There is some excellent news from Lusaka! The Zambian government has announced the deployment of drones in the country’s national parks and other protected areas to increase general surveillance and curb poaching. Poaching is rampant in Zambia and a three-year study has revealed a drop of about 30 percent in the populations of savannah wildlife, mainly due to poaching, and it’s not just the key species like elephants, rhinos, lions and wild dogs that are affected, but all wildlife species. Poaching is not just of those key species either, but in parts of Zambia it is also for bush meat.*
And here’s an interesting twist on drones in wildlife conservation in Gabon in West Africa. Local conservationists and researchers from Duke University in England have been deploying drones in the Wonga Wongue National Park to monitor elephants and have come up with a remarkable observation. Some of the park’s elephants are very anti-drone, throwing soil at them when they come too close.
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Further research showed that the anti-drone elephants had also had contact with beehives used to keep them out of agricultural land, a common policy used in both Africa and Asia, wherever elephants are a problem. The conservationists put two and two together and came up with this astonishing idea, the drones sometimes sound like a swarm of bees, hence the hostile reaction by the elephants. It will be interesting to see if the Zambians come across something like this.*
The creative use of drones in wildlife conservation is to be welcomed, given the many negative aspects of them.
Now, if you enjoy your wine and consider yourself a bit of a fundi on oenology, this bit of news is for you. There are now a number of gadgets available to enhance your next wine experience. There is a thermometer than fits around the bottle in the refrigerator that tell you when the wine is at a perfect temperature – that’s about R130; then there is an inflatable balloon that allows you to seal a bottle of wine if you want to save the rest for another day – that’s about R340; then a device that instantly ‘breathes’ a bottle of wine so that you don’t have to bother with decanting it – about R1000; then a two-bottle chiller, just plug it into the wall and it will cool your wine from anywhere from 19° to 5° (I hope that’s Centigrade) – that would cost about R1 300; and finally, a device that allows you to extract a glass of wine from a bottle without moving the cork – don’t ask, I don’t know, just stand by with R4 500.**
I think it appropriate to note that around here a bottle of wine once opened seldom gets to live another day, a wine is considered to have been aged and breathed on the trip from the Cape to the KZN coast, and its natural home is in the ‘fridge’ whatever temperature it is (for white wines, anyway).
*Save the Elephants News Service.
**The Week: The Best of the British and Foreign News Media.
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