Limbe Wildlife Centre

Category: Cameroon, Simone de Vries, education, endangered species | Date: Aug 02 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

The Fraser’s eagle owl at the Limbe Wildlife Centre has a new enclosure. Since his arrival in January 2008 the owl has lived in a cage in quarantine. Now we have build a new cage for him, so he has more space and the visitors can learn about owls.

Fraser was brought to the LWC after some kids had thrown rocks at him. His eye was damaged and as a result he cannot be released. In Cameroon owls are considered to be witches, who bring bad luck. It is very important to educate the people about owls and their place in nature.In order to give Fraser the opportunity to fly we started a training program. Every day his trainer Killi takes him out of the cage to let him fly freely outside. Apart from the welfare issue, these flight shows are an excellent opportunity to talk to the visitors about owls. Yesterday Fraser moved in his new cage and he seems perfectly happy in there, but this afternoon during the training he was a bit confused and not flying very much. Maybe he needs some time to adjust.

On this pictures Killi is showing the owl in front of the new cage. If you want to support the Limbe Wildlife Centre, please make a donation. With the money we receive via this blog we can build other enclosures for our animals. Thank you very much for your support!

Best wishes, Simone

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Category: Anne Sofie Meilvang, Cameroon, Uncategorized, education | Date: Jul 13 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

Our educators here take visitors around the centre every day, and most of our keepers guide visitors around whenever they have time. As Cameroon has both a French speaking and an English speaking part, many of our visitors are French speaking. Therefore many of the tours have to be in French. Until now only a few of the staff have been able to do the tours in French, but this is now going to change.

Thanks to Gwendy Reyes-Ills and her parents who have raised a lot of money for our staff education program, 15 of the people working here, last week started on a French course. The course is four hours a week, and pretty intense.

Here you see the group who started taking the French course;

It is great to see how hard the staff is working to learn French and how enthusiastic they are. Every morning after a class, we all practice what we have learned, so all over Limbe Wildlife Centre you will hear French. I even think some of the keepers started talking to their animals in French!

We are very grateful that Gwendy and her parents are supporting our staff education. Merci beaucoup!

Best wishes,

Sofie

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Category: Anne Sofie Meilvang, Cameroon, Gorilla, education | Date: Jul 02 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

It has been a busy time for the education team in Limbe. Every year we have holiday workshops here at Limbe Wildlife Centre. Last week we had the first one this year, which were for secondary school students. This year’s theme is “Gorillas, research and conservation”. We decide to focus on gorillas, because 2009 is appointed as “Year of the gorilla”.  Our holiday workshops are sponsored by Buschgarden Zoo in Florida, and they came up with the idea of focusing on research. The holiday workshops are free of charge, and it lasts for three full days. They are very popular among the children and adults in Limbe, and every year we see a lot of well known faces from previous workshops. This year more than 50 children signed up for the first workshop. This year the program was very busy. Within the three days, the students had several lectures about gorillas and conservation. They learned how to recognize gorillas from each other, and they did behaviour studies on the gorillas here. They went to a nearby forest to investigate if it was a suitable habitat for a gorilla group. We also had a gorilla researcher, Albert, from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) here to tell about his job. He is Cameroonian and do research on Cross River gorillas. The children loved to hear his stories about counting gorilla nests and analyzing gorilla faeces. Buschgarden Zoo has holiday workshops at the same time as us, and our children always have a chat session with Buschgardens children in Florida. It is a very important part of the workshop, and this year the students discussed everything, from the weight of a tiger and the status of lemurs, to how often people do shopping in Florida and how big a Cameroonian family is. On the last day the children prepared posters showing what they have learned doing the workshop. They all have to present their poster and the ones how had made the best poster, and who did the best presentation got awarded. At the end all the participants are given certificates.Everything went very well, and we are now looking forward for the next three workshops, one for primary school children, one for high school children and one for university students and other interested adults. We are very grateful that Buschgarden Zoo sponsors our holiday workshop, and that so many people are interested in learning about primates and conservation.   Best wishes Sofie

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Category: Cameroon, Simone de Vries, education | Date: May 13 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

The Limbe Wildlife Centre has run a conservation education program for more than 10 years, but in the last months something has changed. It seems like Limbe has woken up, things are moving and people are organizing themselves. It is very exciting to be in the middle of all this. It is LWC’s ambition to be a conservation resource centre for other organisations and more and more we live up to our own expectations.

In February the LWC organized a meeting for all the people who are involved in Conservation Education is this region. The big organisations were there (WWF and WCS), but also small and new initiatives. It was very interesting to hear from each other what we are all doing and it was decided to collaborate more. While often promises like this are merely words, this time it seems to have a real impact.

Last Saturday the African Alliance for Development Action and LWC jointly organized the first workshop for church leaders and pastors. Religion is very important in the South West Region of Cameroon, so church leaders and pastors can play an important role in educating the community in conservation matters. The workshop was very successful and all participants would like to continue organizing more workshops in order to reach more churches and also traditional leaders.

While I am writing this, yet another workshop is in progress in our education building. This time the members of ASPTUG-CAM TRESAT, a new eco-tourism initiative in Limbe, are trained by LWC staff. Spread out over three days, several topics will be discussed, with the aim to provide the eco-guides the skills to communicate a strong conservation message.

We are funding these activities out of a small budget that Givskud Zoo has provided us, on top of the funding for the salary of our full time Education Officer, Glenn Motumba. But when we want to keep up with the current developments we will need more funding. We are grateful for any gift to support this important work.

Best wishes, Simone de Vries

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Category: Anne Sofie Meilvang, education | Date: Apr 27 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

Every month we try to make a “field trip” with the Nature Club members, which is always exciting for the children.

On Saturday the 25^th of April our nature club members went to Down Beach in Limbe to do beach cleaning. The beach cleaning is a yearly event, which in addition to cleaning the beach, also gives us a good opportunity to discuss garbage and its impact on nature with the children. The week before this event we discussed this subject in class to prepare and encourage the children.

This year more than 30 motivated Nature Club children showed up to help with the beach cleaning. In addition, 20 teenagers from a church group joined our efforts, so we had a big group. We divided the children into small groups, each with a wheelbarrow and rakes, and then worked our way from one end of the beach to the other. The children collected a big pile of rubbish, and even though the beach may look dirty again today, I believe that they learned a lot from the cleaning, and that it also made a good impression on all the people who watched us clean the beach.

Best wishes,

Sofie

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Category: Simone de Vries, education | Date: Feb 05 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

Since the beginning of this month we have a new Education Officer. Although new… Glenn Motumba has been part of the LWC family since he was very young. We are delighted that Givskud Zoo in Danmark has recently decided to fund the costs for an education officer, which will enable us to further develop our education program.

Glenn Motumba started his career at the LWC as a member of our Saturday Nature Club. He was always the most enthusiastic student and was desperate to learn anything he could about nature, wildlife and conservation. He is probably the only person who has read every book in our library and is always eager when new books arrive. It was natural that, when he was too old to be a member of the club, he became an education volunteer. He guided people around on Saturdays and Sundays and helped out with workshops, field trips and of course Nature Club. At the end of last year Glenn graduated from Beua University and he now has a Bsc in Sociology and Anthropology. For us this was the time to offer him a real job and Givskud Zoo made it possible.

The first month has been a starting up month: finding space for an office, painting, putting a desk together, finding a computer to work on, etc. But at the same time Glenn has started the work with much enthusiasm. He is teaching in our School’s Outreach Program in a secondary school in Batoke. This is a 16 weeks program that is taught on a weekly basis. Glenn also started up a football project with a primary school in the same village. This is a PASA (Pan African Sanctuary Alliance) project that combines football with education. We will keep you informed about the progress on this. And last but not least, Glenn organised a mini-workshop on the theme: Climate Change, Consequences for Cameroon. Jane Boles, a volunteer from the neighbouring Botanic Garden, did one of the presentations and we all learned a lot about the carbon trade and how this can affect conservation in Cameroon.

I am confident that Glenn will turn out to be a great education officer and many students will learn a lot from him in the future.

Best wishes,
Simone de Vries
Assistant Project Manager

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Category: Gorilla, education | Date: Nov 15 2008 | By: limbewildlifecentre

Yesterday LWC presented the book ‘Gorilla Stories’, which is going to be used in conservation education in all the schools in and around Limbe. The Cross river gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli), that lives in the South West Province of Cameroon, is critically endangered, with only around 250 gorillas left in the wild. It is therefore very important to educate the people of this province about these gems in their forests. The book is a tool to discuss the Cross river gorilla, its needs and the threats it is facing.

‘Gorilla stories’ is developed by the Czech Radio, with money that came from their project Odhaleni (Revealed). This gorilla project, which started with a gorilla version of the television show ‘Big Brother’, filmed in Prague Zoo, is very popular in the Czech Republic. Now the Cameroonian students will meet with the Czech Zoo gorillas and will learn about the life of gorillas both in the wild and in the zoo.

The principles and teachers of fifteen schools were present for the book presentation, which was covered by the Cameroonian Radio and Television and some local radio stations. Miroslav Bobek, one of the writers of the stories, and Jana Jiritova, were over from the Czech Republic to assist with the presentation and start the distribution of the books. All school representatives were very pleased with the donated books, which are very nicely illustrated with lots of gorilla pictures. Like everybody in this country, the Cameroonian schools are always struggling to make ends meet, so it is very difficult for them to build up a library. This book donation is for most schools a valuable gift, that can be used in all sorts of classes, from conservation education to comprehensive reading, drawing, etc. The Limbe Wildlife Centre will use the books as well in both the outreach program and the Saturday Nature Club.

Best wishes,

Simone de Vries

Assistant Project Manager

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Category: Bush meat, Cameroon, Felix Lankester, education, endangered species | Date: Sep 30 2008 | By: limbewildlifecentre

The Limbe Wildlife Centre, Cameroon, focuses predominantly on the rescue and rehabilitation of endangered primate species, like western lowland gorillas and the drill monkey.  However we also often rescue non-primate species, like reptiles and birds and other small mammal species.  Many of these species tend to be solitary animals whose behaviour is fairly instinctual and consequently returning them to the wild when they are healthy is less complicated than it is with primates.   In 2008 we have rescued and released dwarf crocodiles, African rock pythons, black kites, genet cats, palm civets and African civet cats, land tortoises, and 1227 African grey parrots to name a few.   

Earlier this year a fledgling owl was brought in to the LWC by members of the French Army who have a base nearby.  The owl was a Fraser’s eagle owl (Bubo poensis) and it’s left eye was extremely swollen, closed and bruised.  The army cadets had rescued the bird from some children who had been throwing stones at it.  Locally, and in many other parts of the world, owls are associated with witchcraft and as a consequence people are frightened of them and tend to try to kill them if they see one.   

We took the owl in and placed it on treatment and waited for the swelling in the eye to reduce.  After a few days the swelling had reduced sufficiently for the eyelids to open and at this point we could assess the damage to the eye.  Using an opthalmoscope it was clear that the damage was permanent as the retina had become detached from the back of the eye.  Owl’s hunt using their hearing but also rely on sight to guide them through the trees as they fly and only having one good eye would severely handicap this owl in the wild.  Consequently we decided that we would not be able to release it.   

This posed us with a dilemma of what to do with the young owl:  keep him in a cage for the rest of its life or euthanase it?  Not great choices.  Luckily, however, we came up with a third option:  to try to train the owl to fly to the fist in the hope that we could use him for displays whilst educating visitors about owls, how they live and hunt, and how they are not witches in disguise!  At this point, as the owl was to stay, we gave him a name and the obvious choice was Fraser.  

So for the past 5 months our quarantine keeper, Killi Matute and an English ornithologist, Robbie Whytock, have been working together to train Fraser.  The process is quite complicated but Robbie has a lot of experience training raptors and under his guidance Killi and Fraser have slowly developed a very intimate relationship.  Killi sets traps at night to catch mice and rats and then during the day he chops them in to bite sized pieces, weighs them, and at 1pm feeds approx. 25grams of meat to Fraser.  The amount fed each day has to be carefully calculated as if Killi feeds him too little he will lose weight, and if he feeds too much he will not want to fly the next day. It’s an interesting balance and its only through careful daily calculations made by weighing the food fed and judging how Fraser responds each day that Killi has been able to finally estimate what Fraser’s preferred daily ration should be.  Each day since the training began little by little Fraser has become more comfortable sitting on Killi’s fist, feeding from his hand, flying to his fist in a cage, flying to his fist outside with a string attached to his jesse (leather straps attached to his feet), to finally, this week, flying outside to Killi’s fist without a string attached.   

Last weekend Fraser and Kill had their first display in front of a crowd of local children and visiting government dignitaries.  The response that Killi received when he appeared with a ‘witch bird’ on his hand that flew at his command was quite incredible.  However before anybody began to think that Killi was himself a wizard, we described how and why Fraser came to be living at the LWC, how vulnerable owls are and how they deserve protection not persecution.   

The impact was remarkable and Fraser’s story really underlines how at the LWC we try to extract the maximum conservation value from each and every animal that is unfortunate enough to need rescuing.   I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Robbie Whytock for his expertise in training Killi and Fraser.  A great job well done! 

Felix Lankester

Tags: bushmeat, conservation, conservation education, Felix Lankester, Limbe Wildlife Centre, owl, raptor

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Category: education | Date: Jul 10 2008 | By: limbewildlifecentre

Yesterday was the last day of our second Conservation Education Holiday Workshop of this summer. This week we had a very interesting group of students of around 11 years old. Just a few students had been at the Limbe Wildlife Centre before, so for most it was quite a new experience. In the regular school curriculum in Cameroon conservation is not taught, so there was a lot to learn.

The theme of this year’s Holiday Workshops is ‘Animals and Culture’. Busch Gardens Zoo in Florida is sponsoring the workshops and they are simultaneously organising Summer Camps with the same theme. One of the very popular parts of the program is the internet chat session that links up the Cameroonian students with the students in Florida. Before this I told the story of Little Red Riding Hood to our children and how that story influences our thoughts on wolves. I also told about how the wolf almost got extinct in the USA and was reintroduced to the wild later on. So one of the topics our students were asking about was how the wolves are doing now and how the American students feel about wolves. The students at the other side were equally prepared because they asked about the meaning of the elephant for the Bakweri culture. The Bakweri people live on Mount Cameroon.

Our students had already learned a lot about the meaning of elephants, because they had participated in a traditional Bakweri Elephant Dance. One of the men explained the meaning of it all. The elephant is considered the strongest and most powerful animal of the forest. If you do something bad, like stealing, the elephants will come to punish you. They might for instance destroy your crops. The dance acts this out and warns everybody to be good to each other.

This year’s theme is very useful to bring our conservation message across in a very playful way. Storytelling, making poems and singing are all great teaching tools, especially with young kids. We will have two more workshops this summer, but then for High School and University level. That will give us the possibility to discuss how culture influences our choices concerning conservation. I am already looking forward to that.

Simone de Vries

Assistant Project Manager

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Category: Bush meat, education | Date: May 30 2008 | By: limbewildlifecentre

This week we organised for the fourth time a workshop for hunters. The participants came from two villages, one of them Ndokbangengue. Our loyal readers might remember this name: it is the name of one of our drills that came from the same village. It was very interesting to show little Ndok to the hunters and tell her story. Unfortunately the hunter who had killed her mother was not among the participants, but they all knew who it was.

The Hunters Workshop is organised in cooperation with Ebo Forest Research Project of CRES and sponsored by San Diego Zoo. This time 21 hunters travelled the long distance from Ebo Forest to Limbe and took part in the two days program. The goal of the workshop is to raise awareness about endangered species and discuss alternatives for hunting. It is very interesting to work directly with hunters. They understand our message well and they experience in the forest that the numbers of many species are going down. We discuss with them the possibilities for other ways to make a living and most participants are positive towards change. It is now too early to assess the long-term effects of the workshop, but the immediate result seems to be positive.

And in this last workshop Ndok offered a great tool to talk about the pet trade crisis. She was rescued from a hunter in Ndokbangengue and lucky to be brought to the Limbe Wildlife Centre. She had a broken arm when she arrived, so she had to wear a cast during the first weeks. Then she was introduced to another drill named Tiko, who had recently been brought in from a Catholic mission. Together they have now moved to the drill enclosure, where they are slowly introduced to all the other drills. Ndok still gets her milk twice a day and she looks very healthy.

Simone de Vries

Assitant Project Manager

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