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No. 54 NEWSLETTER Spring 2003

WEST MIDLANDS BRANCH, BUTTERFLY CONSERVATION

 

Account of a Trip to Cameroon
or
Life with the Fon or Over the Hill and Far Away

I was fortunate in April of last year to be selected to join an Earthwatch expedition to Cameroon. Earthwatch is an international charity which organises expeditions to various parts of the world whereby volunteers are able to work alongside scientists on conservation projects. Normally, volunteers have to pay their own way but having now reached that “certain age” I was able to benefit from a Millennium Award which paid for the cost of the trip.

My project was based on the Ijim Ridge in north–west Cameroon at Laikom close to the Palace of the local tribal chief known as the Fon of Kom. The aim was in conjunction with scientists from Kew to undertake surveys of rare forest and grassland plants building on previous work undertaken in the same area. Western Cameroon is of considerable interest to botanists as the area contains an exceptionally high number of endemic species. Like much of tropical Africa, pressure of population growth combined with illegal logging operations means that much of the original montane forest has already disappeared and scientists are involved in a race against time to discover new species before they become extinct. By working with local people and conservation agencies on the ground, the hope was to raise awareness of the importance of the area for biodiversity and help prioritise areas for conservation by providing sound data for assessment. Previous visits to the same area had resulted in the discovery of a number of species new to science and the timing of our visit, towards the end of the dry season, was aimed at both finding further new plants and obtaining fertile material of species at stages lacking from earlier collections.

Before our project could begin, we were required to meet with the Fon to receive his blessing. This proved a somewhat surreal experience as we were led between a series of stone huts to a large open courtyard where a rather large man sat on a throne drinking whiskey & orange. After a welcoming speech, which was translated by a member of the Fon’s Council, Richard, a member of our group who bore an uncanny resemblance to Osama bin Laden (which is another story in itself), was summoned forth to receive the Fon’s blessing. The blessing took the form of the aforementioned whiskey and orange being poured into Richard’s cupped hands and the poor unfortunate soul being made to drink it much to the rest of the group’s collective amusement. Blessing over we were ready to start our work.

For people like myself who had not been involved in this kind of survey work before, the methods used seemed somewhat brutal with each specimen being dug up by means of a trowel or wrenched from trees with the help of long pruning poles extendable to around 40 feet. Plant material was gathered up in large plastic bags for subsequent identification and pressing. In the heat of Cameroon, it was important that this happened as soon as possible otherwise important plant characteristics might be lost, which meant carrying large field presses and other equipment with us. Information on each plant was entered into a notebook including a description of those features like scent and colour that might not be apparent from the dried specimen. At the end of the day, when we returned to our base at Laikom, all specimens had to be checked, rearranged if necessary, and interleaved with blotters and corrugates ready to be placed on a portable drier. Both morning and evening checks were made of previously collected specimens to make sure they had dried thoroughly. Fruits, in particular, we found took several days to dry. The aim was to finish up, if possible, with at least four specimens of each plant: one to be sent at the end of the expedition to the herbarium at Kew, the other three to be kept in various local collections within Cameroon.

Local people from the village were employed to act as our guides, cooks, cleaners, firewood gatherers and water carriers and we soon settled into a daily routine. Days started early at first light and lasted until “lights out” at 10.00 p.m. Chances of any lie-in were remote with loud cries of “specimen checking” guaranteed to rouse any malingerers from their beds. Specimens checked, we could turn our attention to breakfast: a cup of tea and bread with either honey, chocolate spread or peanut butter. After breakfast, we would quickly gather up all the necessary equipment and begin the long walk up onto the ridge. This meant that the most strenuous part of the day was completed while it was still relatively cool. By mid-morning, with temperatures approaching thirty degrees celsius, we were keen to seek out any shade going. The diversity of plants was quite astonishing with some extremely impressive orchids, epiphytes and climbers. Our local guides proved very adept at not only locating interesting plants but also in knowing any medicinal value they may possess. On one occasion, I came across a very striking gladioli, the bulb of which was apparently ground up and used to treat coughs. Lunch (usually more bread, accompanied by fruit) was taken in the field and we would then continue collecting to the middle of the afternoon. By this time, the clouds had begun to gather and, if we were fortunate, we just had time to return to Laikom before the onset of a heavy downpour. Although supposedly the dry season, rain was a daily occurrence and, in the evening we were often reduced to sorting specimens in semi-darkness. Our evening meal was always announced by the Camp Manager with great aplomb. There was usually an assortment of vegetables, sometimes spaghetti and invariably “cow meat” of which we were allowed “one lump only”, a reflection of the fact that meat was very much a luxury item in Cameroon. After supper, we all took turns to give a talk on the subject(s) of our choice, in my case CSV(the national charity I work for) and (surprise, surprise) Lepidoptera.

These evening talks (when I managed to stay awake!) offered a fascinating insight into the problems of conservation in a third world country. The impression was of a plethora of recently formed environmental organisations with very similar agendas all competing with one another for very limited resources. The real challenge for all, however, was how to develop a conservation strategy that could, at the same time, produce real economic benefits for local people. This issue was encapsulated by one speaker from a local Birdlife International project who entitled his talk “Conservation versus Survival”. With many local families still having five or six children and men commonly having more than one wife, there was huge pressure to bring every scrap of available land into cultivation and wildlife was the inevitable loser. Much of the original forest had already been removed and what survived was mainly along stream valleys or had some local religious or cultural significance. One could see very clearly that biodiversity reasons alone would not be sufficient to protect the remaining scraps in the long term. It was hard to see a way forward. The advance of western medicine meant that the importance of local plants for their medicinal use was likely to decline, while the absence of any proper tourism infrastructure or basic amenities like electricity, sewage or clean water meant that scope for the development of eco-tourism was severely limited. One suspects that the power of the local Fon, although still considerable, was also likely to diminish and may not in the long run be sufficient to retain areas of forest currently deemed sacred. The answer seemed to be on the one hand to improve agricultural techniques so that more food could be grown from existing land and, on the other, to look for ways in which local people might generate income from the forest. Working examples of the latter seemed rather thin on the ground with the most promising being a bee keeping project which we visited whereby local people were provided with hives that they could keep in the forest and received training in the production and sale of honey.

There was no doubting the incredible richness of what was at risk with over 330 different plants collected by the end of our two week stay. Perhaps our most exciting plant discovery was a tree in the legume family known as Newtonia camerunensis, a species thought to be extinct from the area and only known from six other sites in the entire world. Several specimens were eventually found including large numbers of young seedlings and, for the first time, a tree in fruit. In similar vein, was the discovery of more than 1000 flowering spikes of Kniphofia reflexa, a relative of the Red-hot Poker, within an old volcanic crater which had never previously been recorded in its flowering state. Biodiversity, however, was by no means confined to plants with a very rich assemblage of birds and invertebrates also present.

As is often the case within a rainforest habitat, birdwatching was hard-going. Birds were certainly present and audible but spotting them in the dense canopy was another matter. Fortunately, help was on hand from staff at the Birdlife International project who took a fellow bird enthusiast and myself out on one of our free days to a rather more open habitat where they were able to identify for us some of the local species. Yellow-crowned Bishop, Fiscal Shrike and Speckled Mousebird were all very common and we were also able to see such wonderfully named birds as Blue Fairy Flycatcher, Yellow White Eye, Western Green Tinkerbird, Splendid Sunbird and Malachite Kingfisher. Like so much else in Cameroon, there was a mix of the exotic with the familiar. So at the same time as seeing all these new birds, we would suddenly come across something immediately recognisable like Swallows, Swifts, Stonechats or Whinchats, all presumably preparing for the long flight north to spend the summer in Europe - a reminder of the importance of conservation on a global scale and the need to focus our efforts just as much on countries in west Africa, where so many of our bird species spend the majority of their year, as we do on protecting habitats and nest sites in the UK. Two personal bird highlights were a flock of Yellow-billed Oxpeckers busily removing insects from the head, ears and backs of a herd of cattle (just like you see on the telly!) and a more distant view of a Black & White Casqued Hornbill flying over the forest.

Perhaps most difficult of all to identify were the butterflies and moths. I don’t think anyone exactly knows how many species of Lepidoptera occur in the Cameroon as they have never been comprehensively studied. No Field Guide specific to the country has been produced and I finished up taking the long out of print “Butterflies of Africa” by John Williams which I was able to obtain secondhand. According to the author, over 2,400 species of butterfly alone occur in the whole continent, with West African rainforest being the richest habitat for Lepidoptera. Williams includes 436 species in his book, of which just 283 are illustrated in colour. If this was not problem enough, I was further handicapped by not taking a net, so identification was often reliant on a quickly taken photograph, which often in the event misses some key ID feature, or trying to catch a fast moving insect in a plastic bag which, although a cause of great hilarity to the rest of the group, was not a particularly effective technique! Nevertheless, this combination of methods did produce a list of around 20 species from eight different families but a decent field guide and a butterfly net would probably have doubled this number. Most impressive were the Swallowtails, especially the stunningly beautiful but very fast-flying Narrow Blue-banded Swallowtail Papilio nireus, which I saw on just the one occasion and only managed to photograph its underside. Much more obliging, was the Citrus Swallowtail Papilio demodocus which was attracted to the depression left by a walking boot across an area of bog we visited in search of orchids. Although very prone to disturbance and never entirely still in true Swallowtail-like fashion, it did at least keep returning to the same spot and I managed a half-decent photo. Also unmistakable, was the almost white Mocker Swallowtail Papilio dardanus which I saw in the botanical gardens at Limbe on the last day of the trip. Another interesting group were the Acraeas, a rather narrow-winged family of butterfly which do not occur in Europe and are related to the Monarchs which I also saw. The Acraeas all look very similar and despite success with the plastic bag, in this instance, I was still not able to come up with a positive ID! Wherever one goes in the world, the Nymphalidae are always well represented and this was certainly true of Africa. An interesting feature of this family is seasonal variation as is seen in the European Map butterfly where the Summer form is totally different to that seen in the Spring. In Africa, the difference is often between the wet and dry season form and, despite it being theoretically the dry season, I saw the wet season form of both the Fashion Commodore Precis pelarga and its close relative Darker Commodore Precis antilope. Whites and Yellows were common, especially around the village, including the Common Grass Yellow Eurema hecabe and Broad-bordered Grass Yellow E. brigitta, while the marshier areas near the stream supported large numbers of African Clouded Yellow Colias electo, very similar to the European Colias species but much, much smaller. A very large Skipper seen (“hello, hello, hello…what have we got here?”) proved rather appropriately to be the Striped Policeman Coelidas forestan.

Some of the moths were equally spectacular and, although I managed a few photographs, all still await identification (any suggestions of appropriate books welcome). Several appeared by their size and basic jizz to be members of the Saturnidae, while others seemed akin to our Noctuids. Perhaps the most striking of all insects, however, were the grasshoppers and crickets. On several occasions, I disturbed a large red-winged Grasshopper which was a strong flier and, I swear, the size of a Sparrow!

The two weeks in Cameroon passed by very quickly and it was soon time to say farewell to the Fon (more whiskey and orange) and the rest of the group. This had been my first time in Africa and the trip had been amazing on so many levels. I felt I had learnt a lot, both more about how the rest of the world live and about just how difficult it is to deliver conservation objectives in a third world country like Cameroon. It certainly provided a lot of food for thought, and I am grateful to Earthwatch for giving me such a tremendous opportunity.

Mike Williams

Earthwatch provides opportunities for volunteers to take part in scientific expeditions to various parts of the world. If you are interested in taking part contact Earthwatch Institute, 267 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 7HT tel. 01865 318850
website: http://www.earthwatch.org/europe