Sierra Leone chimp refuge shuts doors to tourists to protest deforestation
Authorities acknowledge that the country's rich wildlife is threatened by land seizures and illegal logging, but the founder of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Bala Amarasekaran, says they have not yet done enough about it to convince him to reopen to visitors.
"A few months back, we could see the land grabbing and the encroachment coming closer to the sanctuary," Amarasekaran told Reuters at the refuge, which is home to more than 100 mainly orphaned chimps and normally lets guests stay in its lodges.
"(Deforestation) is really threatening the sanctuary's existence, because it's too dangerous when people come close to a wildlife preserve like this," said Amarasekaran, who founded the refuge 30 years ago and has led it through crises including civil war and the 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic.
Sierra Leone lost approximately 2.17 million hectares (5.36 million acres) of tree cover between 2001 and 2024, representing about 39% of the total in 2000, according to online tracker Global Forest Watch.
The Western Area Peninsula, home to the capital Freetown and Tacugama, lost more than 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres) of tree cover during that same period.
Amarasekaran said deforestation in the area was fuelled by "land grabbing" for development.
The consequences of rapid deforestation were highlighted by a mudslide on the slopes of Mount Sugar Loaf in 2017 that killed an estimated 1,000 people.
A 2019 paper published by the Geological Society of London blamed the incident on a mix of heavy rain, deforested slopes and unchecked construction. It said tree loss had weakened the soil's ability to absorb water and hold together, worsening the mudflow.
"It's a serious problem, an existential problem," Sierra Leone's Information Minister Chernor Bah told Reuters.
"We regret that the Tacugama authorities have taken the step that they have taken to shut down here, but it's one that we understand."
Amarasekaran said President Julius Maada Bio's government had dispatched a task force to conduct some raids on illegal logging operations, but complained about a lack of follow-up operations.
Bah said the government was committed to protecting the peninsula's forests.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
18 hours ago
- The Sun
Why you need to put salt on your driveway this weekend to save yourself hours doing a boring chore
FOR those who hate gardening but hate the sight of weeds more, listen up. A gardening expert has shared the job you need to get done this weekend to prevent yourself from spending hours on a boring chore. 1 According to experts at Good Grow UK, there's a super easy way to banish weeds from your driveway without any hard labour. The experts have urged gardeners to sprinkle salt on their driveways this summer in a bid to banish weeds without using harsh chemicals. Weeds are a constant, unwanted pain in warm weather which gives them the perfect conditions to thrive. Through spring to autumn, homeowners lucky enough to have a driveway will see them sneak through paving stone cracks. Before you know it, your driveway is covered in them. While many gardeners turn to chemical solutions like weedkillers, which are fast acting and long lasting, they do have some setbacks. They can be expensive to buy and often kill everything they touch, including beneficial wildlife like bees and butterflies. But sprinkling table salt over your driveway will get rid of weeds without harming wildlife. The experts say: "Salt is a cheap, effective way to kill weeds and keep them gone. "It's versatile too, you can simply spread the salt by hand or dissolve it in water and spray it onto the ground. I had loads of irritating weeds popping up between my patio slabs - a free hack killed them instantly and they haven't grown back 'In general your weeds should start to die within 3-10 days. 'Salt kills weeds by causing them to dehydrate. When plants are exposed to salt for long periods of time, they lose water and die. The amount of salt needed will vary depending on the type of plant being treated. 'You don't need a special kind of salt, table salt works just fine. 'Using salt to kill those small pesky weeds between the gaps in your paths?" the experts asked. "Or maybe your gravel drive is infested with the blighters either way salt will be effective against smaller weeds in 10 days." You can buy 750g of table salt for as little as 65p in Sainsbury's to cover your entire driveway.
Times
a day ago
- Times
Creatures of the night do battle in the dark woods
The natural world at night is a world at war. Walking through the night-time wood after checking the sheep, I slapped at mosquitoes and other biting insects, and recalled why I am word perfect on Vivian's library scene lament in Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying: 'Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty… Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.' People who gush endlessly that nature is wonderful are people that do not spend enough time in nature. And in the primitiveness of the night, nature's discomforts and bloodiness seem particularly acute. If fascinating. As I hurried along, flapping my arms fit to fly, I caught sight in the moonlight of a swirl of long-eared bats (Plecotus auritus) in the pine glade. They were corralling a shoal of white moths into the centre of the glade, where the Lepidoptera made easy pickings. This is the second time that I have seen this batty herding phenomenon. • Six-year-old boy 'attacked by wolf' in Dutch nature reserve The long-eared bat, like others of its Chiroptera ilk, is locked in a millennia-old co-evolutionary arms race with its moth prey, with each species developing counter-measures to maintain survival. In an upping of their armoury, long-eared bats now use the sense of smell to help hunt moths. Meanwhile, some hawk-moths have evolved to hear with their mouthparts and respond to bat calls with evasive manoeuvres. Tiger moths (Bertholdia trigona) can use their own ultrasound clicks to jam the echolocation signals of the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus). So, I am left wondering whether the apparently co-operative hunting of the long-eared bats is a fluke, or an escalation in the arms race. As local names such as 'muckweed', 'dirty jack' or 'dirtweed' indicate, fat-hen (Chenopodium album) is a plant of the farmyard and well-manured field. For the Anglo-Saxons it was 'melde' and its historical abundancy gave it a place in national toponomy, with Milden in Suffolk and Melbourn in Cambridgeshire. Like peoples before them, the Anglo-Saxons used fat-hen as a food for humans and fowl, hence the 'hen'. As well as being harvested for its seeds, fat-hen was eaten as a vegetable until spinach and cabbage knocked it off the plate in the 16th century. We classify fat-hen today as a weed or wildflower, yet for millennia it was cultivated as well as gathered: the wild and the farmed were not discrete in the old times. Indeed, my grandfather, as late as the 1960s, expected the farm to 'crop' wild things (from blackberries to hares) as well as the planted and the tended. They knew a thing or two, those ancients: in this year of drought my farmed crops have struggled, but we have on the manure heap a quite excellent accidental crop of fat hen. In August, the spire-shaped fat hen is at its peak height, a metre and a half, and the profuse green flowers are already turning to seed. The grey-green oval leaves are often conspicuously covered in a white, powdery meal ('album' in the plant's scientific name refers to this white dust, which is strictly speaking an epicuticular wax). As well as fattening humans and poultry, the seeds are beloved by hungry buntings and finches in winter. • Community surrounding The Sound of Music's lake in lease dispute We have a sky full of swallows. The juveniles from our three nests — and I am aware of the unsuitability of using the possessive pronoun for wild things — have joined their novice fellows up in the blue. There are, as I write, perhaps 50 young Hirundo rustica skirling above the house and surrounding fields; their constant communication with each other a joyous baby babble. Our largesse in swallows is not accidental; we and our neighbours keep livestock — hence the manure heap — and where there is outdoor livestock run on nature-friendly principles there are swallows. It could hardly be other. In his pioneering study 'The Larval Inhabitants of Cow Pats', Journal of Animal Ecology, 23, 1954, BR Lawrence calculated that the dung of a single outdoor cow supported nearly 2.2 million insects a year. Which is quite a lot of grub for swallows. Folklorically, swallows are weather indicators, thus the saying, 'Swallows high, staying dry; Swallows low, wet will blow.' On fine days warm air rises upwards, carrying the gauzy-winged insects with it. Consequently, the insectivorous swallows fly high to find their food. Conversely, during unsettled weather the insecty things seek the shelter of trees and vegetation, requiring swallows to swoop low — sometimes just millimetres off the ground — to catch them. John Lewis-Stempel is the author of England, A Natural History
Reuters
2 days ago
- Reuters
Sierra Leone chimp refuge shuts doors to tourists to protest deforestation
FREETOWN, Aug 1 (Reuters) - The eco-lodges and tree-covered footpaths of West Africa's largest chimpanzee refuge have been devoid of tourists for more than two months as its founder stages a protest about rampant deforestation in Sierra Leone. Authorities acknowledge that the country's rich wildlife is threatened by land seizures and illegal logging, but the founder of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Bala Amarasekaran, says they have not yet done enough about it to convince him to reopen to visitors. "A few months back, we could see the land grabbing and the encroachment coming closer to the sanctuary," Amarasekaran told Reuters at the refuge, which is home to more than 100 mainly orphaned chimps and normally lets guests stay in its lodges. "(Deforestation) is really threatening the sanctuary's existence, because it's too dangerous when people come close to a wildlife preserve like this," said Amarasekaran, who founded the refuge 30 years ago and has led it through crises including civil war and the 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic. Sierra Leone lost approximately 2.17 million hectares (5.36 million acres) of tree cover between 2001 and 2024, representing about 39% of the total in 2000, according to online tracker Global Forest Watch. The Western Area Peninsula, home to the capital Freetown and Tacugama, lost more than 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres) of tree cover during that same period. Amarasekaran said deforestation in the area was fuelled by "land grabbing" for development. The consequences of rapid deforestation were highlighted by a mudslide on the slopes of Mount Sugar Loaf in 2017 that killed an estimated 1,000 people. A 2019 paper published by the Geological Society of London blamed the incident on a mix of heavy rain, deforested slopes and unchecked construction. It said tree loss had weakened the soil's ability to absorb water and hold together, worsening the mudflow. "It's a serious problem, an existential problem," Sierra Leone's Information Minister Chernor Bah told Reuters. "We regret that the Tacugama authorities have taken the step that they have taken to shut down here, but it's one that we understand." Amarasekaran said President Julius Maada Bio's government had dispatched a task force to conduct some raids on illegal logging operations, but complained about a lack of follow-up operations. Bah said the government was committed to protecting the peninsula's forests.
