SUNDAY is not only South Africa’s national Heritage Day, a good day for a braai, but it is also World Rivers Day, a good day for reflecting on some of the world’s river systems.
The Tsavo West National Park was once famous for its man-eating lions, now it’s in the news for its disappearing rivers. It’s reported that relentless drought has left a landscape of bleached savannah and disappearing rivers.
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The park was once traversed by sundry rivers and streams, but most of these have now dried up, leaving the wildlife to gather around the few remaining waterholes. A local Kenyan farmer from outside the park has been carting water to one of these gathering places for months, but he is now short on funds and needs help.
Conservationists have blamed increased human activity around the park, including farming, for pressure on the river system and they say that global warming has also played a hand in the overall drought situation.
In Canada’s Yukon province a major river, the Slims, has quite simply disappeared. The river, which has carried water northwards for hundreds of years, disappeared over a four-day period, closely watched by a team of scientists.
The reason for the Slims’ disappearance is the retreat of the huge Kaskawulsh Glacier because of rising sea temperatures caused by global warming.
The river’s original course was moved and it was broken up into many much smaller rivers by glacial action, meaning that the destination of the waters of the glacier have been redirected thousands of kilometres from the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Alaska. This leaves a geographical gap big enough to mean the redrawing of maps of the Yukon.
But some better news. A biologist attached to the University of Exeter in the English county of Devon says beavers are having a very positive effect on the local environment in which they have been reintroduced.
Professor Richard Brazier says that a pair of beavers reintroduced into a wetland and river system near the town of Okehampton, have shown that muddy and polluted water coming in one end of the wetland is three times cleaner when it leaves at the other end.
He says the muddy water is the result of heavy rains and the pollution largely due to agricultural fertilisers, but the system of dams built by the beavers gradually cleans up the water and is being very beneficial to the local environment, helping to prevent floods and soil erosion. Professor Brazier is recommending a general re-introduction of beavers in England.
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Some of my most informative years were spent growing up on my parents’ farm near Okehampton and I can vouch for those heavy rains, in fact locally the town was referred to as Soakhampton.
I doubt that much in the way of fertilisers found their way into our rivers in those days, farming was a very different business back then, but I rather think my parents would have welcomed beavers (we had two rivers on the farm). In fact it was on the farm that I first developed my love of nature and wildlife, they were happy days.
Sources: BBC News and the Internet.
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