Endangered Black Rhinos
From the air, which is the only practical way for two legged creatures to travel in northern Botswana, the Okavango Delta looks something like an 18,000 hole golf course. Even in the winter dry season, deep high quality replica handbags green fairways of tall papyrus are punctuated by patches of sand, small stands of trees, and a vast network of water hazards crosshatched with the lines of highways. Amid the vastness of the Okavango, the six to 12 seat bush planes that occasionally buzz across the empty sky, commuting from luxury lodge to luxury lodge, could be mistaken for dragonflies.
is a beautiful place, man! Map Ives shouts. been here 30 years and I still can get used to Wholesale Replica Bags it. Whooooo! We are traveling, impractically, along a very bumpy sand road in the back of an open air Toyota truck driven by Njunja James, chief rhino monitor for the Botswana Rhino Project, on our way to Wholesale Replica Bags receive a much anticipated airmail delivery.
replica handbags online At 60, Ives has the energy and the ruddy round Replica Handbags face of a mischievous schoolboy, counterbalanced somewhat by his upright ex soldier posture and a Dumbledore ish beard that hangs to his sternum. The Botswana Rhino Project that Ives oversees is a partnership between his two full time employers Replica Designer Handbags the luxury travel company Wilderness Safaris and the government of Botswana itself, which last year appointed him national rhino coordinator. It a new position, because not so long ago the country had almost no rhinos to coordinate: A 1992 survey showed that Botswana black rhinos had been wiped out. Ever since, Ives has wondered if black rhinos can be returned to Botswana, reintroduced like wolves in Yellowstone or reseeded like the prairie grasses in downtown Chicago. replica handbags online
wholesale replica designer handbags In the last decade, however, poachers supplying rhino horn to shadowy buyers in distant lands have been killing Africa rhinos at Replica Bags Wholesale an increasing and unsustainable rate, in some cases slicing off faces and leaving the animals to die. As the price for an intact horn has soared as high as $800,000, international crime syndicates have accelerated the illegal trade. If the slaughter merely continues at Handbags Replica its current pace, the wild black rhino, one of Africa signature species, will be extinct in about a decade. In response, the Botswana Rhino Project has evolved from a straightforward repatriation plan into a sophisticated joint operations mission to fight what Ives calls a genocide. wholesale replica designer handbags
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Replica Designer Handbags After three hours of jolting up and down the circuitous replica handbags china paths that pass for roads in the Okavango, we park along the edge of a sandy airstrip. Ives, who has spent years trying to convince foreign bureaucrats that Botswana is now a safe haven for scarce black rhinos, double and triple checks preparations with members of his team before slumping down in the back of the truck. like someone once said about the military, he says as some teenage boys shoo an elephant off the runway. of boredom punctuated by a few minutes of chaos. radio crackles; someone barks something in rushed Tswana. think the C 130 here, an assistant says, pointing at a black speck in the otherwise empty bleached blue sky. The dot quickly begins to grow in size until the outlines of aaa replica designer handbags an improbably large airplane certainly far too large to land on this ribbon of dirt come into view. is a nervous moment for me, guys, Ives says. are my babies on there. in defiance of the laws of physics, the gigantic bird alights softly and, with a deafening replica handbags china whoosh, stops like a balsa toy yanked by an invisible string. It vanishes briefly as its reverse thrusters kick up clouds of sand, then taxies a few hundred feet. Replica Designer Handbags
The tail pops open and out Wholesale Replica Bags jumps a squad of Botswana Defence Force soldiers in camouflage uniforms and berets, each carrying an automatic weapon. Behind them emerge three animal care specialists from Zimbabwe, a similar team from Botswana, the aaa replica designer handbags pilots, assorted people with video cameras, and Ives sleepy associate Kai Collins, who has been up for 48 hours supervising the transfer. Strapped in the cargo hold are three small, brightly colored container cars, each Replica Handbags with a somewhat dazed looking black rhinoceros.
The animals have every right to feel confused. Two days earlier they been minding their own business hundreds of miles away in Zimbabwe when a veterinarian leaned out of a helicopter and darted them with a healthy dose of M99, after which they were blindfolded, relieved of roughly half of their horns (to prevent them from injuring themselves in transit), guided into crates, loaded onto trucks, driven to the Wholesale Replica Bags airport (on this stretch mercenaries are frequently hired to protect the animals from hijackers), and hoisted onto the C 130. That just the endgame. Prior to each transfer come months of negotiations, first with the foreign owners of the animals usually Replica Bags a national park or, as in this instance, a private reserve and then with various government officials. Once inside Botswana, the animals must clear customs. wag was saying to me recently that no rhino will be moved until the weight of the paperwork exceeds the weight of the replica handbags online rhino, Ives tells me.
Wholesale Replica Bags In ordinary times this might seem like an awful lot of effort to move three animals. But as Ives points out, these rhinos represent 0.15 percent of the world members of their species. If all goes well, within a few weeks many more black rhinos will be roaming the Okavango, a green oasis encircled by the immense emptiness of the Kalahari Basin. Like any settlers, if they KnockOff Handbags like it here, they will multiply, Ives hopes. Wholesale Replica Bags
Ives works the runway like a party host, shaking hands and slapping backs, directing the members of his aerial stevedore ballet KnockOff Handbags company ( cut your bloody nuts off up there! and occasionally climbing onto the truck to peek inside a container. Sam! he reads, the name inscribed on the young male crate. to Botswana, you fine young man! rhinos are driven a short distance and released into their temporary homes, high fenced pens called bomas. When one female begins munching the leaves off a freshly cut branch of leadwood, the day operation is declared a success. Even the boys in berets breathe a sigh of relief.
high quality replica handbags tell you up front: My mind works in strange ways, Ives warned me moments after we first met. love rhinos. Anthony Paul Ives and his native land have grown up together. He recalls his father helping to arrange of liters of free beer for the public celebrations in Francistown on the day the British protectorate of Bechuanaland gained its independence, in 1966. Around that time, during one of the elder Ives Saturday night outdoor movie screenings kids on blankets, a 16 millimeter projector aimed at a whitewashed concrete wall the program began with the short documentary Operation Noah, about an improvised wildlife rescue mission. The Rhodesian government had dammed the roaring Zambezi River, which over the next few years slowly created Lake Kariba, the world largest man made lake. As the water rose, thousands of exotic creatures took refuge on shrinking parcels of land and were saved by a plucky Rhodesian game warden and his sparsely equipped crew. guys captured one rhino on an island and tied it down and rescued it, Ives says, describing a scene he been replaying in his head for nearly 50 years. just captured my imagination completely. the size of Texas, the newly christened Botswana contained only 600,000 people, a lot of sand, and animals (though by that time only a tiny remnant of rhinos), and not many job prospects for a restless young man carrying around what Ives calls great deal of aggression. His interests leaned toward cricket, hunting, drinking beer, and getting into fights. After high school Ives departed for neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and interviewed with its Department of Wildlife and National Parks. He was placed on a waiting list. had nowhere to go, he says, I joined the British South African Police, an unofficial branch of the Rhodesian military, in which he received six months of counterinsurgency training. high quality replica handbags
RELATED: The Last Stand in Africa Most Dangerous Park
purse replica handbags The 1970s was a period of brutal civil war in Rhodesia. Guerilla groups, some allied with rebels in neighboring countries, were attempting to overthrow the white minority run government. Ives had learned to track animals as a boy just the sort of thing kids did for fun growing up in Botswana, whose Kalahari Bushmen are renowned for their tracking skills. soon realized that I was an above average Replica Bags Wholesale tracker, and my services wholesale replica designer handbags were often called on to follow up tracks of the enemy along the Mozambique border, where insurgents were infiltrating Rhodesia. When a wildlife job finally opened up, Ives was posted to Chizarira National Park, a remote game reserve near the border with Zambia. It was here, while on foot patrol looking for poachers, that he encountered his first black rhino in the wild, a exciting Wholesale Replica Bags moment that he says itself in his 22 year old mind. purse replica handbags
Replica Bags (Ives has rescued dozens of black rhinos including these two. Photograph by Jonathan Torgovnik) Replica Bags
Fake Handbags Ives essentially worked two jobs one day he might find himself studying plants; the next he be tracking rebel groups through the highlands. Chizarira was in the thick of the action. camp was like a prison guarded by machine gun nests, Ives says. saw a bit of combat, people replica handbags china dying and that. He is garrulous by nature and can deliver a 45 minute lecture on the unique shape of Botswana sand grains, but his war experiences are one topic he doesn like to discuss. Eventually the war got so hot that nature work became almost impossible. you went out to look for rhinos or count elephants, you get your ass shot off, he says. Fake Handbags
Ives left the military, and after briefly guiding safari tours in South Africa, he returned home to Botswana in the early 1980s. He found work in the Okavango, where he cataloged the local flora for pleasure KnockOff Handbags and led occasional trips to earn money. Things were a little looser in those days: An adventurous soul could spend 10 days floating the delta alone north to south in a mokoro, a pole driven dugout canoe, or slip quietly across the https://www.ermobags.com Namibian border to have a throbbing tooth pulled at an army base. Tribal people told him stories of another solitary, hot blooded creature KnockOff Handbags that had once roamed the area. heard Replica Bags that there had been many rhinos here in the past but that they had been wiped out, Ives said. During this footloose period, he pondered what to do with his life and decided to Replica Handbags channel his inborn vigor toward improving the world. Around this time he gave up hunting.
Designer Fake Bags Even today the Okavango seems virtually untouched replica bags by the modern world. is a bloody remote place, replica handbags china Ives tells me during a wildlife spotting drive. hundred miles from the nearest factory. There are only a few of these left on Earth. Along with Botswana low population density, the country focus on attracting small numbers of guests willing to pay top dollar for an immersive, eco friendly experience has allowed it to preserve the integrity of places like the Okavango while providing thousands of jobs. Tourism is now the country second biggest business, after its well respected diamond mining industry. Last year unesco named the Okavango Delta a World Heritage Site. Designer Fake Bags
Ives met his wife when she was working at a photography camp in the delta. They married in 1985, bought a home, and settled down to raise two children. He joined Wilderness Safaris in 1992. As environmental manager, he is responsible for making sure the company luxury eco lodges are in compliance with Botswana strict conservation policies. The longer Ives has worked in the Okavango, the more impressed he has become with the way its various plant and animal species work together almost as single living organism on a macro scale. was only one flaw in this otherwise perfect Eden, he says. rhinos. 30,000 years ago, a Paleolithic graffiti artist in the Chauvet Cave in southern France grabbed a piece of charcoal and sketched one of the world oldest known artworks: two tank like animals using their enormous horns to attack each other. Humans have always looked at the rhino armor like hide and scimitar nose and assumed violence was the animal top priority. Hippos may kill many more humans each year than rhinos do (the latter are mostly a danger to one another), but their rounded bodies inspire excellent plush toys. In Babar books, the elephants are wise and wear spats, while the rhinos are hotheaded.
Handbags Replica There are two species of rhinos in Africa, black and white, and they look pretty similar. The far more common white rhinos at 20,000 animals, they outnumber blacks roughly five to one are slightly larger and eat mostly grasses. Black rhinos are browsers; the pointed, prehensile upper lip they use to feed on leaves and twigs is a primary difference between the two. Black rhinos in particular have a reputation as recluses who will charge with intent to kill any human who dares to come near essentially pachyderm Unabombers. This aggressiveness, paired with the taxidermic allure of their facial trophies, has long made them prime targets for sportsmen. Today, Ernest Hemingway 1930s journal Green Hills of Africa reads like a whose is bigger contest cheap replica handbags in which KnockOff Handbags he envies the size of the black rhino horns bagged by a fellow hunter. Handbags Replica
ALSO: Africa Newest (Four Legged) Poaching Police
replica Purse In part because they inhabit scrubland not coveted by farmers, black rhinos survived at greater numbers than other species until around 1970, when about 65,000 remained in the African wild. But the revolutions of the 1970s, coupled with the departure of British replica Purse colonial law enforcement and conservation agencies, left a vacuum in anti poaching efforts. A surge in demand from suddenly oil wealthy Yemen, where horns were used in crafting traditional ceremonial daggers, helped cut that number to 3,610 by 1993. After a fatwa was issued against the use of rhino horn, conservation efforts slowly began to reverse that trend. When Ives arranged a soft launch of the Botswana Rhino Project in 2001 by trucking in four white rhinos, rhinos were no more endangered than many species in Africa. replica Purse
Designer Replica Bags Then suddenly, less than a decade ago, the numbers of white and black rhinos poached in South Africa home to the majority of all surviving wild rhinos began to climb precipitously. In 2007, 13 rhinos were poached there. The following year, 83 were. Year by year the numbers soared: 122, 333, 448, 668, 1,014. Last year 1,215 rhinos were killed. Early reports for 2015 indicate at least four killings per day, an increase of nearly 20 percent. Designer Replica Bags
Replica Bags Wholesale are maybe 4,000 black rhinos left on Earth, Ives tells me as we drive through the 1,900 square mile Moremi Game Reserve, a wildlife sanctum sanctorum within the Okavango, searching for signs of any of the eight black rhinos Replica Bags Wholesale they released in the area since last year. He stops the vehicle and leans out the side. these parallel marks? A black rhino has come through here and defecated. It urinated. It scratched its back legs. He sounds as if he is reading the r of a promising job candidate. Replica Bags Wholesale
aaa replica designer handbags (A container holding a black rhino being unloaded from a C 130 cargo plane. Photograph by Jonathan Torgovnik) aaa replica designer handbags
replica handbags china The increased demand for horn is coming from the Far East. In China, rhino horn has for centuries been used in traditional medicine to reduce fevers and purify the blood. Multiple studies have shown that rhino horn is composed primarily of keratin the same protein in human fingernails and hair and has no medicinal value. Vietnam seems to be the primary driver of replica handbags china the current poaching onslaught. (Rhino horn is illegal in both countries.) The truth may be beside the point by now, since demand has driven the price to $65,000 a Wholesale Replica Bags kilo, more than double that of cocaine. replica handbags china
Fake Designer Bags Efforts to rein in horn trafficking have concentrated on the Replica Bags supply side, but the picture there is just as murky. After decades of civil war, guns are not especially hard to come by in sub Saharan Africa. Angola, just to the northwest, is awash in Kalashnikovs. Mozambique, a very poor nation that features an AK 47 on its national flag, shares a 230 mile long open border with South Africa enormous Kruger National Park, home to the world largest population of wild rhinos. Penalties for poaching in Mozambique are almost nonexistent; as recently as last year, stealing a neighbor chicken was considered a more grave offense than killing a rhino. John Sellar, an organized crime consultant and former chief of enforcement to the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, who has worked with both Botswana and South Africa, says that at least 12 gangs of poachers are operating in Kruger on cheap replica handbags any given day. Ives believes the number might be closer to 20. Fake Designer Bags
What makes the new wave of poachers doubly effective and terrifying is their link to international crime syndicates. look at organized crime historically, Sellar says, it Al Capone or the Yakuza or the triads, they all get involved because there lots of what they consider easy money to be made. rhino project has the enthusiastic support of Botswana president, Ian Khama, a Sandhurst trained military pilot and conservationist who has placed the defense forces Replica Bags Wholesale in charge of anti poaching efforts. This level of commitment to wildlife is far from universal in Africa; Zimbabwe president, Robert Mugabe, recently served cheap replica handbags a baby elephant to guests at his 91st birthday party. President Khama brother Tshekedi is minister of environment and tourism; Ives reports to him in his role as national rhino coordinator. Botswana strict anti poaching laws now allow the use of lethal force when armed perpetrators are wholesale replica designer handbags encountered. This spring, three Namibian elephant poachers carrying a load of tusks were shot dead after opening fire on a patrol.
Replica Handbags I ask Ives if he thinks Botswana tough reputation and the Okavango isolation, combined with a national educational initiative to demonstrate wildlife importance to the economy, could be enough to dissuade poachers. be naive to think they won come, he says. Botswana may be Africa least corrupt country, but a Kalahari Bushman offered several years worth of Replica Bags Wholesale income for a single rhino horn is going to be tempted. Replica Handbags
cheap replica handbags think it is fair to pose the question, Has Botswana been tested yet? says Sellar. don think it has. When I hear about the purse replica handbags number of rhinos that are being relocated, the thought has crossed through my mind, are you folks making a rope for your own neck here? pagebreak > cheap replica handbags.