WILD 2019 ISSUE 2 LIFE Adopt today AND HELP CARE FOR OUR ANIMALS AT JERSEY ZOO Kea Badongo Wilbur Bluey Bahia Barnaby Kate Stumpy Miora Bintang Astrid Homer Who will you choose? FROM ONLY £32 A YEAR VISIT WWW.DURRELL.ORG/ADOPT YOUR GIFT WILL HELP TO CREATE A WILDER WORLD WELCOME WELCOME TO WILD LIFE It has been a wild autumn here at the Trust, We made significant progress on rewilding in and I am not just talking about the Jersey 2019. Not only were white storks successfully weather! We have rounded off our 60th released into the UK, but some of the anniversary year with many conservation released birds ‘did what comes naturally’, achievements and memorable events. by heading south on migration. Don’t worry – we’re keeping an eye on them using GPS The wildest was no doubt the invasion of trackers! Mountain chicken frogs are calling Jersey by 40 gorillas to raise funds for a new once again in their native Montserrat after gorilla house. Each was a life-sized statue their release into special areas of the forest, sporting a unique design illustrating the artist’s which have been slightly modified to reduce idea about gorillas and the environment. the impact of the deadly chytrid fungus. Strategically placed around Jersey in a DR LEE DURRELL public art trail, the statues infected the island There is much, much more in this edition HONORARY DIRECTOR with a sort of ‘gorilla madness’, with images of Wild Life, which I am sure you will going viral on social media and the ultimate enjoy. Once again, thank you all for your auction raising more than a million pounds! extraordinarily generous support. We couldn’t do it without you! Our Rewild Our World strategy was gloriously celebrated in Jersey at the Wilderness Ball where 600 guests traversed a rainforest wilderness, created by our amazing Events Team, before being entertained by Sister Sledge. Even more money was raised than at the previous blockbuster ball, and all will go to support our rewilding goals. CONTENTS 2 REWILD OUR FORESTS 6 MEETING MILO 8 HOT TUBS FOR SICK FROGS 10 AT THE ZOO It is important to us that we keep you informed about our work, and 12 IN THE WILD the difference we are making to the many species, habitats and local communities with which we work. If your household has received 16 SPECIES SPOTLIGHT – WHITE STORKS more than one copy of Wild Life and you would like to discuss your mailing preferences going 22 TECH CORNER – DRONE MONITORING forward, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of our Supporter Care team on (0)1534 860111 or 24 GONE WILD [email protected] If you’d like to hear from us more regularly you can subscribe to our 28 DODO DISPATCH email newsletter at www.durrell.org/ wildlife/social 32 BE INSPIRED Wild Life is printed on paper which is certified FSC® Mix Grade with fibre coming from responsible 34 IN NUMBERS – GO WILD GORILLAS sources and can be fully recycled. Your copy of the magazinbe is sent to you in a fully compostable wrap DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST is a Registered Charity with the Jersey Charity Commissioner, registered charity number: 1 PATRON HRH The Princess Royal FOUNDER Gerald Durrell, OBE, LHD HONORARY DIRECTOR Dr Lee Durrell, MBE, PhD DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST - UK is registered in England and Wales. A charitable company limited by guarantee. REGISTERED CHARITY NUMBER 1121989 REGISTERED COMPANY NUMBER 6448493 REGISTERED OFFICE c/o Intertrust Corporate Services (UK) Limited, 35 Great St Helen’s, London EC3A 6AP PHOTO AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS Neil Aldridge, Chloe Allen, Bam Perspectives www.bamperspectives.com, Leila Boyd, Claire Burke, Emma Caton, Matt Chung www.mattchungphoto.com, Andy Coutanche, Andy Ellis, Danny Evans, Sid Gentle Films Ltd, Givskud Zoo, Gregory Guida, Martin Harvey, Mike Hudson, Luke Jones, Tiffany Lang, Steve Longmore, Paul Marshall, Dean Maryon, James Morgan, Silvano Paiola, Jennifer Parker, Sam Rowley, Chris Scarffe, Colin Stevenson, Massimiliano Sticca, Nick Upton, Serge Wich, Mark Williams, Charlie Wylie COVER IMAGE Paul Marshall www.paulmarshall.je ISSUE 2 • 2019 WILD LIFE 1 REWILD FORESTS DR LESLEY DICKIE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER 2 WILD LIFE ISSUE 2 • 2019 At the recent Durrell London forests across our rewilding sites including Lecture, held at the Royal Madagascar, Saint Lucia, Mauritius and the UK. However, the evening focused mainly Institution, we focused on on our work in Brazil, with our local partners our work in forests around IPÊ, the Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas. Brazil is the most biodiverse country on the world. Forests are Earth’s Earth, but it has hit the headlines this year most dominant land-based with the horrific burning of the Amazon ecosystem and can hold due to an abdication of governmental responsibility for the environment. It is great significance to people. deeply worrying that such mindless They often feature in myths destruction should be allowed. Yet there is and legends, shaping how we another, little known, great tropical forest of Brazil, the Mata Atlantica, or Atlantic Forest, interpret our world and are that has suffered even greater destruction central to childhood stories over the past century. This extraordinarily such as Little Red Riding Hood. lush rainforest extends along the Atlantic coast and inland in southern Brazil and is some 60 million years old. It is home to It is not only forests but individual trees hundreds of animals and thousands of that become symbolic to us and our plants that are found nowhere else on societies. The Ashbrittle Yew, the oldest Earth, yet only 12% of its original range known tree in the UK, possibly as much persists, in some regions only 3%. as 4,000 years old, has stood sentinel Our connection to the region goes over Ashbrittle through the centuries with between the boreal and tropical forests, back many years. Durrell has a well- countless generations of Somerset children and are sometimes referred to as the ‘four- earned reputation as a world leader in the having played beneath its boughs. You season forests’. They are highly diverse care, management and conservation of may have visited the mighty ‘General with coniferous, deciduous and broadleaf callitrichids, the beautiful tiny monkeys of Sherman’, a giant redwood or sequoia, in trees and even contain temperate the Americas and none more so than the California, the largest known living single rainforests, some of which are found in the black lion tamarin. Thought to be extinct stem tree on Earth. It weighs nearly 2 million UK. The fourth type of forest that could be in the 1970s, black lion tamarins were kg, a true giant of our planet that invokes described are man-made commercial rediscovered, and Durrell became the awe and wonder. forests, these are often monocultures and first zoo outside Brazil to hold and breed Forests can be split into four types. First, have little biodiversity. this species. To this day, we continue to there is the Taiga, also known as the boreal At the Lecture, the first speaker of the be the only zoo in Europe that keeps forest, which grows in the high northern evening was Professor Miles Richardson, these rare and endangered monkeys. latitudes. They are characterised by cold from the University of Derby. He gave a Like other species in the forest, they are temperatures; think of how vast expanses fascinating insight into how connectedness severely impacted by deforestation, of frozen forests are used in films to portray to nature affects our physical and mental which is happening at an alarming rate. icy cold. However, it is tropical forests happiness, and our likelihood to carry out The disappearing forest forces animals that dominate the planet’s ecosystems behaviours, such as recycling, to help to live in small fragments of ideal habitat. and as the name suggests lie between the planet. Connectedness to nature is Here they become isolated and face an the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. something that is at the heart of Durrell’s increased risk of extinction from inbreeding, Half of all the world’s forest is tropical, strategy, and this was a thought-provoking insufficient habitat and the increased which includes both rainforest and dry introduction to the science behind it. dangers from roads, farms and predators forest. Temperate forests are sandwiched We then turned to Durrell’s work with when moving between fragments. ISSUE 2 • 2019 WILD LIFE 3 sleeping dens as the old, weathered trees. Black lion tamarins are small and vulnerable to larger predators such as tayra (a small mammal from the weasel family) and snakes. They were therefore understandably nervous about venturing too far without assurances of where they could hide and sleep. We tackled this problem by testing different designs of artificial next boxes at Jersey Zoo in our callitrichid forest where tamarins and marmosets roam free. Our own monkeys essentially chose the nest-box design they liked best for their wild cousins, demonstrating the effectiveness of applied zoo-based research. The selected nest box was placed into the wild corridor and was soon being investigated by numerous species including black lion Our partnership with IPÊ has deep roots tamarins. It’s still early days, but we and extends over 30 years. Our very first will continue to monitor as this project Brazilian trainee at the Durrell Academy progresses. was Claudia Padua, an exceptionally Our next step, together with our talented young biologist who, on his return partners at IPÊ, is to create a tree corridor home, founded IPÊ and still leads it today. to connect the Morro do Diabo State Park IPÊ has gone from strength to strength, and to isolated forest fragments to the north.