Dehai News Mailing List Archive: S.Telegraph.co.uk: The great migration-South Sudan's great wildlife migration threatened by war

From: Berhane Habtemariam <Berhane.Habtemariam_at_gmx.de_at_dehai.org>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 21:07:23 +0100

The mass movement of at least a million antelopes - one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in the world - is endangered by South Sudan's bloodshed.

Tuesday 27 October 2015

The landscape of South Sudan has turned a verdant green under the annual rains, beginning one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth. At least one million antelopes are now converging on a vast savannah east of the White Nile.

This mass movement of two species - the tiang and the white-eared kob – rivals the wildebeest herds of the Serengeti as the biggest migration of land animals in the world.

During South Sudan’s long war for independence from Khartoum, no outsider could be sure whether this migration was still happening. After the fighting ended in 2005, aerial surveys discovered that vast herds had somehow survived – and the antelopes were still travelling the same routes they had used for millennia.

Yet South Sudan is now enduring another war and its unique migration is threatened all over again. At present, about a million white-eared kobs are moving westwards from their dry season habitat in Boma National Park to the plains near the White Nile. They will be joined in Bandingilo National Park by 125,000 tiangs, which migrate southwards from their dry season refuge in the swamps of the Sudd region.

“This is one of the great wonders of the world,” said Paul Elkan, the head of the South Sudan programme for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The country’s wildlife is one of those special features of South Sudan which still arouses some hope.”

White-eared kob and zebra migrating through Boma National Park in 1983. UNEP Sudan

Yet both species of antelope must pass through active war zones during their respective migrations. Of the two, the tiangs are probably most at risk. Their dry season habitat in the Sudd lies across a region that is bitterly contested by government and rebel forces.

The kobs, meanwhile, must run the gauntlet of 5,000 government soldiers and 3,000 rebels who have been deployed inside Boma National Park since the onset of a separate insurgency in 2013.

The earlier war for independence lasted for 22 years, but it became a relatively static conflict, focused on battles for control of state capitals. Mr Elkan fears that today’s war may pose a greater danger to wildlife because the fighting has spread across the country, threatening areas of the migration routes.

“This time, you see a lot more combat in the bush, particularly in the Sudd,” he said. “The opposing sides are already using wildlife to feed their war machine. You have commanders loading up their trucks with bushmeat and bringing it to their wife’s restaurant in Juba [the capital]. That wasn’t happening before – and you didn’t have Chinese people buying ivory in Juba.”

Because they are always on the move, migrating antelopes have the advantage of at least being able to escape the danger zones. Sedentary species are far more at risk. When the war for independence began in 1983, South Sudan had as many as 80,000 elephants; today the figure has plummeted to about 2,000.

If the herds of kob and tiang were to be decimated, this would also threaten the survival of South Sudan's remaining predators, including lions, cheetahs and even African wild dogs - a particularly rare species that was recently rediscovered in the migration area.

Kob in South Sudan. Phil Snyder / UNEP Sudan

But the wildlife is still protected by the sheer remoteness of large areas of South Sudan. This country is bigger than Britain and Germany put together and has a population of less than 12 million. It is, perhaps, the last place on earth where the very existence of a million migrating antelopes could once have been open to question.

Even today, South Sudan possesses the biggest expanse of pristine savannah in Africa, with almost 12,000 square miles untouched by human activity.

A Topi and her calf. Alamy

The antelope migrations, meanwhile, converge in Bandingilo National Park - only a 45-minute flight in a light aircraft from the capital, Juba. This creates a powerful incentive to protect wildlife as the basis of a tourist industry when the war ends.

“There are conservationists in the rebel camp and in the government camp,” said Mr Elkan. “There are a lot of top leaders who don’t want to see their wildlife disappear. But war is war and even if they’ve got good intentions, protecting wildlife is not a priority right now.”

Received on Tue Oct 27 2015 - 16:07:25 EDT