the critically endangered list. But each of those instances were working with bird populations on privately owned islands—a situation generally unusual, but common in the Seychelles—and so they did not require community support.
A local town in La Digue
At about 10 square kilometers and with a population of about 2,500, La Digue is the fourth largest and third most populated island in the Seychelles. Terence’s father was born here and Terence also now lives here with the other permanent residents. What we plan to see this week and to share with you all via this blog is where Rare Pride’s social marketing techniques can work in concert with the ecological, social, and political dynamics of more typical conservation work to help educate a community on how to guarantee the preservation of some of it’s own most valuable resources.