Stop Wildlife Poisoning

Category: carbofuran | Date: Mar 24 2009 | By: Martin Odino

So Furadan seems to have come in just to make the locals of Bunyala destructive to their bird biodiversity.
Backtracking on their origins, their folklore typifies the Banyalas (the local people) as occupational pastoralists with marked traces of hunting (including fishing) and gathering amongst ‘chosen’ family lineages.

 The photograph above was taken last month. While surveying for bird poisoning, we met the boy fishing without any special impliments. I bet passed on skills!

 The above photo shows what I saw when i took a look into the boy’s yellow container  above. Fish! No need for hook, road and bait!

Well, hunting as they say was a commercial venture especially to provide a commodity for exchange with their trading counterparts in the years back then when wild game was bountiful. But even now the hills where the game were reputed to roam are getting degraded, the vegetation just a thin shit constituted of scanty shrubbery.

Wanga Hill in the background. You can literally see the soil!Only covered in shrubs.

Thick bushes and trees were the characteristic vegetation of Bunyala. Birds, small mammals, cats; cheetahs and leopards, jackals, hyenas and even rumours of the king of the jungle, the lion (whose local name does exist) were common place.
So human population pressure set in like in many other places and man turned against his own enviroonment. With money having also been introduced as the measure of value, commercial hunters did their best too to reap the best out of the wild, both forces and pushing the natural resources to thin levels. Birds seemed not directly targeted but for the game birds. However with small mammals and land resource at their diminishing levels an unexploited resource seemed prestine just a couple of meters above them. The birds of the air, flying meat!
Furadan brought the killling of birds revolution, favouring uncontrollable large scale  poiosning of birds since the early 1980’s, even evolving into decoy-employed methodology.

Tags: Birds, Bunyala, fishing, hunting, poisoning

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