The Stack.
Fuzzy cubicles, hairy slits, dusky warblers and a long aside about taxonomy. That's what you came for, right?
Well, this was hard. Gave myself a whole year to cover, in which I had four or five different notebooks on the go but the events that, in retrospect, seemed most important weren’t written down in any of them. I had to cut a huge amount out and what I’ve put in seems often too constructed. There’s even a tense change - maybe two - part way down. And it’s long. Well, I did say draft.
Thing is, this is like casting back to try and work out where I picked up the trail. I’m still not sure that the trail is even a real trail at all and, if it is, I doubt that it’s the trail of the right thing. You don’t necessarily know for sure when you first see a trail. You know when you see the first clear footprint, if you ever do, but something might be going on before that. And then, even if you know what you saw first, you still have to ask what contributed to the impression that it was actually a trail, and that it was the one you should be following.
So maybe you can make something more of all this than I can right yet. There is a lot I left out
22/03/05. Student Conservation Conference, Cambridge. From memory and some notes (06/06/23)
I was in a talk about the chiru, the Tibetan antelope; though the speaker says it’s not really an antelope but a goat. Whether that’s a valid taxonomic point, I’m not sure, but certainly ‘goat’ isn’t what the pictures suggest. Pale buff, with dark clouding on the face and leading edges of its legs, as if it has been walking into an ash-storm, and long lyre-shaped horns. It is a beautiful animal and one that I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not sure I’ve heard of. Relatively speaking, I’m a bit of an animal nerd on the Cambridge conservation scene. I was surprised in the FFI office when a new coffee-table book of animal pictures did the rounds and only myself and one other person - a regional director - could name most of the species. I’m just a project assistant, although I’m aware I’m qualified for better. Anyway, the speaker asked how many people have heard of chiru and four people in the crowded auditorium raised their hands. Not for the first time I am surprised by how little nerdy natural history knowledge conservation professionals, and even biologists, actually have.
The auditorium was crowded with a diversity of faces, joining the familiar Cambridge crowd. The conference aims to attract and showcase high quality student work from across the world. Many, including this speaker, seemed to be professionals studying later in life and to me, who can’t seem to do anything but study, their poise and self-assurance were a little daunting. The chiru, it turns out, is threatened by the harvesting of luxury wool, shahtoosh, which is stripped from the belly of the hunted animal. Unlike the case of the vicuña, a classic example of a species saved by sustainable use, there are no semi-domesticated chiru.
In the other presentations I learned that revenues from trophy hunting of elephants in Zimbabwe’s famous CAMPFIRE sustainable use programme were inequitably distributed, even before Mugabe’s land seizures. In Bangladesh, 5 humans are killed by elephants for every elephant that dies of any cause. African elephants can also lower exam performance because children are scared to meet them on the way to school. Elephant-human conflict is a surprisingly big topic now. I learned also that agroforestry science is trying to move beyond the farm, but risks leaving behind the lore of individual farmers which is born of ‘the adaptability of poverty’. All of this is complex, political, challenging; signs that conservation is growing up. Against this background, the story of the chiru seems so simple; one I might have read about in my childhood. There is no human-chiru conflict, no poor people who need its meat to survive; it’s threatened by a silly luxury product that rich people like to be seen with. Why aren’t I hearing stories like that any more? Perhaps they just aren’t interesting enough.