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Visiting St Lucia

By Elizabeth Moore
National Marine Sanctuary policy advisor

Cape Vidal
Cape Vidal, part of the St Lucia Wetlands Reserve.
April 25—Today the delegation conducted a site visit to the St Lucia Wetlands Park, a World Heritage Site and one of the premier parks under the management of our KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife hosts. The park comes closest to resembling true ecosystem management as I have ever seen in a single protected area: terrestrial, wetland, estuarine, and marine habitats are all combined, as if a national park and national marine sanctuary were adjacent to each other and managed by the same agency. (While the Channel Islands, Florida Keys, and Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuaries are all adjacent to national parks, they’re managed by different agencies). St. Lucia Wetlands Park enjoys numerous protections for all the portions of the park, including “marine sanctuaries,” which here mean that absolutely nothing can be removed from those areas. Unlike many shore areas in the U.S., there are few major access points to the beach, allowing the managers to have a good idea of the level and types of use occurring on the beach and adjacent waters.

We have been studying this park and its management plan as we worked on the draft management plan for Aliwal Shoal, but to see it in person at Cape Vidal simply takes our breath away. It is sea poetry written in endless pristine shores; soaring dunes; clear, warm Indian Ocean waters. For those of us in love with the ocean all our lives, for whom the ocean is a hunger, a passion, a spiritual bond, Cape Vidal is the closest to a heaven on earth we are ever likely to find.

April 26, 27 and 28—On Friday, we make the long trip to the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve, the largest game reserve in the province and one that also falls under the jurisdiction of our hosts. We pass through what looks to be mainly farm country: sugar cane and eucalyptus plantations near St. Lucia. Small Zulu family or village plots appear as we turn inland toward the Game Reserve. We also see small herds of cattle and goats grazing beside the road or being driven to small country markets. The sense of space is similar to what you might feel out west in the U.S., but the sights are purely African: villages of rondevals; craft stands beside the road featuring beading, baskets, wood carvings, and other crafts by local Zulu artisans; large horned cows meandering in the highway; small Zulu boys driving herds of goats.

The Hluhluwe-Umfolozi
Landscape at the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve.
We will spend the first three days of next week finishing up the draft management plan for Aliwal Shoal before returning to Durban for the closing workshops of this expedition; it is a tall task—we left St Lucia with a very rough draft and want to leave something as complete and useful as possible, but really only have four more days to do it. For a program such as ours that generally takes years to produce a management plan for one of our sanctuaries, having to do one in days is daunting. Part of the delegation spends a portion of the weekend editing and reorganizing the document in preparation for our work on Monday. Bob Currul, from Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, writes up an enforcement piece (it appears below). I take the time to update these reports.

But on Saturday and Sunday, we take some time to revel in wildlife encounters with animals most of us have never seen in the wild before. By the weekend’s end we will have seen countless bird species, including the yellow-billed stork, hoophoo, purple-crested lhurie, and crested guinea fowl, four different kinds of antelope (impala, nyala, kudu, and waterbuck), buffalo, wildebeest, warthog, giraffe, rhino, baboon, and vervet monkey. As a bonus, we came to a river and find a herd of over thirty elephants cooling themselves in the water and rolling in the mud. We stay and watch them for quite a while, and find it really is like a large human family: stern father, rambunctious teenagers, doting mums, and playful babies. We are all hard-pressed to decide which animals are our favorites: the homely but endearing warthogs, surprisingly serene white rhinos, giraffes with their huge brown eyes, the delicate antelopes, or the elephants. My vote goes to the elephants.


Sunrise
Sunrise at the Game reserve.




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