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When I was a young boy, I went to school, secondary school near by the gate of Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
I started to see people like tourists going in and out of that Ngorongoro Conservation Area
and I was curious what's happening there so I used to go from there and try to
get close to the gate and see what's happening. So I started learning about wildlife and
get more experience like I want to keep doing that and find out what's happening and that was the
start of me engaging myself in
my long vision focus.
My name is Robert Godson Mollel.
I'm the Director of Wild Nature Institute here in Tanzania. Right now we are collecting information
about giraffes and other ungulates in Tarangire, Manyara, and outside protected areas as well.
Ungulates are mammals with hooves.
examples: buffalo, zebras, wildebeest,
impalas, dik-diks, are small ones, and giraffes, the largest of the ungulates.
The ecosystem is really defined by these long-distance migrants the wildebeests and the zebras.
They go the farthest
between the wet and the dry season.
They disperse the farthest outside of Tarangire National Park
to the Simanjiro Plains and to the northern plains towards Lake Natron.
They are really important prey items for a whole host of scavengers and predators.
We would not have
things like lions and leopards and all the vultures and other scavengers like jackals and hyenas
They wouldn't be able to persist here without the ungulates.
There used to be, back in the sixties,
as many as a dozen different migratory routes in and out of Tarangire National Park.
But now there's only two
and both of them are threatened.
In 1988, the estimate
of the number of the eastern white bearded wildebeest
was roughly forty thousand and in 2001, the number was six thousand.
It really crashed
precipitously.
One of the biggest problems is poaching,
which is rampant right around
Mtowambu
in that corridor and there is terrible poaching of wildlife there. Robert has
discovered by talking with local people, many people there
are only buying wild game meat, poached game meat. Because it really cheap, and easy to get,
It's cheaper than buying beef or goat, so that's very troubling.
So, if the wildlife decreases, then the
tourism will decrease, and the revenues will decrease.
And those revenues go toward schools
and education and health care. It's important for the community.
I would probably say that there's not a lot of
knowledge about this corridor, or how important it is.
That's something the Wild Nature Institute
is hoping to do.
Well, luckily in our ecosystem
it's predominately Masai people. And Robert is a
great ambassador
to the Masai people, being Masai himself.
The point of involving the kids in our conservation issues
is because if you educate young guys, when they grow up they
grow up with that kind of feeling that they value those animals,
they grow up where they have conservation ideas. So, as they grow up they can change the whole community
because they have that kind of knowledge already, and it will be easy for them
because they live there. They can tell people what's happening with wildlife, and create more awareness of life with those animals, and get more protection. So, that's a good idea.