Zimbabwe’s first global biodiversity prize
The Save Valley Conservancy joins the Amazon and the Serengeti on the list of places the planet cannot lose by BERNARD CHIKETO ZIMBABWE has its first globally recognised Key Biodiversity Area.
Category: Wildlife & Conservation
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What the Balanga already knew
by BERNARD CHIKETO IN THE forests of eastern Congo lives a monkey with black fur, a black face and pinkish-orange lips. Locals call it Likweli.
A Feathered Fiasco
by STAFF WRITER THE VICTORIA Falls Anti Poaching Unit (VFAPU) has arrested a suspect for allegedly slaughtering and selling guinea fowl on a commercial scale, bringing a two-week surveillance operation to a close.
The tree, the snake, and the women who hold the land together
by BERNARD CHIKETO A COMPLETELY harmless Spotted Bush Snake hung over a pack of nervous journalists huddling in the cool shed of a giant baobab. It warmed itself in perfect camouflage against the grey, leafless bark, oblivious to the muffled murmur below—a unified verdict, delivered by phobia, that all snakes are dangerous.
The women saving Nenhohwe
In rural Zimbabwe, it is women who are holding the land—and the dead—together by NORMA TSOPO ON A scantly vegetated plain in Chimanimani district, Queen Chimwoyo gestures at terraces of stone, neatly packed behind woven wire. These are gabions, the humble engineering of soil conservation.
A traffic in keratin
Rhino horn is still flowing from Africa to China—carved into bracelets, not just medicine by NORMA TSOPO AT THE turn of the 20th century, an estimated 500,000 rhinos roamed the wild. Today, fewer than 27,000 remain, and a rhino is killed every 15 hours.
A Bird’s Unlikely British Holiday
by NORMA TSOPO BIRDS can drive holidays. And commerce. Wales is experiencing a sudden wave of travelers because of just one bird – a bow famous grey-blue heron from the tropics.
How Zimbabwe’s MPs lost their swamp
by BERNARD CHIKETO FROM time immemorial, the Monavale Vlei has done exactly what a healthy wetland ought to do. It has sponged up seasonal rains, filtered pollutants, recharged aquifers and released clean water into the Marimba River system feeding Lake Chivero, Harare’s main reservoir.
UNESCO adds 14 new biosphere reserves
by STAFF WRITER FROM the quartzite peaks of Mount Binga to the Rusitu river valley far below, this corner of eastern Zimbabwe has long been a laboratory in the hardest of sciences: survival.
A hidden ark
by STAFF WRITER ON THE Lisima plateau, a vast highland in eastern Angola that feeds four of southern Africa’s great river systems, spiders glow blue, crickets wear armour and elephants linger in the shadows, long since forgotten by science.