At the turn of this century, seeing a wild jaguar was exceptionally difficult. People driving through the Jaguar Ecological Reserve in the Pantanal in Brazil would very occasionally get a glimpse of one crossing the road, but photographing them in the wild was considered almost impossible. The same was true for other large iconic cat species including snow leopards and puma, but just 20 years later all three species can be easily seen in a few days, in the right areas.
Visitors to the Pantanal can now see multiple jaguars in just one day, and behaviors previously seldom witnessed or photographed, like hunting and mating, or mothers interacting with their cubs, are now regularly recorded. And excellent puma sightings are practically guaranteed in Chile, while snow leopards – once named the ‘grey ghost’ – are regularly seen in various locations in the Indian Himalayas, Mongolia and China. What changed?
The answer is tourism.
Wildlife-based tourism has long been an important income earner for many governments: think of Africa’s safari industry centered around viewing iconic large mammals or visitors to Borneo seeking mammals including orangutans, while in Madagascar, lemur watching is a vital part of the poor country’s tourism industry. But, today, many other places – and mammals – are starting to get in on the act.
Consider the big cats. With growing numbers of people willing to spend thousands of dollars to see not just lions and tigers, but pumas, jaguars and snow leopards, cottage industries have sprung up based on local guides who have figured out where – and how – to look for these species. The resulting positive feedback loop has seen more people come to look for the animals, which in turn causes the cats to be less fearful around people and therefore easier to see.
Significantly, as revenues earned by local businesses, land-owners and local governments increase, so have the incentives to protect the wildlife. While jaguars and pumas were often shot on sight by ranchers eager to protect their livestock, in tourist areas this persecution has diminished or even disappeared due to a combination of financial incentives, as well as both legal and social pressure on both landowners and communities. Cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Pantanal and former sheep herders around Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park now offer cat-watching excursions as important income earners. Quite simply, the animals are now worth much more alive than dead.
It comes as little surprise that people will pay to see big cats, but will they pay to see smaller, less well-known mammal species? Yes, it turns out. Although there will likely always be some relationship between the charisma of an animal and the lengths people will go to see it, the list of ‘desirable mammals’ is surprisingly large.
Consider the western long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus bruijnii). An obscure, egg-laying mammal that is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN Red List, it had not been recorded by scientists since the 1980s: its popularity as a source of bushmeat had taken it to the edge of extinction.
Mammalogists often use ear tags to identify individuals in their research. But Echidnas do not have external ears to attach a tag. Opiang used color-coded plastic tubing, glued to spines to identify individuals (visible on the right forelimb). Quiet, rare, nocturnal, hard-to-tag and found in remotest parts of New Guinea, field study of echidnas presents tremendous challenges. Photo by Muse Opiang
But in June 2023, we joined a group of mammal watchers led by Carlos Bocos, a wildlife guide with significant experience in West Papua, looking for the species on the Vogelkop Peninsula. Villagers from a small settlement of Klalik reported seeing echidnas from time to time and hosted us as their first ever foreign visitors.
Within just four hours of entering the forest, they had found us the astonishing looking echidna. Thanks to the power of social media and a report posted on our site, mammalwatching.com, the news spread. One year later, Klalik village had received well over 100 echidna tourists, with most having a successful sighting!
The community gets paid a significant fee per client for hosting and guiding them, and has used some of the money to build tourist accommodations, set up a small chicken farm, and now has plans to build a fish farm. But even more critically, they have decided to ban snares on the community land, to avoid anyone catching an echidna.
Within the space of a year, the echidnas have gone from being a ‘dish of the day’ to an important income earner for the community. If you visit Klalik, like the German Ambassador to Indonesia did recently, you can even buy an echidna-branded T-shirt. Echidnas are big business.
Germany’s ambassador to Indonesia (third from left) made the trek to West Papua to see a western long-beaked echidna and bought the tee shirt. Image via mammalwatching.com.
Could this model extend to even smaller species, perhaps even a rodent? The answer is yes – at least for the right type of rodent, such as the crested rat (Lophiomys imhausi), a large, multi-colored, striking and adorable rat that has the distinction of anointing its fur with poison from a tree’s bark to protect itself from predators. Somewhat improbably, a recent sighting at a lodge on the foothills of Mt. Kenya — again promoted online — has resulted in a small but steady stream of visitors. The lodge now has an employee whose job description includes monitoring the rats and showing them to guests.
A major impetus behind this surge in interest for finding rare and charismatic mammal species is the ready availability of information. Before the internet era, information on where and how to find mammals was difficult to come by.
Now, it is easily accessible. Trip reports on dedicated websites like ours provide information on where to find many of the world’s mammals. A patchwork of areas across the world are now firmly on the mammal-watching circuit, and a growing number of ecotourism operators run mammal-watching trips to them.
Traditionally, most wildlife watching has been centered around government protected areas such as national parks. But increasingly – and importantly – benefits are now also being captured by communities or private landowners. This trend is driven partly by tourists looking to escape the more crowded protected areas, but is also a feature of the growing interest in seeing a wider selection of mammals: areas such as Marrick Farm in South Africa for aardvarks and aardwolves, Villavicencio in Colombia for ornate titi monkeys and Brumback’s night monkeys, or Parque Tepuheuico and Monito del Monte for Darwin’s fox in Chile, have all capitalized on this interest in seeing diverse mammals.
They have focused entirely on tourism for revenue, following the example of local farmers in parts of Ecuador who have found setting aside their land for birdwatching to be more profitable than farming. Others, such as Jaguarland in Bolivia and Hato La Aurora in Colombia combine working soy farms and cattle ranches respectively with jaguar tourism.
In these cases, much of the tourism revenue goes to the local community or landowner. This approach does not require the establishment of large new parks or protected areas. Rather, it encourages a patchwork of small areas that can provide protection for wild mammals, even within areas of intense human utilization, which is important when there are over 6,500 mammal species in diverse habitats across the world.
Even small amounts of income can be welcome in cash-poor rural areas, which typically have few other avenues for wealth generation, particularly if it does not damage their main livelihoods. As primatologist and CEO of Re:Wild, Russell Mittermeier has pointed out, sometimes communities don’t require large numbers of visitors to be inspired to protect wildlife: the pride felt by communities for having a species that is only found on their land may be enough for them to protect it.
Setting up a new national park is a major endeavor, whereas it can often be quite simple for a village or private landowner to set aside a small patch of land to protect a distinct animal. Can such informal reserves actually make an appreciable difference to a species’ survival? Or might tourism simply habituate animals and make them easier to see, rather than more numerous?
Accurate data can be hard to come by, though there are increasing examples where communities play a significant role in protecting mammal species. The white-thighed colobus, for instance, is a critically endangered monkey of West Africa. In 2007 the total known population was estimated at 850-1,150 individuals. Of those, 365 (or roughly 30-40% of the known animals) lived in Ghana’s Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary. This sanctuary – originally established for religious reasons – comprises a small, 190-hectare forest close to the two villages of Boabeng and Fiema. It later expanded into an active ecotourism venture involving nine different communities.
Since 2007, the number of colobus has increased to 580 individuals. Similarly, two of the largest and best protected populations of the endangered ring-tailed lemur in Madagascar occur on community or private land. The Anja Community Reserve, which is comprised of two villages and receives approximately 12,000 visitors each year, has about 210 animals. The Berenty Private Reserve has approximately 280 animals. Only one other protected area (the Beza Mahafaly Reserve) has a population of over 200 individuals. This shows that even small, local level protection can have a species-protecting conservation impact.
We recognize of course that wildlife tourism is no panacea. In addition to benefits, it can also bring social and environmental harm, and much depends on how it is conducted. Yet with habitat loss and human consumption leading to ever increasing numbers of threatened mammal species, even marginal gains made through tourism may prove an important part of the conservation toolbox for the protection of rare species.
This article by Charles Foley and Jon Hall was first published by Mongabay.com on 31 October 2024. Lead Image: Because it’s quiet, rare, and nocturnal, seeing a western long-beaked echidna was tremendously challenging until recently. Photo courtesy of Muse Opiang.
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