I have lived my entire life in Africa, running around barefoot, with acacia trees which grow thorns the size of toothpicks everywhere and managed to get away relatively unscathed, and yet you couldn’t find anyone on the planet less adapted to survive in the lush green English countryside. For, lurking underneath all that lush green grass, pretty blue bells and fields of daisies are the most dangerous and spiteful plants I have ever encountered! The dreaded STINGING NETTLE. Last night while frolicking in a field with the Kuni kuni piglets that I am currently babysitting, as the sun set over the rolling English countryside, I managed to find the only patch of nettles in the entire field and sit on them! I nearly gave the poor pigs heart failure as I ran around like a chicken on fire trying to work out what had attacked me so viciously, only to discover it was a clump of dammed leaves.
Anyway, enough about my inability to survive life on this small island with its peculiar range of deadly South African eating plants, I want to blog about the next chapter, in what is turning out to be quite an unfolding adventure, that is my little existence in Cornwall.
I’m graduating on the 6th of November, so armed with my BSc honours degree and truck loads of enthusiasm I’ve been filling every spare minute of my time volunteering for various conservation organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Cornwall Wildlife Trust, and of course running the tag a turtle project with Blue Reef and the Marine Conservation Society, in the hope that not only will I gain some invaluable experience but that somewhere along the line I will hopefully build a career. So it was to my complete surprise when the Director of Newquay Zoo contacted me last week and offered me the opportunity to join their team as a Primate Keeper! This will give me the wonderful chance of working with these fascinating animals (lemurs, marmosets, monkeys and apes to name a few) up close and enabling me to observe and record behaviours which will contribute to their conservation in the wild.
Newquay Zoo is part of the Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust (WWCT). The WWCT operates and supports over 20 UK and overseas conservation projects. Newquay Zoo recently signed up to the World Land Trust's Wild Spaces project with the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA). This aims to raise £260,000 to purchase a critically threatened 3,675 acre (1,500 ha) parcel of strategically placed land in the Brazilian Atlantic forests, home to over 930 bird species and 260 mammal species.
The World Land Trust takes direct action to save tropical and other wilderness land. They buy it, acre by acre and are currently working to create new reserves to save threatened habitats in Brazil, Ecuador and India. To find out more please visit their website.
Another great project at the moment worth mentioning is the The Tiger Corridor Initiative promoted by the conservation organization Panthera. It hopes to secure a major wildlife conservation corridor which could extend along the foothills of the Himalayas from Nepal into Bhutan and northern India, then through to Myanmar, stretching across 2000km with an area of 120,000 sq km. The ambition would then be to connect it to another corridor spanning Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, terminating in Malaysia.
The amazing images in this blog were taken by Matt Button on our recent trip to Newquay’s sister Zoo Paignton in Devon (where we will be visiting again next week for a week of hiking on Dartmoor) and are all of critically endangered species which need protection if we are to conserve them for future generations.
Look out for my next blog on my visit to the wild Gorrilla’s in Bwindi Impenetrable
Forrest in Uganda…
Have a great week
Nic x
No comments:
Post a Comment