A small and fortunate number of QNHG members was given the opportunity of visiting the Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation (AWWP) in the last month. The preserve is not open to the public although guests are not unwelcome. The current director of AWWP, Dr. Sven Hammer, and his wife, Catrin, Curator of Mammals, have prepared an introduction to the preserve for Zoo News. The two are instrumental in moving the family farm and game preserve, situated in the heart of Qatar from an unsupervised collection of common wildlife species, into the professional wildlife preservation it is today, and all in approximately 7 years. The AWWP’s web site also displays more information ranging from their conservation and breeding programs, to digitized publications and some excellent photographs. Some of my own photos are presented on this blog but they cannot match the professional photographs shown on the web site.
As the introduction cited above relates, in the late 1990s,
“the current owner, Sheikh Saoud Al Thani, the youngest son, took over, and from this time onwards things have changed. He started not only to improve the existing facilities, but also to built up new, bigger and better-arranged enclosures for his animals. These improvements are still in progress. Five years ago, he employed the first Europeans to organise animal care. Since August 2000 an international team of two veterinarians, two curators, two biologists and 35 animal keepers have run the place (the number is steadily increasing).”
The Director arranged an excellent ½ day for us. We had a 35-40 minute powerpoint presentation of the history accompanied by excellent photos, followed by a tour of the facilities of the main building only recently completed and still not fully occupied or functioning. There are no other facilities or resources in the country so everything they need they have to provide themselves, from diagnosis to surgery to blood work to DNA analysis. After the facilities tour, we split into two groups for tours of approximately 1 hour each – mammals and birds. I was far more intrigued by the birds although a couple mammals were worth seeing. A bit more on that later.
For now, a description of the facilities from introduction:
“The area is about 2.5 km2. The heart of Al Wabra is like an oasis, a green place with palms, alfalfa fields, many different fruit trees, etc. In this area are kept the more delicate animals, such as all the different bird species, cheetahs, smaller cats and some ungulates. The greater part of Al Wabra consists of ordinary desert land; in this area the huge enclosures for most of the gazelles and antelopes are situated. Currently we keep around 2,000 animals of 103 species … There is an ongoing effort to improve the design and layout of enclosures by creating conditions more appropriate for the various species and more conducive to the proper organisation of the collection. This is resulting in much-reduced levels of stress, fighting and injuries due to herd panic, as well as more successful breeding. The cruel individual holding of two great apes in isolation, for instance, was ended a year ago. The gorilla was sent to Prague Zoo, where he has become part of the EEP, and the chimpanzee has gone to a chimpanzee orphanage in Zambia.”
My first tour was the birds described in the introduction as follows:
“For heat-sensitive birds, like birds of paradise, macaws, cockatoos, umbrella birds and pheasants, there are huge aviaries with air-conditioned indoor rooms and computer-controlled irrigation systems, connected to a fresh-water osmosis unit. Recently a large walk-through free-flight aviary (75 m ´ 30 m ´ 7 m) has been finished. In its rainforest atmosphere, the aviary accommodates bird of paradise males, Somali starlings, pheasant pigeons, turacos and cranes. Another similar aviary is still under construction, where it is planned to keep flamingos, scarlet ibis and macaws.”
The curator of birds, Richard Switzer, had spoken at the December monthly meeting of the QNHG and the following day a report on this was published in the local newspaper by Fran Gillespie: “Brilliantly coloured Birds of Paradise fly from tree to tree in a vast aviary, their iridescent plumage glittering in the sunlight. Below them, pink flamingoes and white spoonbills stalk the shallow waters of a pool, and the silence is broken by the harsh cries of Red-tailed cockatoos.” The curator, in answer to my question in the aviary, indicated there were at least 60 birds representing a dozen species in the aviary. The five photos below are from mine and, yes, the top one of them is not a bird but one of two monkeys that reside in the aviary.
Part of the breeding program at Al Wabra includes the spix’s macaw, now extinct in its native Brazil. “Its story is a sad one,” the article indicates, “typical of the fate of so many parrots and macaws that have suffered from widespread trapping for the exotic pet trade. The introduction of the aggressive Africanised bee, which competed for nest sites, stinging and killing breeding birds on their nests, also contributed to its decline. The last wild male disappeared in October 2000. Fewer than a hundred Spix’s macaws were in captivity world-wide, but the owner of Al Wabra set about buying a number from private collections in the Philippines and Switzerland, and a breeding programme to save the bird from total extinction was begun. Now, some 50 birds, representing 75% of the entire known population of Spix’s macaws, are at Al Wabra. ‘It was not all plain sailing,’ said Switzer. ‘Many of the birds we acquired were diseased, and these had to be treated. Every 12 months a vet comes over from Germany to conduct a thorough check on our birds. But more serious is the fact that because all the birds in captivity are probably descended from a few individuals, there are inbreeding problems. There is the occasional misshapen egg, chicks sometimes fail to hatch, and there are behavioural problems.’ Despite these teething problems, the future of the bird now seems assured, and their devoted curator dreams of one day seeing them reintroduced to the wild. In 2006, 12 eggs were laid, and removed to incubators for hatching. Seven chicks survived. In 2007, 32 eggs have been laid, and a higher percentage of chicks was successfully reared. Birds of Paradise are particularly difficult to keep in captivity, said Switzer, and at Al Wabra they are proud to number no fewer than six species in the collection. Each of the breeding pairs have to be given an aviary to themselves, as the birds are aggressive and a male bird will not tolerate the presence of another male. Carefully planted rainforest foliage, maintained by frequent misting with water, provides display perches for the males, and nesting sites."
The Lear’s Macaws at AWWP are on loan from the Brazilian government as part of a breeding program. Three chicks were recently born and are being hand reared by experienced staff since unfortunately the breeding pair that produced the eggs have not yet developed sound incubation skills. This bird has rarely been bred in captivity and until AWWP produced these first chicks they hadn’t been officially bred in captivity in 22 years. As the introduction in Zoo News indicates, “Al Wabra has been successful in both natural breeding and rearing and also hand-rearing of valuable and endangered species: greater and king birds of paradise, green-naped pheasant pigeon, chestnut-bellied sand grouse, beira antelope, Speke's, red-fronted and Pelzeln's gazelles, gerenuk, sand cat and leopard tortoise, as well as other common zoo mammals and birds. In the important, but still young, collection of parrots, the first pairs have just laid their first eggs.”
The tour of the mammals followed. I was most intrigued by the Somali Wild Ass, a subspecies of the African wild ass found from the Southern Red Sea region of Eritrea , the Afar region of Ethiopia, and Somalia. Its legs, as my photo and all photos show, are horizontally striped with black. This critically endangered animal prefers hilly and stony deserts, arid to semi-arid bushlands and grasslands. They may be small, but they're fast: African wild asses have been clocked at 30 miles per hour. In the 16th century, the Spanish brought domesticated African wild asses to the southwestern United States. The descendants of those animals -- best known as burros -- still roam through the Southwest.
Again from the introduction in ZooNews:
“Most of the ungulates are well adapted to the Qatari climate, but for the sensitive and very famous beira antelope, stables with air-conditioned rooms are essential. The other species are either housed in large holding pens or in smaller breeding enclosures. Because there has been less and less demand for surplus ungulate males, two bachelor pens were established a year ago, one of approximately 90,000 m2 in area and the other of around 70,000 m2. These are important genetic pools and are also attractive for visitors.”
