Poaching

The Seychelles is no different than most places around the world wildlife wise; it’s knackered; basically where there’s people there’s no wildlife, similar sad familiar story we know so well from the UK. The reason it’s gone of course is us, with our rats, cats, chemicals and chainsaws, again just like home. Where it differs from the UK is that the Seychellois eat everything! With the excuse of tradition they eat the birds, birds’ eggs and if they miss the eggs the first time round they come back and eat the young. So with no birds left on inhabited islands, to serve tradition they come and poach on our nature reserve. The main bird they are after is the sooty tern, which arrives in it’s thousands during May to Aride to breed, they cover the higher areas of the island in dense colonies. Of course we were aware of this problem before we arrived, but we were pleasantly surprised by the outgoing warden who told us “don’t worry about it it’s not much of a problem”. Well we still don’t know to this day why he said that as we later found out he couldn’t have been further away from telling the truth if he’d tried. A few weeks later the good Seychellois staff told us a much different story, they said “it’s a commercial operation here”. So we decided to spend as much time as needed to assess the problem for ourselves.
The poachers are more active during dark, but not exclusively, so we set up watches on the beach from dawn till dusk to look for boats with more than 2 people in them (normally only 1-2 people fish in a boat) and at dusk we went in pairs to the colonies on the hill. The intention was firstly to deter the poachers by letting them know we could see them, then ring in their details to the only good bloke here re anti poaching, he would then contact the police (they deserve a blog entry all to themselves, but not while I’m still here!) so they could catch them as they got back to the mainland. Armed with a massively powerful torch and a machete, me and Sal took our first shift on the hill, at 140m high the cliff where we watched the sea - it is just stunning, sat here with 1000s of sooty terns flying right above our heads the noise was indescribable.

As the sun set the first poachers arrived, as they came to land I shone the torch at them, the torch was telling them you’ve been seen and you will get in trouble if you land, what they said to the torch was f—k you and landed anyway. These are serious people who can’t be messed with, so we legged it, with only one escape route we left in quite a hurry because of the real risk they would get around the back of us and cut us off. With the other observation points faring no better, the total amount of poachers on the island on that first night was 9 confirmed, with the certainty there where a lot more unseen. The next night we did the same, in the same place, this time, no birds no eggs just a few they had broken and no noise, all gone! What they do is strip an area clean, load the eggs into containers, so not to break the eggs they pack the containers with dead sooty terns, and if it’s just eggs they want, they break them into jerry cans so they can sell it by the litre. Well as you can imagine we were shocked and piss off, and any of you reading this who knows us will know we wouldn’t be quiet. We rang the good chap every night with what ever details we could get re boats and it’s occupants, but no arrests, which we were not at all surprised about, as we rang in more and more instances of poaching, the good chap (who has a lot of clout here) said it was getting to dangerous for us to deal with by ourselves, he was going to send in the armed police. Just to fill you in a bit, the armed police in the Seychelles, like their jobs and they shoot people.

Our CEO (Sal’s line manager), rang the director of police and asked what they intended to do, and she was told “ if there’s people on the island that shouldn’t be, they will be shot!” Shit! that sent us into a panic, don’t get me wrong, I would like all the b_____ds shot and wouldn’t lose one moments sleep no matter how many they killed. But the reality if that were to happen, would be an unthinkable back lash from the relatives and friends of the shot poachers, we, that’s all the staff would not be safe anywhere either on or off the island. Thankfully, strangely, because all Seychellois eat wild birds and eggs the chief of police thought it would be too contentious an operation with political ramifications and put a stop to it.
At the end of the poaching season 65% of our sooty terns’ eggs were taken, with that and a month of 15hr a day 7 day a week fatigue, put me into my first big sulk here, I could have caught the next flight home and said f—k it. Thankfully it only lasted a week or so.