The battle to save the Arabian leopard from extinction in the wild can be called many things: crucial, worthy, pivotal and righteous. Just don’t call it glamorous.
I’m learning just how unglamorous while sheltering in the shade of a thorn-covered tree in a dusty wadi in the Dhofar mountains of southern Oman, a range that forms the critically endangered species’ last stronghold after decades of retreat from a habitat that once stretched as far as Palestine and Mussandam.
Alongside me are eight enthusiasts who have each paid US$2,100 (Dh6,785) to the non-profit conservation group Biosphere Expeditions to spend their holiday volunteering in a research project. Leading us is Tessa McGregor, a big cat specialist who is doing her best to lower our expectations about what we will encounter over the next two weeks because this is a research project, not a wildlife-spotting tour.
The chance of actually seeing a leopard are about as close to zero as it’s possible to get, and whether or not our contribution will help avert permanent extinction in the wild is uncertain.
Tessa then describes what we’ll be collecting from the wadis and mountains of the western Dhofar mountains through a series of polite euphemisms: “sign”, “scat” and “droppings”.
We will also be monitoring motion-triggered cameras posted in remote locations, doing an analysis of animal tracks, conducting population censuses of prey animals and interviewing local villagers – a process that involves tea and hospitality while asking about recent wildlife sightings – but she wanted us under no illusion about one of the key roles: “You’ll come back with bags and bags of scat.”
We get instructions on what the different species’ scat looks like and even “scat etiquette”, which involves wearing gloves while bagging suspected leopard droppings to avoid contamination.
I remember thinking to myself at this point that this is truly one of the oddest holidays I’ve ever been on. But for all the lack of glamour, everything we are about to do has a purpose.
The leopard scat, for example, will be subjected to DNA analysis to ensure that it is leopard and, if so, how many different animals there are and the degree to which they are related to one another. The gloves are to ensure that we don’t contaminate it with our own DNA.
None of this seems to faze those around me. They run the gamut of demographics ranging from an octogenarian Californian retiree who has done dozens of these kinds of trips to a fresh-faced Australian graphic designer on her first. Their conservation experience ranges from never having been camping before to spending months in the field doing research.
But almost all of them voice a similar message about why they’ve travelled to Salalah to join this expedition: they want to give something back to conservation rather than having a more traditional holiday.
For the last 11 years Biosphere Expeditions has provided the logistics so that volunteers like these could help research teams doing conservation work around the world without the former draining scarce funds from the latter.
In this case, they’re helping the Diwan of the Royal Court, which has taken on the Arabian leopard’s plight as one of its flagship programmes. By providing leaders, transport (Land Rover provided three brand-new LR3s and Shell Oman provides petrol) and a spartan but comfortable base camp (bucket showers and pit toilets but with a talented Bangladeshi cook to provide breakfast and dinner), Biosphere Expeditions provide nearly a dozen helpers to fill in some of the yawning gaps in knowledge.
Thanks to the leopards’ friends in high places in the Omani royal court, their main base in the eastern end of the Dhofar mountains behind Salalah has been turned into the Jebel Samhan Nature Reserve, created specifically to safeguard the leopard’s habitat.
But almost all the information about the leopard is from that area. Our focus is on the western edge of the mountains, closer to the Yemen border, about which very little is known. Here, the terrain varies from barren plateaux featuring camel-ravaged frankincense trees to dry and dusty wadis with occasional waterholes. Closer to the coast, the effect of the seasonal monsoon makes this the most forested part of the Arabian peninsula, and it’s this region which has provided the most promising results about the presence of leopards.
If you go
The package
Biosphere Expeditions’ next Arabian leopard research trips will take place from January 16-28 and January 30-February 11, 2011. The trip costs $2,179 (Dh8,700) per person including all training, accommodation and food, but not international flights. Log on to www.biosphere-expeditions.org/oman or call 0044 870 446 0801.
The flight
Return flights from Abu Dhabi to Salalah, via Muscat, cost from $532 (Dh1,955) including tax, through Oman Air (www.omanair.com)
Tessa, a veteran of big cat research projects ranging from the Sundarban tigers of the Ganges delta to the snow leopards of the Siberian Altai Mountains, explains that this region is crucial to the leopards’ viability.
“Big cats need lots of space. It’s estimated that each one’s territory is 200 square kilometres,” she explains. “Even if you’d protected the whole of Jebel Samhan, it’s too small to have a viable population in the future. They need to be able to go all the way to where we are here.”
The viability of the population is something about which she’s unfortunately already aware through previous research trips. The Arabian leopard is extinct in most of the Hajar mountains that stretch between Musandam and Muscat but a tiny population still clings on in the northernmost section near the UAE-Oman border in Ras al Khaimah and Fujairah.
“In Mussandam, there were some leopards there and we did find some signs of leopard but all the prey animals are gone,” Tessa explains.
“Leopards need ungulates – large prey like ibex and gazelle – but there aren’t any, just feral goats.
“We found some fresh pug (paw) marks and we heard leopard but even if there were two or three, really the population there is finished.
“That makes ungulates so important. Poaching (leopards) isn’t a big big problem but poaching of their prey animals is.”
Tessa does not want to be drawn on total population of the leopards or how many are needed for a sustainable population but other estimates say there are only 200 left in the wild. It’s the second most threatened big cat in the world and is deemed to be critically endangered, one short step away from being deemed extinct in the wild.
In western Dhofar they have very little idea about either the prey animals or indeed the leopards. The project last year found only a few old signs of leopards’ presence, raising the prospect that the population is in steep decline in this part of the range.
Just in case expectations were not already low enough, Tessa raises the prospect of coming back empty-handed from a scat-gathering expedition but insisted that finding nothing is still pivotal information.
“When you’re traipsing around and finding nothing you feel like, ‘What am I doing?’ But it’s very important,” she says.
“Most of the work has still to be done. There’s really no baseline. There are so many unanswered questions.”
It would take a particularly congenial volunteer to enjoy spending their money and holiday proving that the leopards are doomed to functional extinction in the wild, but this year the first group of volunteers found signs only a few days old of several animals resident in a forested area near the Yemen border.
Just how little is known about the Arabian leopard is shown by the belief that they do not scrape trees with their claws to mark their territory, a finding that had to be reversed just two weeks before our trip when the Biosphere volunteers found signs that they did.
The interconnectedness and interdependence of all the animals in the ecosystem are why Tessa spends the first day acquainting us with the tracks and scat of all the animals in the area. Even if we find leopard tracks, the population will be in deep trouble if we find few signs of ibex, hyrax and gazelles. The truth is that tracking is as much an art as a science and it takes time for your eye to adjust to the signs. One of the few similarities of this disparate group is that almost all work in sedentary office jobs and live in cities.
Just how much there was to adjust is demonstrated by Leslie, a previous Biosphere leader who has joined the volunteers as a break before completing her PhD dissertation on reptiles.
Approaching a thorn-laden acacia, she bursts into: “Look! A gecko!” And it takes the rest of us an embarrassing amount of time to even see the thumb-length reptile she’d spotted in seconds, even though we know it’s there and where to look.
And so it is with the leopard sign, where in anything other than ideal conditions, I find myself completely incapable of differentiating between leopard and other pawed creatures like the striped hyena or Arabian wolf. There’s the gnawing concern that the only thing worse than the paucity of information about leopards in this part of the Dhofar is the presence of information which turns out to be untrustworthy.
So far this trip is reinforcing my cynical view about volunteer holidays. Most seemed to involve visits to third-world villages by westerners who do half as much work as the locals and expect twice as much luxury, all the while feeling good about their input while making one-tenth of the contribution they would have achieved by staying at home and donating the money they spent on the tour and their flight.
But after listening longer to Tessa’s explanation of the volunteers’ input, my view softens. Besides creating a new series of ambassadors who will take their message home to Britain, Germany, Australia, Sweden, the US and Oman, there are other effects of our presence. The reality is that the locals begin to look at the issue more seriously if they see a dozen highly paid and qualified westerners in the region putting their time and energy into the local wildlife.
Still my concern about my own tracking ability is such that I’m relieved when we spend the first day visiting a waterhole at the head of our wadi, the location of several of motion-triggered cameras but seemingly too close to the village of Ayuun for there to be much chance of finding signs of the notoriously human-shy leopards.
I’m even more relieved when Tessa is joined by Khalid al Hikmani, who grew up in the mountain villages of the Dhofar and who now works with the leopard protection team as a field officer. Mohammed, a ranger with the Environment Ministry, also joins us.
Khalid is one of two boys who joined the programme through a chance encounter with an Australian who was in the mountains photographing the wildlife, became lost and emerged at their remote village. Both were youths at the time but through him became fascinated by the leopards and, once they’d completed their schooling, joined the Diwan conservation team.
The other youth, Hadi al Hikmani, is away in Britain studying for a BSc in biology, gaining the formal skills to enable him to do his work better.
Khalid’s enthusiasm for his job is demonstrated about 20 minutes into the tour when we reach the site of the first motion-activated camera, sited in a cave perfect for leopards to take shelter from the midday heat while being able to survey their domains.
As we approach, the camera is nowhere to be seen. Previously this camera has captured hunters going past and the fear is they’d stolen it to hide poaching. Khalid and Mohammed’s body language says it all – they seem dejected and downcast until the camera is found lying at the bottom of its mounting post, having been dislodged by an amorous or aggressive porcupine.
It’s taken nine photos since the last visit and the memory card shows the interfering porcupine but also a honey badger, fox and a striped hyena. Corroborating evidence is found in the paw- and hoof-prints in the dust nearby and slowly familiarity allows an increasing confidence in our ability to correctly identify tracks. My concerns about whether we should be here fade.
As we make our way down the wadi bed, every time a twist of the valley provides a new vista Tessa is out with her binoculars scanning the slopes for the presence of ibex and gazelle. As the wadi briefly closes in, Khalid and Mohammed scramble up to precarious ledges to look for leopard paw prints, emerging instead with the skull of a hyrax, a marmot-like animal which is one of the leopard’s prey species. Two more camera sites yield no startling results, and we head back to camp.
Sitting around the fire that evening, reviewing the tally of animals detected is surprising considering the only live mammal we’d seen all day had been a pair of camels. Between the cameras, tracks in the dust, skulls and, of course, scat, we’ve shown the presence of porcupine, striped hyena, Arabian wolf, red fox, Blandford’s fox, Arabian gazelle, Nubian ibex, hyrax, honeybadger and camel.
The finds in the days that follow make those pale by comparison. In an adjoining valley to the wadi in which base camp is located, Tessa finds a ledge bearing an old but clear leopard paw print, the closest sign of leopard to the main wadi. And in that news I begin to understand why volunteering for a conservation campaign can become so compelling.
jhenzell@thenational.ae
Source: The National: Leopard spotting
Friday, 19 February 2010
Monday, 15 February 2010
Jewel sets sail on a tide of history
MUSCAT // When fishermen stumbled across the wreck of a ninth-century sailing dhow off the coast of an Indonesian island more than a decade ago, archaeologists found it laden with 60,000 pieces of rare Chinese porcelain.
The spectacular discovery threw light on an era when the Arab world’s trade ships fanned out across the world, bringing goods from the far corners of Asia and Africa.
Today, that rich maritime heritage will be brought back to life when a reconstruction of a 1,000-year-old ship will set sail from Oman destined for Singapore.
The Jewel of Muscat, an 18-metre dhow weighing 50 tonnes, will trace a famous ancient trade route in a five-month voyage from Oman to the far east.
The vessel has been painstakingly built by Omani ship builders using traditional techniques from the ninth century. No nails were used and planks were sewed together watertight with coconut fibre. The wood is protected by a layer of goat fat mixed with lime, according to the Jewel’s Omani captain, Saleh Said al Jabri.
“We have to follow the local tradition in building the vessel otherwise the whole voyage will have no meaning. Most of the timber those days was imported by Omani sailors from abroad and brought here for construction,” Capt al Jabri said.
The men in charge of finding the right materials were the archaeologists Luca Belfioretti, from Italy, and Tom Vosmer, from Australia. They made trips to Pune in India in search of wood and also to Ghana for the Afzelia Africana timber. Both woods are known for their ability to withstand a battering by rough seas and bad weather, they said.
“The West African and India connection of timber used for the construction of a boat in Oman those days is based on archaeological evidence,” Mr Belfioretti said.
The vessel will depart from the yard where it was built in Qantab, a fishing village near Muscat that is part of Oman’s rich maritime tradition of seafarers setting off across the world on trade missions.
“The overall distance is roughly about 3,000 nautical miles, depending on the wind direction. The vessel will be on the mercy of the wind and will not sail in a straight line,” Capt al Jabri said.
The voyage, sponsored by Oman’s ministry of foreign affairs, came from an idea proposed by Singapore and is being funded by both countries.
The journey was inspired by the ship that went down in the ninth century off Belitung, an island on the east coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, according to Mr Vosmer. The wreck was accidentally discovered by fishermen in 1998 and the Indonesian government gave a German company permission to excavate the wreck. The rich cargo that it was carrying became known as the Tang Treasures.
The German excavators found 60,000 pieces of rare Chinese porcelain when they lifted the ship. International experts who identified the Tang Treasures said they were produced from kilns in what is now the Chinese province of Hunan.
Indonesian authorities in published reports said that the treasures include rare blue and white porcelain, tricoloured glazed pottery from the Tang dynasty and three early Qinghua plates, the best preserved of their kind ever found.
They also said the Arabic inscriptions found on some of the pieces suggested the pottery was produced and transported in the early ninth century, and carbon dating has confirmed this.
The Arabic inscription is a strong indication that the treasures were being exported to Arab countries. The shipwreck itself also revealed much about Arab shipbuilding and navigation from the period. Well-preserved fragments of the ship showed that stitching was used by Arab craftsmen to bind the timber of the hull, the Indonesian authorities said.
Mr Vosmer, a maritime archaeologist based in Muscat, believes the sunken ship was built in Oman and carried the treasure from China for export destined to one of the Arab countries.
Mr Vosmer hopes the Jewel of Muscat will not only publicise Oman’s former maritime greatness but also shed some light on the sunken ship.
“We are looking to discover more about how the original ship was built, how it handled and how it sailed. As well as this, we are hoping to find out what life on board was like and even perhaps why it sank,” Mr Vosmer said.
The Jewel of Muscat’s crew will employ ninth century navigational methods including a technique called Al Kamal, which determines the latitude of the celestial bodies to calculate the distance to a given destination.
Capt al Jabri will have 17 other people on-board, including nine Omani sailors helped by four trainee crew, a couple of technical support personnel, a journalist from the National Geographic magazine, a video cameramen and a photographer.
Capt al Jabri was born in Haramel in Muscat, in his parents’ house just metres away from the beach. He has 23-years of sailing experience, the majority of it working for the Royal Navy of Oman onboard its tall ship, the Shabab Oman. He holds a position of a training officer on the ship, which has sailed around the world several times for international regattas and historic voyages.
“It is not going to be a smooth sailing to Singapore. We expect very rough weather in the Bay of Bengal. It is the one of the most hostile patches of water in the world. It is a journey of perseverance where everybody on-board will live on minimum and basic surroundings during the course of the journey,” Capt al Jabri said.
The vessel will have only a radio for emergency calls and will have no other ships to escort it. Everybody onboard will sleep on bunks and use the same galley and toilet facilities used by ancient Omani mariners. The diet will be primarily dates, dried fish, rice and plenty of coffee served in traditional cups.
The first port of call from Muscat will be India’s Cochin after a month at sea. The crew will break for two to four weeks to carry out maintenance. The trainee crew of different nationalities will be replaced by a new team.
The ship will then sail on the monsoon wind towards Sri Lanka to dock at the south-western port of Galle for another two-week maintenance break. Depending on the monsoon, the journey will take 10 to 14 days.
“Then we will start our sternest challenge of the journey,” Capt al Jabri said, “across the Bay of Bengal. It is not the easiest route and one of the busiest in the world and notorious for its bad weather.”
If all goes well, Capt al Jabri will guide the vessel to Penang in northern Malaysia. “Depending on south-westerly wind and how rough the sailing will be, we expect to reach Penang in three to four weeks. But we are going to stop for only a few days, mostly a week, because we don’t want to miss the monsoon wind blowing towards our next stop in Malacca,” he explained.
The trip to Malacca is expected to last a week and the crew will rest a few days before embarking for their final destination in Singapore. They expect to arrive there in early July.
“The voyage’s schedule will depend on the weather conditions because the ship has no engine and will entirely rely on the monsoon’s winds,” Chris Beggins, the voyage’s project manager said.
The Jewel of Muscat will be placed in a museum in the city state, its final resting place, in accordance with an agreement between Oman and Singapore.
salshaibany@thenational.ae
Source: The National: Jewel sets sail on a tide of history
The spectacular discovery threw light on an era when the Arab world’s trade ships fanned out across the world, bringing goods from the far corners of Asia and Africa.
Today, that rich maritime heritage will be brought back to life when a reconstruction of a 1,000-year-old ship will set sail from Oman destined for Singapore.
The Jewel of Muscat, an 18-metre dhow weighing 50 tonnes, will trace a famous ancient trade route in a five-month voyage from Oman to the far east.
The vessel has been painstakingly built by Omani ship builders using traditional techniques from the ninth century. No nails were used and planks were sewed together watertight with coconut fibre. The wood is protected by a layer of goat fat mixed with lime, according to the Jewel’s Omani captain, Saleh Said al Jabri.
“We have to follow the local tradition in building the vessel otherwise the whole voyage will have no meaning. Most of the timber those days was imported by Omani sailors from abroad and brought here for construction,” Capt al Jabri said.
The men in charge of finding the right materials were the archaeologists Luca Belfioretti, from Italy, and Tom Vosmer, from Australia. They made trips to Pune in India in search of wood and also to Ghana for the Afzelia Africana timber. Both woods are known for their ability to withstand a battering by rough seas and bad weather, they said.
“The West African and India connection of timber used for the construction of a boat in Oman those days is based on archaeological evidence,” Mr Belfioretti said.
The vessel will depart from the yard where it was built in Qantab, a fishing village near Muscat that is part of Oman’s rich maritime tradition of seafarers setting off across the world on trade missions.
“The overall distance is roughly about 3,000 nautical miles, depending on the wind direction. The vessel will be on the mercy of the wind and will not sail in a straight line,” Capt al Jabri said.
The voyage, sponsored by Oman’s ministry of foreign affairs, came from an idea proposed by Singapore and is being funded by both countries.
The journey was inspired by the ship that went down in the ninth century off Belitung, an island on the east coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, according to Mr Vosmer. The wreck was accidentally discovered by fishermen in 1998 and the Indonesian government gave a German company permission to excavate the wreck. The rich cargo that it was carrying became known as the Tang Treasures.
The German excavators found 60,000 pieces of rare Chinese porcelain when they lifted the ship. International experts who identified the Tang Treasures said they were produced from kilns in what is now the Chinese province of Hunan.
Indonesian authorities in published reports said that the treasures include rare blue and white porcelain, tricoloured glazed pottery from the Tang dynasty and three early Qinghua plates, the best preserved of their kind ever found.
They also said the Arabic inscriptions found on some of the pieces suggested the pottery was produced and transported in the early ninth century, and carbon dating has confirmed this.
The Arabic inscription is a strong indication that the treasures were being exported to Arab countries. The shipwreck itself also revealed much about Arab shipbuilding and navigation from the period. Well-preserved fragments of the ship showed that stitching was used by Arab craftsmen to bind the timber of the hull, the Indonesian authorities said.
Mr Vosmer, a maritime archaeologist based in Muscat, believes the sunken ship was built in Oman and carried the treasure from China for export destined to one of the Arab countries.
Mr Vosmer hopes the Jewel of Muscat will not only publicise Oman’s former maritime greatness but also shed some light on the sunken ship.
“We are looking to discover more about how the original ship was built, how it handled and how it sailed. As well as this, we are hoping to find out what life on board was like and even perhaps why it sank,” Mr Vosmer said.
The Jewel of Muscat’s crew will employ ninth century navigational methods including a technique called Al Kamal, which determines the latitude of the celestial bodies to calculate the distance to a given destination.
Capt al Jabri will have 17 other people on-board, including nine Omani sailors helped by four trainee crew, a couple of technical support personnel, a journalist from the National Geographic magazine, a video cameramen and a photographer.
Capt al Jabri was born in Haramel in Muscat, in his parents’ house just metres away from the beach. He has 23-years of sailing experience, the majority of it working for the Royal Navy of Oman onboard its tall ship, the Shabab Oman. He holds a position of a training officer on the ship, which has sailed around the world several times for international regattas and historic voyages.
“It is not going to be a smooth sailing to Singapore. We expect very rough weather in the Bay of Bengal. It is the one of the most hostile patches of water in the world. It is a journey of perseverance where everybody on-board will live on minimum and basic surroundings during the course of the journey,” Capt al Jabri said.
The vessel will have only a radio for emergency calls and will have no other ships to escort it. Everybody onboard will sleep on bunks and use the same galley and toilet facilities used by ancient Omani mariners. The diet will be primarily dates, dried fish, rice and plenty of coffee served in traditional cups.
The first port of call from Muscat will be India’s Cochin after a month at sea. The crew will break for two to four weeks to carry out maintenance. The trainee crew of different nationalities will be replaced by a new team.
The ship will then sail on the monsoon wind towards Sri Lanka to dock at the south-western port of Galle for another two-week maintenance break. Depending on the monsoon, the journey will take 10 to 14 days.
“Then we will start our sternest challenge of the journey,” Capt al Jabri said, “across the Bay of Bengal. It is not the easiest route and one of the busiest in the world and notorious for its bad weather.”
If all goes well, Capt al Jabri will guide the vessel to Penang in northern Malaysia. “Depending on south-westerly wind and how rough the sailing will be, we expect to reach Penang in three to four weeks. But we are going to stop for only a few days, mostly a week, because we don’t want to miss the monsoon wind blowing towards our next stop in Malacca,” he explained.
The trip to Malacca is expected to last a week and the crew will rest a few days before embarking for their final destination in Singapore. They expect to arrive there in early July.
“The voyage’s schedule will depend on the weather conditions because the ship has no engine and will entirely rely on the monsoon’s winds,” Chris Beggins, the voyage’s project manager said.
The Jewel of Muscat will be placed in a museum in the city state, its final resting place, in accordance with an agreement between Oman and Singapore.
salshaibany@thenational.ae
Source: The National: Jewel sets sail on a tide of history
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