Video #12-: Meet The Locals

These are some of the people who destroyed the forest in the Nhamacoa.

As you can see, subsistence farming, the illegal chopping down of precious timber for sale in Chimoio or charcoal-making hasn’t improved their lifestyle or put much money into their pockets.

The school at Lica is awful and no one has even made an attempt to put more grass on the roof to shade the children from the sun or to protect them from rain.  Without wood to make desks and benches, the children write on their laps and sit on the few tree trunks they’ve been lucky enough to find lying around.

And as for the 65,000 U.S dollar dirt road, well, what can I say?

Despite their poverty and hardships, they still find a lot to laugh about.  Which makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how people who are living a comfortable and easy life in the West can find so much to complain about.

The tropical climate here is perfect for fruit.  Pineapples, tangerines, mangoes, bananas, avocados, paw paws, guavas, lychees, oranges and lemons all grow with abundance and without chemicals. What a pity, though, that the people haven’t got a market for their produce or a nearby fruit juice or fruit canning factory.

At the end of this film, you’ll get a surprise.  Who would have thought that filming something bad could result in something good coming out of it?    

Val. 

To Watch Video Click The You Tube Link Below-:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMxOu3rzBhE

Video#11-; The Vangas ( Bias Musicus )

Although Vangas are rare  -  according to Newman’s ‘Birds of Southern Africa’ - we’re lucky enough to have a resident pair and see and hear them around our house almost every day.

This is probably because years ago a Frelimo co-operative who took over the old Magalhaes sawmill planted several eucalyptus trees and the taller the trees, the more the Vangas like them.  They seem to be the only birds we have that make their nests in these trees.

This, of course, makes them difficult to film and is a great strain on our neck muscles!

Since we’ve been watching the Vangas, we’ve noticed that they’ve only ever produced female offspring.  After the eggs have hatched (usually one egg, occasionally two) they fly around for a while with the little females and then they all disappear for a few weeks.  When they return, they return without their offspring and leave us wondering if they had taken them to Gorongosa to pair off with other Vangas there.

Although quite a small bird, the male Vanga can be very aggressive.  Once, when he felt threatened by a young hawk sitting on a nearby branch, he flew towards it with such terrific speed that the hawk actually fell off the branch with surprise.

This year in October, the Vangas attacked an African Emerald Cuckoo (Chrysococcyx caprius) that was visiting us for the summer.  As our pair of Forest weavers had also attacked the Cuckoo, it made a hasty departure and we haven’t seen it since.

We’ve never seen this particular Cuckoo before and at first O’D thought it was a Green-headed Oriole.  Wow!  How excited we were!  This Oriole is really, really rare.

Alas, closer scrutiny of the film in our camera showed us how wrong we were.

But, who knows?  Perhaps one day a Green-headed Oriole may well fly in to take advantage of the safety of our little forest …

Val.

To Watch Video Click the You Tube Link Below-:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFJiGCVn09M

Video#10-: A Visit To Mr Alberto

O’D and I have been growing indigenous trees for about eleven years now and have a project in mind of reforesting the Nhamacoa.

We recently formed a conservation association and one of our aims is to pay the local people to GROW indigenous trees instead of chopping them down and turning them into charcoal for money.

One of the people interested in growing indigenous trees (for money, of course) is Mr. Alberto, the local Frelimo Secretary and we spent a pleasant few hours visiting his home.  It was winter at the time and as the trees aren’t evergreen, the scenery was dry and rather bleak.

Some years back, Mr. Alberto had a rather scary experience with a woman called Nora Swete.  You’ll see her in our film about the local people.  She’s supposed to be possessed by a demon and has burnt down seven churches, as well as attacking our Gaz lorry with an enxada (hoe) and making a big hole in the windscreen. 

Well, anyway, apart from scaring the hell out of Sabao, our driver, Nora Swete also got hold of Mr. Alberto and, forcing him to kneel down in front of her, covered him from head to toe with salt in order to ‘purify’ him.  He ended up looking just like Lot’s wife, the one who turned into a pillar of salt in the Bible!  

Now back to forests.  In Mozambique, rural people only use firewood to cook their food.  They make charcoal to sell to people living in the towns and to supplement their incomes.  As there are very few trees left here in Manica Province, disaster appears to loom just around the corner.     

Although Mozambique has the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric dam on the Zambezi River, the majority of people do not and never will have electricity to cook their food or light up their homes at night.

Obviously, some other form of energy is urgently needed.  Unfortunately, our scientists are too busy writing books about why they think God doesn’t exist instead of trying to find a solution to what is going to be a very serious problem.

Val.

To Watch Video Click the You Tube Link Below-:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sQ0Eas8eIQ

Video#9-:The Queimadas

We have just come through that horrible and terrible time that the Mozambicans call the ‘Queimadas’ or the ‘Burnings’.

This is the time when the Mozambicans gleefully set fire to the entire countryside and burn everything to a crisp, and this often includes their fellow humans. Two years ago, they burnt fifty people to death. Young children were among the dead.

As these burnings take place at the end of winter and coincide with the breeding season, many young animals and birds too young to flee or fly are incinerated, leading to more extinction.

The excuse used for these burnings is that the fields are being cleared for planting. This, however, is not altogether true. Uncultivated areas of trees, grass and bush are often set alight in order to flush out animals and then to kill them with machetes or bows and arrows.

For the animals that do manage to survive, it’s a difficult time. Dislocated by the fires, they are also without food, as grass, leaves and seeds have all gone up in smoke.

The cost to the country must be enormous. In the past, I have seen several farm barns burnt down during the Queimadas, as well as a field of grazing for a herd of cattle. One of the houses we were renovating lost its roof during one of these fires and several of our workers’ huts were burnt down, along with their meagre possessions of sleeping mats, blankets, clothes and identity documents.

People involved in tourism lose their animals and the thick pall of smoke that hangs over us for weeks must surely be much more of a threat of lung cancer than smoking cigarettes.

There is never compensation for these losses.

This year, people set fire to our little forest three times.

One of the fires along our eastern boundary was particularly dangerous despite our firebreaks and it took Douglas and our workers over three hours to put out, using water from a little stream. If the stream had been dry, our trees would have turned into an inferno and during the ensuing chaos, our animals would have fled straight into the waiting machetes of the hunters.

As far as I’m concerned, the Queimadas are an abomination and should be regarded as a crime against nature.

Val.

To Watch Video; Please the click the You Tube Link Below-:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2MY6LtKTM 

Video#8-:The Death Of A Forest – Mozambique

I found these words on the back of Pedro Capela’s book of poetry and wildlife flowers of Mozambique:

“Unrealistic, beautiful, useless, deep, a perfect organised suicide.”

During the 15 years O’D and I have spent in the forest of the Nhamacoa, we have seen these words played out before our eyes

The destruction of the beautiful indigenous forest of Mozambique is a form of organised suicide

the Mozambicans rush like lemmings to their destruction, refusing to be pulled back from the abyss.

Living only for the day and not caring about the future; they appear blind to the fact that forest resources are finite and if they don’t look after it, their cooking pots are going to remain cold.

You can reforest the vast tracks of emptiness but while it takes 5 minutes to cut down a tree, it takes between 40 – 60 years to grow an indigenous forest.

In the meantime, the habitat is gone, the animals become extinct, the fauna and flora die.

Exotic or plantation timber such as quick growing eucalypt or pine isn’t the answer as these so not produce the same conditions for the original flora and fauna that has been displaced by the destruction of the original forest.

To Watch Video click You Tube Link Below-:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=d74goTrEvyE

  VAL

Video#7-:Help! We Have An Explosion Of Monkeys!

With the destruction of most of the forest in the Nhamacoa, the trees around us now teem with hundreds of monkeys.

We have a group of about 30 Samangos who live near our dam. They’re no trouble at all as they keep to the treetops and rarely come to the ground.

The Vervets, however, appear to be the juvenile delinquents of the monkey family and unfortunately cause a lot of damage. They’re very wasteful and last year plundered our mango crop until it was completely destroyed by taking a bite or two out of the fruit and then throwing it down uneaten onto the ground in order to make way for another.

They pillage our vegetable garden by pulling out all the vegetables, not to eat but merely out of curiosity and often make raids on our garden, veranda, and laundry room. Douglas has even found them in our outside kitchen and we have had to waive our own rules by allowing him to aim his catapult at their powder blue bums to warn them off!

Trapped in our small space with nowhere to go, the Vervet population has exploded and as these animals live to about 24 years of age, the prospects for the future are alarming.

Various solutions have been put forward to deal with our Vervet problem.

Idalina Fiosse Gavumende, our local Chefe do Posto, has suggested to the population that she bring in hunters to kill all the monkeys.

.

I can think of nothing more appalling. First, the population destroys the animals’ habitat and then a government official wants to shoot and kill them!

Deportation to a game park is obviously the answer but how do we do this without disturbing all the other animals in our little forest? And where do we go for sensible

help? This needs quite a lot of thought.

The poor baboons are now trapped in some panga panga trees, in an area the local people use as a cemetery. Their future is also uncertain. A couple of months ago Idalina was at it again. Did the local population want her to bring in hunters to kill all the baboons?

Val. 

To watch Video Please Click You Tube Link Below-:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIqEqoWFTc

Video#6-; The Making Of A Dam

For years O’D has wanted to turn a deep gully in our little forest into a small dam but we have never had the money to do this.

Then one day, Albertino and Amaro Ferreira who own a brick-making factory called Ceramica de Vila Pery told O’D they wanted to buy our small mountain of sawdust.  In exchange for the sawdust, they agreed to put Ceramica’s ancient little Massey Ferguson bulldozer (aged about 40 years old) to work and by the time the rains arrived, the dam was ready.

Our dog, Miss Bandit, enjoyed helping out too!

Oh, by the way, Vila Pery is the old Portuguese name for Chimoio during Colonial days.

To watch Video; Click You Tube Link Below 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PfE60SSyKI