Limbe Wildlife Centre

Category: Bush meat | Date: Jan 20 2008 | By: admin

I received the telephone call at lunch time warning me that an infant drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus) had been seized, and by 3pm the little female infant was already with us. That’s the thing about this job, you just never know what is about to happen.

The infant drill had been seized from a hunter’s house in the forests of the Littoral Province of Cameroon, several hours drive from Limbe, by our conservation colleagues working for the organisation Conservation Research for Endangered Species (CRES). The hunter had killed the mother and had kept her 2 month old infant as a pet to sell. In the past year or so CRES and the LWC have joined forces to try to teach hunter’s from the forest areas where CRES’s field project is based about the dangers of over-exploitation and the conservation issues affecting the species that they typically hunt; so it was disheartening to hear that a hunter from that region had killed another female drill. However on further investigation we realised that the hunter was actually from a neighbouring area that had not benefited from the CRES/LWC program which sees hunters from the forest being brought out to Limbe to spend 2 days being taught all about the species that they hunt, what the conservation issues are pertaining to those species, and what the legal implications of hunting these species are. So far the program has been very popular with the hunters, many of whom have never before had the chance to travel far from their forest homes, and have certainly not had the chance to learn about the animals that they hunt. Each workshop ends with a hunting debate in which the hunters are divided in to two opposing groups to debate the issue of whether the hunting of endangered species should be allowed. The debates are always lively and typically the ‘anti-hunting’ camp wins.

The program will now be extended to include the hunter that shot this infant’s mother and all the other hunters in his area. We hope that through such programs the hunters will learn about the impact that their actions are having on the fragile forest ecosystem and the legal ramifications that will affect them should they continue to hunt.

The infant drill meanwhile has been named Ndokbagengue, or Ndok for short, after the village in which she was rescued. On arrival at the LWC it was immediately obvious that she had an injured hand and a very swollen elbow. Arrangements were made to smuggle her into the local hospital for an x-ray the result of which illustrated that she had fractured her left elbow and 2 bones in her right hand; both injuries were probably caused by lead-shot from the cartridge that would have killed her mother.

Ndok has now got a splint stabilising her elbow and is being cared for by a volunteer. Ndok will spend a few weeks being looked after by her human carer before we will begin the process of introducing her to other young drills that we have in quarantine. Eventually she will join the LWC’s resident drill group, which is the second largest captive breeding group in the world, the largest being at the LWC’s sister project , the Pandrillus Foundation’s Drill Ranch (Afi Mountain) in Nigeria.

Drills are one of the most critically endangered primate species in the world, with current estimates placing the total population in the wild between 3,000 and 6,000 individuals. When one considers that the LWC and Drill Ranch have over 300 drills (5%-10% of the total wild population), it becomes clear how important for the conservation of this species our rescue efforts are. So few of these precious monkeys remain in the wild that each captive individual has become vital for the survival of the species as a whole, and that is why the rescue, rehabilitation and eventual integration into a breeding group of rescued infants like Ndok, is of such critical importance. It is hoped that in the near future our two projects can begin releasing groups of drills back into the wild to restock areas of forest from which the drill has been extirpated.

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