The bird and the bees

Forget about man and his dog. A small brown bird called the honeyguide lays claim to one of the oldest relationships between humans and animals, says Mark D Anderson.

SPOTTING THE HONEYS. The male greater honeyguide is identified by its pink bill, black throat and white ear patches. The female has no bold facial markings and she has a blackish bill.

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Piciformes
Family:	Indicatoridae Swainson, 1837

In the old days, people would follow a honeyguide to a wild bee nest, where they would smoke out the bees and rob the nest. The bird’s reward for leading humans to honey would be a feast of beeswax and bee larvae. Scientists suggest that this relationship goes back to prehistoric times when we all still had to forage for our sugar fix. In modern times, honey­guides are still so tuned in to human behaviour that they will even attempt to guide boats and motor vehicles to bee nests.The honeyguide is the only bird species able to digest beeswax, and it has a tough skin to protect it against bee stings.

Honey, I’m here…
If you’re in the bush and notice a small brown bird chattering away to attract your attention and then flying ahead of you, only to land on a nearby bush, you may well have met a greater honeyguide (the one species in South Africa known to interact with humans in this way). Once the bird has got your attention, it will flick its tail, fly to the next bush and wait for you to follow, gradually leading you to a bee nest.

Honey hex
In African folklore there’s a belief that if you fail to reward the honeyguide, it will bring misfortune upon your head, and next time it will show you the way to a black mamba instead of a sweet treat.

Honey who? 
In Kenya, the Boran people still actively use the honeyguide to find honey. The Boran are, however, gradually being excluded from game reserves, leading some scientists to argue that people follow­ing this tradition should be allowed to collect wild honey just to keep this ancient relationship going.

Honeyguides and honey badgers
There is a popular fallacy that honey badgers (and perhaps baboons and mongooses) are also guided to beehives by greater honeyguides. The idea came from early traveller and naturalist Anders Sparrman, who wrote about this in 1785 based on what he had been told. But in the more than 200 years since, no biologist or naturalist has observed this behaviour. So keep your camera and notebook handy – you could be the first person to document teamwork between this bird and an animal other than humans.

References:

• Friedmann, Herbert (1955). The Honeyguides. U.S. National Museum (Bulletin 208).
• Short, Lester, and Jennifer Horne (2002). Toucans, Barbets and Honeyguides. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-854666-1.

Videos:

• YouTube Video: HONEY GUIDE BIRD Guiding ratel/honey badger to a beehive
• YouTube Video: Honey Guide Bird (Amazing Partnership) Guiding humans to Beehive
• YouTube Video: BBC Talking to Strangers: honey birds
• YouTube Video: Lesser Honeyguide (Indicator minor)

THE GREAT GREEN WALL OF AFRICA

The Great Green Wall initiative is a pan-African proposal to “green” the continent from west to east in order to battle desertification.  It aims at tackling poverty and the degradation of soils in the Sahel-Saharan region, focusing on a strip of land of 15 km (9 mi) wide and 7,500 km (4,750 mi) long from Dakar to Djibouti.  

Populations in Sahelian Africa are among the poorest and most vulnerable to climatic variability and land degradation.  They depend heavily on healthy ecosystems for rainfed agriculture, fisheries, and livestock management to sustain their livelihoods.  These constitute the primary sectors of employment in the region and generate at least 40 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in most of the countries.  Additionally, the ecosystem provides much needed livelihood products, such as fuelwood and bushmeat.  Unfortunately, increasing population pressures on food, fodder, and fuelwood in a vulnerable environment have deteriorating impacts on natural resources, notably vegetation cover.  Climate variability along with frequent droughts and poorly managed land and water resources have caused rivers and lakes to dry up and contribute to increased soil erosion. 

The vision of a great green wall to combat ecological degradation was conceived in 2005 by the former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, and the idea was strongly supported by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal. The vision evolved into an integrated ecosystem management approach in January 2007, when the African Union adopted declaration 137 VIII, approving the “Decision on the Implementation of the Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative”. In June 2010, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan signed a convention in Ndjamena, Chad, to create the Great Green Wall (GGW) Agency and nominate a secretary to further develop the initiative. 

The participating countries hope that by linking national-level efforts across borders, they will tackle policy, investment, and institutional barriers that exacerbate the effects of climate change and variability, leading to desertification and deterioration of the environment and natural resources and the risk of conflicts between communities. International Colloquiums are held to discuss possible barriers as well as share available knowledge on the vegetal species, systems of development, and GGW monitoring updates1.

The GEF emulates the spirit of collaboration by allowing participating GGW countries to prioritize which projects they want to implement, in conjunction with GEF agencies and their partners.  They may “develop one or several projects in the context of this program and assign some or all of their financial allocations to the Great Green Wall[1]”.

Progress is apparent especially in the Zinder region of Niger, where tree density has significantly improved since the mid-1980s.  GEF CEO Monique Barbut attributes the success to working with farmers to find technical solutions, particularly long-term land and financial solutions, in order to save the trees.  This form of natural regeneration benefits local communities and the global environment alike by increasing crop yield, improving soil fertility, reducing land erosion, improving fodder availability, diversifying income, cutting wood collection time for women, strengthening resilience to climate change, increasing biodiversity, and much more. 

The Global Environmental Facility (GEF) has granted $100.8 million[2] to the GGW participating countries to expand sustainable land and water management (SLWM) and adaptation in targeted landscapes and in climate vulnerable areas in West African and Sahelian countries.  Each country will design a project based on national-level priorities for GEF and LDCF resources.  The projects will support the following activities

• Expand investment in SLWM technologies to help communities adapt production systems to climate variability, generate income and livelihoods, secure global public goods (such as retention of greenhouse gases, nitrogen fixation, groundwater recharge and biodiversity), and reduce impacts from erosion, drought, and flooding.
• Improve land-use planning, such as at watershed scale (i.e. Nigeria) or local levels (i.e. grazing reserves).
• Improve and apply the information base: climate and water monitoring network improvements, ICT (information communication technology) innovations, institutional cooperation within and across countries, and evidence based policy development

UPDATES: 

The Great Green Wall of the Sahel, still in the planning stages, will span Africa from Senegal to Djibouti in order to reverse desertification of the Sahel eco-system, and will look much like this image of a local re-forestation initiative in Chad.

The initiative will be ongoing, and has garnered the support of several international organisations including the UK's Royal Botanic Gardens, the World Bank, the African Union, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Together they have pledged $3 billion and the expertise of their botanists for its advancement.

"Examples of success [so far] include more than 50,000 acres of trees planted in Senegal,” says Ryan Schleeter at National Geographic. "Most of these are the acacia species Senegalia senegal, which has economic value for the commodity it produces, gum arabic. (Gum arabic is primarily used as a food additive.) A small portion of the trees are also fruit-bearing, which, when mature, will help combat the high levels of malnutrition in the country’s rural interior.”

Even more dramatic is the project’s potential social impact, says Schleeter. By providing better quality land and more opportunities to earn an income from cultivating it, the Great Green Wall will open up thousands of job opportunities to the local population.

References:

An African partnership to tackle desertification and land degradation 

Senegal begins planting the Great Green Wall against climate change 

Today in History: Shepherd Golfs on the Moon

Tiger Woods may rule the golf course here on Earth, but when it comes to extraterrestrial golfing, Alan Shepard reigns supreme. On Feb. 6, 1971, he became the first person to hit a golf ball on the moon, just before reboarding the Apollo 14 spacecraft to return home.

Shepard was the second person, and the first American, to be in space during an early Mercury flight in 1961, although the mission did not achieve orbit (nor was it meant to do so). Alas, an inner-ear disease grounded the NASA astronaut for the next five years, until surgery corrected the problem.

In a 1991 interview, Shepard told of how he brought a collapsible golf club — technically a Wilson six-iron head affixed to the handle of a lunar sample scoop — aboard the spacecraft. “The deal I made with the boss was that if things were messed up on the surface, I wouldn’t play with it, because we would be accused of being too frivolous,” he said. “But, if things had gone well, which they did, then the last thing I was going to do … was to whack these two golf balls.”

On Feb. 6, 1971, Shepard became the fifth person to walk on the moon, and true to his plans, just before ascending back into the lunar module, he took out the golf club and hit two balls. Mission control offered a few pointers on form after his first attempt — “You need to bend your knees a little more, keep your head down” — to which Shepard rejoined: “I’m wearing a spacesuit!”

He was exaggerating a bit on the distance, but with no atmosphere and hence no air resistance, even a one-handed swing sent the first golf ball sailing about 200 meters, roughly the length of two football fields. Shepard did even better on the second golf ball, which traveled a good 400 meters (1312.34 feet, almost 500 yards, or five football fields).

Those two golf balls are still on the moon. NASA gave the makeshift “space golf club” to comedian Bob Hope as a souvenir. Shepard never went to space again (he was already 47 at the time of Apollo 14, the oldest astronaut in the program), but he did become a successful businessman. He died in 1998 from leukemia. But his legacy lives on.

Sources:

The First Person To Play Golf On The Moon

Miles and miles and miles