In the mid-1990s, I used to travel from Kumasi to Ejisu quite often. From Kumasi to Ejisu, a distance of some 25 kilometres, the road was lined on both sides by green forests and patches of grass and marsh. Now, living close to Ejisu myself, I discover that the environmental scenario has changed completely. Where there were forest or grass or marsh, now there is concrete; housing, petrol stations, hotels, shops and schools. The picture is the same at peri-urban Adako Gyakye where I live near the new Asante Kotoko stadium project. There is no patch of forest and when I encounter women going to farm, I ask them where they are farming now. Their answer is always that they farm on other people’s building plots, and when the owner decides to build, they have to abandon their farms even mid-season.
Two weeks ago, I saw something amazing in front of our house. I saw a terrified cat running at an unbelievable speed. Hot on its heels was a black mongoose, also hoping to catch the cat and use it for a meal. If you haven’t seen a cat running for its life, I did that day. Mongooses
[kokobo] are carnivores, also the size of a small cat, and their favourite meat is snake. So catching a cat is a stroll through the park when a mongoose goes hunting.
Mongooses are all over my place, and one day recently, I met a sixteen-year old boy holding a wounded mongoose by the tip of the tail. He stopped and asked me if the mongoose was comestible [safe to eat]. I told him that these days, people eat even mongooses. He dropped the animal on the ground and had to act very fast to stop the apparently half-dead predator from making its escape. He stopped it with a piece of concrete. The mongooses are all over my place, stalking and stealing full grown chickens.
WILD ANIMALS IN THE CITIES
These days a lot of wild animals have come to live in the city of Kumasi. Accra is no exception. The most surprising are the hawks. Hawks are smaller and much faster than kites, the big brown birds that we ordinarily call hawks, with yellow beaks [bills]. In our villages, we call them akroma, and know them too for stealing chicks. Hawks have come to live in the city, in the ceilings of houses and school buildings, churches and in tree holes.
The problem of birds coming to human residential areas to lay their eggs and hatch their young is now commonplace. In the case of hawks, when their young hatch, they must be taught by their mothers how to fly naturally and catch other birds for food as all hawks do. These lessons are called in wildlife circles as ‘test flight’. Practice flights also build up the chest muscles to enable them fly their weights around and hunt. Sometimes, young birds fail in their test flights and fall to the ground before they flap away.
This was the case of the crested eagle in the Kumasi zoo. It failed its test flight in the remnant forests of the now Western North region because it could not find a nearby tree as tall as the one it was hatched on. The other day, I got a call from a friend and Curator at the Okomfo Anokye sword site. Gordon told me that a chief had informed him on phone that a ‘strange bird’ had entered his house and his boys had captured it and kept it in a basket covered with cloth. I asked for a description and the chief passed me pictures of the ‘strange’ bird on
whatsapp. I identified it as a hawk and told the chief that he had a problem on his hand keeping a young hawk in his home. To ensure that the bird was comfortable, Nana needed a proper cage, and needed knowledge on how to keep it properly fed. Under normal circumstances, I should automatically have directed Nana to take it to the Kumasi zoo. But the zoo has its own problems.
PET LICENCE
Yesterday Nana reported to me that on my instructions, he had ordered chicks from Darko Farms and was feeding the bird with a chick a day. The most viable option now is to free the bird to fly into the wild. But Nana wants to keep it, which means he has to acquire a pet licence from the Wildlife Division, otherwise, he would be breaking the law against keeping a wild animal/bird in captivity. If the bird is kept at home for too long, its wing and chest muscles may atrophy and the bird may not be able to fly properly again. I also warned Nana about its safe handling. A hawk has very sharp claws [talons] that would very easily cut into flesh. I advised that Nana buys thick gloves. But can keeping the bird this way continue indefinitely? In other places, crocodiles easily enter homes because their normal habitats have been encroached upon. In the Takoradi Air Force base area, pythons, crocodiles and monitor lizards [mampam]frequently enter homes and have to be killed if there is no wild life office to handle the reptiles. They are a danger to goats, domestic fowl and children.
In our cities, so many wild species are relocating close to human settlements. In my area, one such bird is the coucal senegalensis, commonly called brekuo, whose call [not cry] is used to tell the time. The coucal is easy prey for small boys with catapults. It is a most clumsy bird with very little sense of self-reservation. Besides, the brown bird with a black tail has clumsy landing style. Sometimes it crashes into boughs and branches before establishing a firm perch. Why are wild animals and birds now coming to live in the city? The major threat is the loss of habitats. They have no forests and grasslands to live in and produce their young.
SHIFTING CULTIVATION AND GALAMSEY
Here, I blame agriculture and our destructive practice of shifting cultivation, still in practice in our rural areas. Our forests are virtually finished. But around our cities, construction and settlements are the major cause of the loss of forest cover. The fast pace of urbanization has become a nightmare for forest and wild life protection. I must add that we put up the wrong buildings based on the principle of one-family-one-house. But elsewhere, housing planners plan for one-building-sixty-families. One building can be designed for, say, five families on each floor or level. We build to wasteland.
Galamsey has come to make the situation worse. Vast swathes of forests and marshlands, habitats for our wild species, have been levelled by illegal mining, which also leave our rivers and ponds poisoned and biologically dead. Galamsey operators use highly poisonous chemicals like mercury and lead that leave the environment dead. The same damage
is brought by agriculture through the use of agricultural chemicals, pesticides and weedicides used to kill pests and burn up weeds.
Because of these chemicals, we no longer get snails and mushrooms, and a lot of useful herbs have all been destroyed. Most insects can no longer be found, including ants and termites that help to aerate the soil for better agricultural productivity.
SELF DESTRUCTION
We are killing ourselves. Chemicals have also affected human biological productivity. I am told that in some part of our south-west, babies are born with vital body parts missing, including sensory organs and limbs. Housing, agriculture and galamsey have severely damaged the biological integrity of our natural environment and impoverished our lives. What will be the scenario in the year3000? We in Ghana and indeed, most of the third world will live demeaned lives. I cry for my beloved country. The prospects are scary.
We are under threat; the threat that made a mongoose to come out to chase a domestic cat, that makes a hawk come to nestle in our homes and that makes the coucal senegalensis a victim of small boys with catapults, is the same threat that will place human beings under threat within less than two decades.
By Jacob Oti Awere
* The author is a Novelist and Tourism/Wildlife Expert.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.
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