Say hello to our new Pride campaign mascot, Baby Tiger. Baby Tiger is standing next to campaign manager Angkana Makvilai.

I’m not sure how kids will resist this mascot. One of the best Pride campaign mascots ever.

Wildlife Conservation Society’s Rare Pride campaign will help increase the tiger population in the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary by persuading community members to avoid purchasing wild meat and to report wild animal poaching in order to protect the tigers’ food supply.

Lindsay Hower, Rare’s Director of Individual Giving, reports on a recent field visit to China.  Rare’s China Director, Shiyang Li and Rare’s China Pride Program Manager, Wang Yu led the trip bringing Rare Pride to life throughout Yunnan province’s beautiful peaks and valleys.

I went to China with a bunch of Penguins and learned about Golden monkeys.

This field visit focused specifically on the activities and progress to date of The Nature Conservancy’s Rare Pride campaign running in Baima Snow Mountain Nature Reserve. The campaign is working to reduce fuelwood consumption and targeting a few specific audiences, including farmers who use fuelwood to prepare cooked food for livestock, and women’s groups who lead fuelwood collection for the purposes of cooking in villages. Sina Zhuoma, a reserve staff member, is the courageous and lovely campaign manager overseeing this campaign and partnering with these key audiences to make an impact.

Monday – Having landed in Beijing after a notorious trans-Pacific flight of more than 13 hours, I was anxious to meet the Canadian women who would become my travel buddies for the next week. These ladies were affiliates of Disney’s Club Penguin, a new donor to Rare this year supporting programs in China and Argentina. I was eager to dig in, learn about our travelers, and understand how penguins came to be the centerpiece of the world’s biggest online social networking site for kids! Having stacked a few hundred hours on the road with Rare, both in the U.S. and abroad where Rare works, I have come to love traveling, especially with a cause at the center of the itinerary. I was also eager to work with the China team, since this was our first time collaborating on a field visit together. Shiyang and Wang Yu had pulled together a fantastic itinerary, complete with traditional dancing, homemade meals in Chinese homes, real life rural politics, pigs, Golden monkeys, and lots of road trips.

Top of Tiananmen’s square, photographed the day I arrived and before I met up with the Club Penguin crowd.

I met our Club Penguin crew in the lobby of the Jinglun hotel before jumping into cabs to head to the airport. We were scheduled to meet Shiyang and Wang Yu in Kunming, and all was going according to plan. When we arrived in Kunming, Shiyang, Wang Yu and I all hugged in the way only Rare staff can – after not seeing each other for months and months, Rare staff reunions feel as if we’ve seen each other on a daily basis for years. Besides a lost piece of luggage that showed up the next day, Monday was a smooth travel day. Upon arrival into Shangri-La, a small, quiet airport in the mountains of northern Yunnan province, I bought a winter jacket at the airport since temperatures were way below what I expected. I would have been embarrassed by my lack of thoughtful packing, except that Nicole from Club Penguin bought a jacket too (photo below). And I got a deal — 12 bucks.

Nicole and I showing off our newly purchased winter coats in the Shangri-La airport.

Upon arrival at the beautiful and traditionally furnished Songtsam Hotel in Shangri-La, we settled into the lobby, took off our shoes and got acquainted with the rest of the week’s itinerary. Wang Yu led introductions and an overview of who we would meet, what we would see, and why it all mattered to Rare Pride.

Wang Yu running through the week and telling us what we need to do to survive in Yunnan province!

Our group stands for a photo despite a long day of traveling that included two flights and a two hour van ride. Hooray for Rare Pride!

Tuesday – We woke to a cozy, fireplace-heated breakfast room before heading to our walking tour at the Songza(plin monastery. A few times, Shiyang and Wang Yu both commented that we should lap up the luxury of this stunning little hotel since accommodations elsewhere on the trip would be less than sparkling.

We enjoy breakfast in Shangri-La, complete with some Western favorites as well as dim sum, local cheeses, and meats. Our guide for the monastery is on the far left – the lone man among this powerful (and loud) group of women!

Here I am in front of the Songzalin monastery; I took this on a morning walk before the group stirred for breakfast.

Shiyang, me, and Wang Yu take a moment before our long drive to Xiaruo.

The group enjoyed a guided tour of the monastery (above) before our 6-hour drive to Xiaruo. With six hours of chit-chat under our belts, we were pretty familiar with each other upon arrival. Topics covered during the drive? Pregnancy, bare feet, puppies, dried fruit, hosting “epic” birthday parties for kids under five years old, family farms, and so much more. Inside jokes as a result include: “Star, star;” Nigel, the truck driver; chocolate covered peach things? Dried kiwis?

A woman selling nuts roadside en route to Xiaruo. We stopped because she also had a really cute puppy.

Eating out Yunnan-style – our entire group came into the kitchen of this little roadside restaurant and literally pointed at what foods we wanted prepared. And while it may seem unlikely that what results can be any good, the meal spread that we enjoyed was marvelous! (photo below)

Upon arrival the group met the Baima Nature Reserve staff and sat in on a meeting with them and Zhuoma. Due to a power outage, Zhuoma had to present her project plan without the PPT, but she had stellar guidance from Wang Yu and a great introduction from Shiyang!

Wang Yu (left) translates and interprets Pride campaign manager Zhuoma’s presentation (right). With a power outage, visuals were limited but luckily our six-hour drive made our entire group pretty casual and friendly by this time of day.

Our group in a meeting with the Baima Nature Reserve staff, our guests, and Zhuoma (far right), who led the presentation about her Pride campaign.

Our day ended with an amazing dinner provided by a gracious family in Xiaruo. One of several families participating in the raw food feeding project – a Pride initiative to reduce fuelwood use for livestock feeding – this family opened its home to us for a divine evening and excellent food (kitchen and dining area below).

We have a look at the pigs involved with one of the raw feeding projects associated with Zhuoma’s campaign.

The Bogor 4 cohort.

Rare’s Vice President, Asia, Nigel Sizer blogs about the official launch of Rare’s 10-site campaign in the Coral Triangle to improve fisheries management through the use of No-Take Zones that provide fish an area in which to grow and repopulate.

After nearly two years of sustained effort by a great team, Rare  launched on Monday its fourth Bahasa Indonesia cohort of Pride campaigns in Bogor. Ten partners, nine from Indonesia and one from Timor Leste, arrived in Bogor a couple of days ago, and I was thrilled to see them all in the classroom bright and early this morning.

The cohort was officially declared open by Dr. Hendrayanto, Dean of the Forestry Faculty, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), Rare’s training partner for Southeast Asia. He was joined by Professor Harini Muntasib who helped establish Rare’s partnership with IPB five years ago, and two loyal IPB faculty who have been teaching in the program since its inception: Dr. Arzyana Surkar and Dr. Yeni Mulyani.

I thanked those present, as well as top government officials who could not join us (Mr. Hariyadi Himawan and Mr. Soewartono of the Ministry of Forestry), and our donors, including the Walton Family Foundation, USAID, WWF Indonesia, and the Conservation, Food and Health Foundation.

Rare’s seasoned team will be teaching the new recruits alongside two new Pride Program Managers, Yayat and Rully, both of whom have leapt to the challenge after just a few weeks on the job. I sat through the first sessions and was deeply impressed, as I always am, by the level of professionalism, the quality of the teaching plans, and the sincere attentiveness of our partners.

The partners were selected from over 50 applications, representing four of Indonesia’s seven marine national parks, five district-level marine protected areas (three of these campaigns will be led by Conservation International local staff), and Timor Leste’s only national park. These are some of the globe’s most important marine protected areas. One of the sites has the highest recorded number of fish species in the world, and another has one of the largest continuous stretches of coral reef.

Dr. Mark Erdman of Conservation International talks about the need for Rare’s approach to strengthen local fisheries management in the Coral Triangle. Click here if the above embed video doesn’t show up for you.

This cohort also represents the thin end of a wedge of forthcoming marine cohorts from Rare. In July we’ll launch 12 campaigns in the Philippines with the same theme, and in early 2011 a suite of campaigns in the Sea of Cortez will begin. We hope a second Bogor marine cohort will then follow in 2011, bringing us to a total of more than 30 campaigns in support of the Coral Triangle alone.

The partners who started work today will spend nine weeks in Bogor, housed at the university, before heading home to plan their campaigns. Out team will support them every step of the way as they always do.

I can’t wait to get back to Bogor in three weeks to rejoin the team and offer my support!

The Bogor 4 cohort already hard at work.

For more information about Rare’s Program for Sustainable Fishing in the Coral Triangle, please contact Nigel Sizer.

This blog post was written by Paul Butler.  Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

This part three of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His first post talked about how Rare is evaluating our first cross-regional campaign visit, while the second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats.

There is a popular misconception that conservation is principally about plants and animals and the physical environment that they live in.

In reality, conservation is just as much about people as it is about fauna and flora. People lie behind most environmental threats — whether it be fuelwood collection, dynamite fishing for protein, chemical run-off or setting fires for agricultural expansion. And it is only people that can drive solutions. Those solutions can be alternatives to fuelwood sources or more efficient stoves, training in sustainable fishing techniques, enhanced pollution controls or better regulation and enforcement.

People are thus the key to conservation, and the focus of Rare’s work around the world. Indeed two of our three measures of success pertain to “people.” Our first “C” (Capacity) refers to the training we give our campaign managers to better enable them to launch effective campaigns, and the second “C” (Constituencies) refers to the community support our campaigns strive to generate — support that creates an enabling environment for sustainable resource-use to take root. (See blog post dated May 11th for a more detailed description of Rare’s 3 C’s.)

It is no wonder, then, that the focus of our cross-regional visit to Madagascar would be to meet and engage with the people who drive our campaigns and those upon whom it focuses.

The success (or otherwise) of our campaign in Madagascar lies in the hands of a truly dedicated group of conservationists that make up Blue Ventures, including its founder and research director, Alasdair Harris, project coordinator, Shawn Peabody and Rare campaign manager, Gildas Andriamalala.

Above, Gildas in Andavadoaka.

Gildas first joined Blue Ventures to work on the socio-economic monitoring of Andavadoaka. He has a law degree from the University of Toliara and has worked on the legal aspects of both the establishment of theVelondriake Marine Protected Area (MPA) and the land acquisition issues relating to the Andavadoaka community Eco-lodge project. In February 2009, he became part of Rare’s PEP 1 cohort that trained at Georgetown University in a Master’s in Communication program that is awarded by the University of Texas at El Paso.

Gildas’s campaign is striving to develop a more sustainable approach to fisheries management along Madagascar’s Andavadoaka coast within the Velondriake Marine protected Area (MPA). The aim is to increase juvenileseagrass and mangrove fish, which will replenish the reef fish population, through the reduction of the amount of poison fishing and beach seine netting. These threats will be reduced by informing the local people of the damage done by destructive fishing and by working with the heads of 24 local villages to increase the enforcement of the local Dina (legislation) and encouraging fishers to adopt more sustainable practices.

Shawn Peabody showing us the plant from which Laru (a poisonous white paste used for poison fishing) is derived. Unfortunately, the plant is readily available all along the Velondriake coastline.

Since many of the area’s beach seine fishers come from neighboring communities, setting up and enforcing local patrol efforts will be critical and getting local leaders to enforce regulations is essential. Gildas’s strategy for success reads:

“To eliminate the principal threat posed to the sustainability of the marine resources and habitat in the South West coast of Madagascar, the use of unsustainable fishing practices must be stopped, to the extent that this behavior becomes socially unacceptable in partner communities. Fishers and other stakeholders will be made conscious of the threats to their livelihoods and cultures caused by target unsustainable practices, and will be made aware of the social, environmental, cultural and economic benefits of using the right methods to improve marine resource sustainability and community life.”

So our team needed to talk first to Gildas to check in on the status of his campaign and his outreach efforts, as well as to meet Shawn and Alasdair to get a lead agency perspective on progress. But that would not be enough; Rare’s team also needed to visit the fishers themselves to ask them if they had heard of the campaign, understood its messages, and seen the collateral that Gildas had produced.

We would need to take to the sea and visit outlying communities and meet with beach seine fishers, village leaders, and other stakeholders to verify some of the assumptions that underlie Gildas’s campaign — all in a couple of days. To accomplish these objectives the team split up: Daniel Hayden, Rare’s director of Global Programs Operations, and I would focus on meeting Gildas and key fishers in the Velondriake area. We would combine efforts to travel to adjoining fisher communities, while Rare’s COO Dale Galvin would take to the sea to look at the underwater world that Gildas and his colleagues were trying to protect – the spectacular coral reefs.

Watch Gildas talking about his campaign:

If the above embedded video does not work, please click here to view it.

In the next and final blog post, we will discuss our findings.

You can learn more about Gildas’s campaign by visiting RarePlanet.

This blog post was written by Paul Butler.  Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

In March 2010, I joined a team from Rare to visit Blue Venture’s Rare Pride campaign site at Andavadoaka in Madagascar. Roughly the size of Texas or France, Madagascar is the fourth-largest island in the world.  It is home to 19 million people and an astonishing 5 percent of the planet’s plant and animal species (250,000) of which — because of its 80 million years of isolation – 80 percent are to be found nowhere else. Although, I should add, you will not find the Penguins, Giraffe, and Zebra depicted in the Disney movie of the same name.

Biologically, Madagascar is perhaps best known for its Lemurs. Wild Madagascar describes these primates as looking “something like a cat crossed with a squirrel and a dog;” adding that the island is home “to nearly 60 ‘taxa’ (species, sub-species, and populations from 33 species across five families and 14 genera), ranging in size from the 25-gram Pygmy Mouse Lemur to the Indri. All these species are endemic to Madagascar (two lemur species were introduced to the Comoros) giving the country the second highest number of primate species after Brazil, which has 77 species (only two endemic genera and no endemic families). And new species are still being discovered.”

Madagascar was once covered almost completely by forests, but the practice of “tavi” — burning the woods to clear the land for dry rice and other forms of cultivation — has denuded most of the landscape. Today, forests are restricted to the hillsides aligned along a north-south axis bordering the island’s east coast, from the Tsaratamana Massif in the north to Tolagnaro in the south. Forests continue to be threatened by both tavi and deforestation for fuelwood (wood and charcoal from these forests are used to meet 80 percent of domestic fuel needs). We saw extensive evidence of the denudation that has taken place as we flew into the Capital “Tana” and from there to the Provincial Capital of Tulear, as well as elsewhere in our travels.

But Madagascar’s spectacular biodiversity is not limited to its terrestrial biomes. In the tropical seas off its south-west coast lies the fourth largest coral reef in the world  — the Grand Récif de Tuléar.  Among the inhabitants of Madagascar’s marine environment are 34 species of cetaceans, five species of marine turtles, 56 shark species, 300 types of hard corals, and 1,300 kinds of bony fish.  As with the island’s forests, Madagascar’s marine ecosystems are threatened too.  The Wildlife Conservation Society lists the following as some of the more critical threats:

• Uncontrolled industrial fishing, especially by illegal unlicensed, unregulated vessels (IUUs)
• Industrial trawling, especially on shallow continental shelf seas and sea mounts
• Degradation of coral reefs through overfishing, climate change effects, and sedimentation
• Hunting or incidental capture of large marine fauna (dugong, dolphins, sea turtles, sharks, and sawfish)
• Local extirpation of high-value species, such as sea cucumbers
• Conflicts between resource users over access to resources
• Insufficient protection for marine environment (MPAs, no-take zones)
• Insufficient capacity and information management

Our brief visit to the island took us to meet with an innovative organization doing cutting-edge community development and marine research at the very center of the Grand Récif de Tuléar.  The organization is Blue Ventures, and it is with this organization that Rare is partnering to launch its first Pride campaign in Madagascar. Blue Ventures “is an award-winning marine conservation organization dedicated to conservation, education, and sustainable development in tropical coastal communities. Through its “marine-expeditions,” volunteers from around the world join local staff on career breaks, student gap years and internships, where they working closely with its field research teams, in partnership with local communities.”

Blue Ventures certainly works in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but it is not easy to reach! Our team gathered from the U.S. and Europe in Tana where we spent several days in meetings before heading via Air Madagascar to Tulear.

The drive from this provincial capital to the actual campaign site was spectacular. Ten long hours in a 4WD along what is described as a road, but in reality is a narrow sand track. We passed through the Spiny Forest, where an astonishing 95 percent of all plant species are endemic and saw splendid examples of the island’s famed Baobabs, before reaching Andavadoaka, where Dale Galvin, Daniel Hayden, Annalisa Bianchessi and I spent few days looking at the progress being made with the Pride campaign at that site. The coastal scenery and views from our humble accommodation were incredible.

That night after being introduced to the campaign team (more in my next blog) we slept under the most amazing stars. My next post will deal with an audit of the campaign.

This blog post was written by Paul Butler.  Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

This part one of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats.

Some may falsely think of Rare as solely an awareness-raising organization, but Rare is actually in the business of behavior change.

Rare create an enabling environment for behavior change to take place by marketing the changes needed, as well as providing the alternatives to make desired changes possible and sustainable.  In simplest terms, this means that Rare seeks ways to convince and enable individuals and communities to take action to protect endangered species and ecosystems. When Rare and its partners are successful, individuals and communities change their own behaviors so that conservation threats are reduced or eliminated.

Rare must evaluate its performance by measuring each Pride campaign’s ability to impact individual and community behaviors, so that conservation measures are supported, implemented, and ultimately lead to the elimination of threats to biodiversity.  These conservation measures include evaluating behavior change by determining, for example:

• The number of families to adopt a new fuel-efficient stove;
• The number of fishermen who adopt the use of nets, rather than dynamite;
• The acres of forest that people agree to protect.

These are the most common visible signs that a Pride campaign is making an impact and progressing towards its goal of conservation.  While these signs are critically important milestones in any Pride campaign to protect an endangered ecosystem, they may take months or even years to develop.  In response, Rare has developed success measures that can give an earlier indication of the likely success of a Pride campaign.  These indicators measure achievements that often occur during the organizing portion of a Pride campaign and offer some prediction of the long-term viability of a campaign. Rare measures its success by looking at three categories of measures:

• 1) Capacity
• 2) Constituency
• 3) Conservation

In addition, a “Theory of Change” is developed for each campaign to clarify the expected sequence of outcomes, and determine whether we are on track at each step.

Capacity

Capacity is a measure of a local partner’s ability and willingness to manage a social marketing campaign in the future.  One measure is the percentage of former campaign managers who have stayed in conservation.  Based on longitudinal studies, more than 95 percent of all people trained by Rare are still in conservation roles and nearly 100 percent continue to use the skills they learned from Pride.  Many Pride campaign managers are internationally recognized leaders.  For example, in 2006, Tisna Nando of Indonesia was recognized by Time magazine as one of five Asian “eco-heroes.”  Rare focuses on individual capacity – the capacity a campaign manager develops during the university phase of the Pride Program, as well as the capacity that this new training brings to his or her organization.

Constituency

Constituency is a measure of the local community’s commitment to conservation.  This year, estimates show that 1.3 million people will be touched by a Pride campaign.  Rare and its partners also track the number of volunteers who support a campaign and what that might mean for a community.  For example, Salvador Garcia Ruvalcaba organized over 2,000 volunteers to collect 16 tons of trash around a critical watershed in Manantlán, Mexico.  Through follow-up research, estimates show that over 2 million people have changed their attitude towards conservation due to a Pride campaign, which is a good leading indicator of future behavior change.

Conservation

Conservation is a Pride campaign’s actual impact on the environment. Our ultimate measure is the actual threat reduction of a campaign.  Another measure is the community’s change in knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP).  Each campaign manager should be able to begin measuring the conservation impacts of his or her work (such as area of forest conserved, threats measurably reduced) by the time he or she has completed Pride training. For example, Titus Letaapo, a campaign manager from Kenya, measured the number of forest fires that occurred in his district each year before and after his campaign. Prior to the campaign, there were 14; two years later, there were only five.

These categories, known as the “3 C’s,” form the three pillars that support Rare’s ability to not only measure the success of a Pride campaign but also to help predict the likelihood of continued success after the campaign has ended.  They also help determine if corrective actions are needed while a campaign is in progress, i.e. if the capacity objective is not being met.

A second important tool is a campaign’s “Theory of Change” (ToC).  A clearly articulated Theory of Change serves to create a commonly understood vision of a campaign’s long-term goals, how they will be reached, and what will be used to measure progress along the way. Producing a “ToC” is an iterative process which begins in the application stage of the Pride Program and which is continually re-worked throughout the planning phase and into implementation. The Theory of Change is represented using the following equation:

K + A + IC + BR → BC → TR → CR

Where:

• 1) Conservation Result (CR) — What biological target are we trying to conserve?
• 2) Threat Reduction (TR) — What are the main threats to our conservation target, and which can we reduce?
• 3) Behavior Change (BC) — What behaviors for which group(s) must change in order to reduce these threats?
• 4) Barrier Removal (BR) — What are the barriers to adoption of the new behavior we want to see, and how can we remove them?
• 5) IC (Interpersonal Communication) — What conversations are needed to encourage people to adopt the new behavior?
• 6) Attitude (A) — What attitudes must shift for these conversations to happen?
• 7) Knowledge (K) — What knowledge is needed to increase awareness and help shift these attitudes?

In other words, this equation represents Rare’s hypothesis of how Pride campaigns can help address critical biodiversity issues, namely that “an increase in knowledge plus a change in attitude resulting from interpersonal communication, in the presence of an appropriate[1] barrier removal ‘tool,’ lead to behavior change, which facilitates threat reduction and ultimately ensures conservation.”  For each step in the equation, Rare campaign managers establish “SMART” Objectives and metrics to track progress over, and beyond, the timeline of their campaigns.

An entire division within Rare (Quality Management & Improvement) has been established to work with Rare’s regional staff and project partners to help assess and evaluate the progress being made. Launched in March 2009, the Quality Management and Improvement Team’s mission is to:

Create and manage a set of processes and tools to ensure that Rare is running the most effective conservation projects possible and that Rare has a system to monitor and ensure success. The team will gather and use data, cases, best practices and other tools to improve Pride campaigns, and to improve the overall processes that support Pride.

One such tool is the undertaking of cross-regional campaign visits, with the goal of:

• Ground-truthing processes to check if there are gaps between what was planned to happen, what is actually happening, and what is purported to happen;
• Determining what could make campaigns better and feeding these lessons back into the Pride campaign design (including the formal curriculum);
• Compliance to ensure that there is no gap between reported information and actual results.

I was delighted to be part of the first cross-regional campaign visit, when I joined a team composed of Dale Galvin (COO), Daniel Hayden (Director of Quality Management and Improvement) and Annalisa Bianchessi (Pride Program Manager) on a visit to the Andavadoaka Coast in southwest Madagascar. The trip reviewed progress toward the 3 C’s (Capacity, Constituency, and Conservation) and this campaign’s Theory of Change [2]. I was excited to see the campaign for several reasons. First, it was a marine campaign, and would therefore help us with a suite of new campaigns Rare is proposing for next year (as many as 24 campaigns around the world with a marine theme).  Second, Madagascar was a place I had not visited before.

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[1] Economically viable, socially and culturally appropriate, as well as easily accessible and adoptable.

[2] Take a look at every Pride campaign featured on RarePlanet and you will be able to see its Theory of Change.

Note: This content originated on our online community inspiring conservation, RarePlanet.

This post was written by D’Shan Maycock of Friends of the Environment. She is the Pride campaign manager for the  Abaco Island campaign to protect the spiny lobster population by reducing the harvesting of juvenile lobsters.

Our annual Earth Day Science fair was a huge success. More than 400 students, teachers and parents all came out to support local school students as they competed in one of four categories. The theme for this year was “Conserving Abaco’s Lobster Populations Now & For The Future.”

Miss Earth Bahamas, Krystle Brown did an excellent job speaking to the students. Everyone was attentive during her speech and commented that she really had a way of speaking with the students at their level. She was also a big hit with the students, who surrounded her waiting in line for an autograph.

She spoke well of the campaign and the “need to protect baby crawfish if we want to have cracked lobsters, crawfish salad and minced crawfish on our plates.” I was amazed at how much she knew of our campaign. Her presence alone further endorsed our message, especially with the youth.

Many of the presentations showed evidence of the campaign’s impact over the entire island.  Some students even interviewed fishermen and other members of the Abaco community about threats facing local lobster populations and methods to protect them from juvenile fishing.  One of the project brochures even mentioned Spike the crawfish, the campaign mascot!

This year was also the first time we had major sponsors involved in the Earth Day Science Fair.  The Ministry of Tourism highlighted the science fair on their calendar of activities for National Coastal Awareness Month and provided bus and ferry transportation for students and teachers traveling from the south and north of the island. They also flew in the national television station, ZNS, who televised the entire event and aired it on the following Monday on the evening news. The local television station, BCN, also televised the event and aired it on TV and radio broadcasts.  In addition, the local paper was there to cover the event.   All the media attention ensured that the entire island heard about the campaign.

Funding for prizes such as laptop computers, projectors, and DVD players were provided by a local insurance company, Colina and the Bahamas National Trust.

Below are some of the fantastic project displays:

Note: This content originated on our online community inspiring conservation, RarePlanet.Org.

One of Gaana’s first campaign activities was to officially launch his campaign in all six soums along the Onon River. This was done by hosting back-to-back events with children and adults in the town center (all events followed a similar agenda with some surprises thrown in). Here’s a brief look at Gaana’s very successful launch events that people are still talking about:

Announcement banners go up in the soum centers several days before the event takes place. It is very unusual to see these types of things, so they can reach almost every person that comes into town.

Due to the unusual nature of these events, attendance tends to run pretty high. With this one event, Gaana had great reach among the entire general public audience.

Each event included a community theater skit performed by the local soum’s eco-club. The script was written by Gaana and his team and told the story of a father who felt pressured to catch taimen (Gaana’s campaign is centered around protecting this fish) and as a result began to dream of being visited by a giant taimen who convinced him to change his ways. Many people in the audience said they could relate to the father’s stress and found the performance to be very powerful.

There was so much excitement around the giant taimen that it was necessary to have a photo-op directly following the community theater performance. Adults and Children alike couldn’t wait to have their picture taken with the biggest fish they’ve ever seen.

To test everyone’s knowledge of taimen, Gaana conducted a “create a taimen” contest where children and adults could use paper, glue, scissors, markers, tape and more to make a taimen of their own. It was hard to tell if children or adults were better at this competition!

Gaana invited guest speakers to talk to the audience, some were fishermen who have already changed their behavior, practicing only catch-and-release of taimen.

And as with any Mongolian event, singing and dancing is mandatory. See videos at bottom of blog!

And the few surprises? Well, there was a woman who came to an event wearing her own taimen hat; a community group that presented Gaana with a hand-made, wood-carving of a taimen eating another fish; and a snow storm that forced the WWF team to shovel tracks for the Land Cruiser to travel from one site to the next.

A big congratulations to Gaana for 6 (really 12) successful launch events!

If the above embedded video clip is not showing up, click here.

In this video the Red Knot mascot for our campaign in San Antonio Bay, Argentina and Rare staffers get community members to start dancing. The mascot and staffers are working to raise awareness of the need for habitat protection for the Red Knot.

Our campaign will protect a stopover site for endangered birds by working with communities to create and regulate specialized trails for 4×4 vehicles in order to reduce human intrusion in the site. The Red Knot mascot helps raise awareness for the Red Knot and its habitat.

In early March 2010, Rare hosted a trip with our partner Manomet to San Antonio Oeste, Argentina.  There are three campaign sites in Argentina, each of which is focused on preserving the habitat of the migratory Red Knot shorebird: Costa Atlantica, Tierra del Fuego, Estuary Rio Gallegos, Santa Cruz and the site we visited, San Antonio

Note: This content originated on our online community inspiring conservation, RarePlanet.Org.

Rare has a campaign in the Onon River area to protect the taimen fish that works with local people to adopt catch-and-release fishing practices in order to reduce illegal fishing. You can learn more about the campaign and interact with the team running it here.

I’ve met other people who have traveled to the Onon River area, and they always comment how much of a bonding experience it is, which is usually because of three reasons:

1. You spend an enormous amount of time together in one vehicle, so bonding is inevitable.
2. You tend to meet amazing people at every pass of the trip.
3. Even if you aren’t directly experiencing one, you always feel as if you’re on the brink of disaster, which draws people more closely together.

My second trip to the Onon River area once again provided all three of these elements. Here’s a glimpse into what our 13-hour trip from Bogii’s site in Choibalsan to Gaana’s site in the Onon consisted of:

The vehicle: a WWF Land Cruiser dressed with Gaana’s campaign bumper sticker on three of the four sides of the SUV.

The driver: The shy Mr. Yellowman. A man of few words but drives like a champ.

The roads: I prefer to not call these “roads” but rather describe them more accurately as “tire tracks.” The road condition is the primary reason why traveling 350 kilometers takes more than 10 hours (long time in car = bonding ingredient No. 1).

We came across four men whose truck got stuck in the mud on the previous day and was now stuck in mud and ice. We attempted to tow them out, but were unsuccessful as they had too much cargo in their truck (near brink of disaster = bonding ingredient No. 3).

We’ve heard a lot about the harsh winter Mongolia has had – the worst in nearly 50 years – which has caused a dramatic amount of livestock deaths. Here we see some deceased goats and sheep left by the side of the road, one of many piles we passed today (near brink of disaster = bonding ingredient No. 3).

We stopped for lunch at one of Gaana’s target sites, Bayan-Uul, and met a soum coordinator who is helping to manage WWF’s barrier removal and Pride activities within this soum. In the top photo, Gaana is reviewing some art contest entries from students. Many entries featured the taimen, as the students were heavily inspired by Gaana’s recent launch events (amazing people = bonding ingredient No. 2).

While we were visiting the soum coordinator, we stopped into a nearby classroom to meet the local school music director and one of his students – both of whom participated in Gaana’s launch events. The high school boy put on an amazing performance for us. Listen to his music here (amazing people = bonding ingredient No. 2).

Towards the last quarter of our trip, the Land Cruiser started acting up because the spring mud and winter ice were accumulating around the tires. We had to stop several times to knock off the ice so we wouldn’t damage the vehicle and risk being stuck in the middle of nowhere in below freezing temperatures (brink of disaster = bonding ingredient No. 3).