Miroslav Bobek

When Facebook (FB) changed its main page again some time ago, it was another change to the worse. It is getting on the verge of the tolerable to be constantly fed with information about someone’s results of quizzes, such as “Are you submissive or dominant in sex?”, especially with graphic representation of the results as the fuel indicator in the car (full tank in this particular case), coupled with a regular dose of hearts and beers people keep flooding you with.

FB is based on sharing of brief texts, links, photos, short videos, as well as aforementioned funny and “funny” applications. Unfortunately, there is an apparent drift towards superficiality fostered by Facebook owners and their redesigns of the main page. This trend may eventually drive many of us away. For the time being, though, it is worth staying on board. Let me explain using the development of the Revealed’s profile on FB at www.facebook.com/odhaleni.

► FB has revealed who our fans are. Obviously, it is a limited view but certainly more representative than information we can gather from chats and discussions on our website or from more or less accidental personal encounters.

► FB has brought us new supporters and helped increase awareness of our project in general through precisely targeted advertising we invested in. Btw, it was the very first time that I considered spending money on online advertising not just as appropriate but as a very good investment.

► FB allows us to offer bits of content that we would not post on our official website (the less broadcast on the airwaves) but that are worth sharing. For instance, our Cameroonian colleague sent us an image of himself sitting in the TV studio and talking about our joint project. FB is the place to post it. And when we post footage of Czech superstar Lucie Bila recording gorilla fairy tales in the studio, success is guaranteed. Having her on FB brings us new fans and increases awareness of our project.

► FB helps us know what our audience is interested in. Most in demand are images of cute baby gorillas or other animals, and celebrities. This is good to know and explore – but not to let it drive your efforts!

► FB facilitates direct communication with our fans – we ask them individually or en masse about things we would like to know, for instance when to end an online charitable auction. What time they will be able and willing to take part in the final bidding?

► When we started consulting our planned steps with the fans, we inevitably also started to establish closer personal relations with them, and many of them have become our FB friends. This may be inspiring but also time-consuming… In general, FB offers a fundamental opportunity to get in touch with those who work on similar projects do something we might be interested in. Despite the changes in FB and its drift towards superficiality, our fans and FB friends keep sending us a constant flow of relevant information we would otherwise have to laboriously search for – which we almost certainly wouldn’t. (Hello, Paul Kahumba :-)

► Our FB fans are happy to provide their own content for our purposes. They mainly upload photos and videos – and when we announced a photo competition, they submitted loads of amazing images. We asked for hi-res versions of the best entries and made large prints for an auction.

► Some fans have started supporting us by sharing our announcements, such as that about the so-called donor sms messages on behalf of our project. Some of the users included information about the sms donations permanently in the footer of their e-mails to disseminate it among their contacts.

► Many fans have answered our call and sent a donor sms or bought something from our shop to support our activities. However, we have had a rather negative experience with addressing people directly with an offer to buy our merchandise. Sale over FB does not work for us and rather discourages our fans.

► Yet I see the Revealed’s FB profile as more important than the official website. The website carries more extensive materials, but these could be located anywhere because we always notify of them on FB anyway. This may be a rather extreme attitude stemming from the fact that FB is relatively new and from the great amount of time I devote to it. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the world wide web is changing. I fear umbrella projects like WildlifeDirect will soon be marginalized by FB, unless they reposition themselves. because everyone can now compile their own alternative to WildlifeDirect in FB or other social networking environment.

To sum up: An FB profile is worth having, primarily because of the valuable feedback you are getting. It may well happen that the feedback will cause you to start doubting what you are doing. You may as well end up producing tabloidish content. Most likely, though, the interest your content will generate and comments and information from users will encourage and inspire you. You may even raise some funds or at least spark greater interest in your project. In the first place, though, you will be riding the wave of “new” internet and “new” media – and gearing for the future which will be marked by yet more social networking and personalised content. However, it requires you to devote a substantial amount of time to FB every day and think about the message you are sending out and messages others are sending to you. And you will have to face an ever increasing number of sex activity gauges, hearts, and beers. So, think twice before joining…

PS: Things may change soon. Google Wave is coming (wave.google.com)…

Hi everyone,

We have not written quite a long time, because we had a full plate of our project in the Czech republic. We organized a lot of partial activities which help us to support gorillas in wild, for example exhibition of photos called Phenomenon The Revealed. This exhibition travels around the whole Czech Republic and it reached even Moscow in Russia!

In cooperation with Czech Radio we recorded and produced a CD with Gorilla Fairy Tales. The main protagonist of fairy tales is one of the most famoust czech celebrities – singer Lucie Bílá. Since you have read the last comment we have also prepared the book of Gorilla Fairy Tales for commercial sell. We get also the offer to make russian edition of these fairy tales. We will write details about all these activities soon, do not worry! :-)

Furthermore we have worked on our own Facebook page (you can look here), we have joined the donation sms called DMS. People from the Czech Republic could send sms in a value of 30 Kc (=approximately little bit more than 1 Euro). 27 Kc from each DMS is intended for gorilla conservation. And at last we have prepared an auction of our photos and one oil painting of gorillas (btw. this painting is gonna be the cover page of the forementioned CD). People in the Czech Republic could join the auction till this Friday and suggest as much money as they want to pay for the production. You can have a look on the process of the auction here.

Everything what we gain from these activities is intended to western lowland gorilla´s conservation in central Africa. Our immediate purpose is to publish Gorilla Stories Book and other educational material focused on conservation for children and distribute it in Congo-Brazzaville. Other aim is to support Ecogaurds protecting the Reservation Dja in Cameroon agains poachers. They need the basic equipment – shoes, tents and so on.

So as you see, we have had “full hands of work”… But now, we are back and we will continue to keep you posted! :-)

Your Jana and Miroslav - The Revealed Team!

There are always several BaAka, local Pygmies, at Andrea Turkalo’s camp who work for her as guides and scouts. The camp is also regularly visited by Bantus armed with automatic rifles who guard the reserve. Although the Dzanga clearing looks like paradise on Earth, it is not completely safe for wild animals. However, the situation is much worse elsewhere.

Before zoologists discovered Dzanga Bai, did Europeans know about it?
Probably yes, because this place was colonised by many years by the French. Before independence, this area was also exploited for ivory and other forest products, like rubber and copal, which is used in making perfumes. The French exported hundreds of tons of ivory out of here from the end of the last century until the 1960s. If you know the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Konrad, he describes the situation when the Belgians and the French had a concession system and basically mandated that pepople collect ivory and other forest products. If they did not collect it, they were whipped.

But elephants, to say nothing about other animals, continue to be killed here…
There are different levels of poaching in this part of the world. There is game poaching for local consumption. People go out and set snares and catch antelopes, go home and they go home in the evening and eat the animal. That’s sustainable. That’s like what the BaAka do with the net hunting. They kill an animal, divide it up and eat it. That can go on for a long time without affecting the total population because what they are taking and what is reproducing is at the same level. Elephant poaching is a whole different situation because it is done by people who have the means to buy big guns and send people out with munition to kill animals.

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Dzanga Bai appears to be from a different time and world. Against the backdrop of the forest, you can see dozens of elephants: females, their offspring of various age, as well as a long-tusked males here and there. Together with them scores of forest buffaloes and antelopes… This remote place in Central African Republic is where American zoologist Andrea Turkalo has been conducting her research for nearly twenty years.

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Andrea Turkalo has lived in a small forest camp in the southwest of the Central African Republic. Every morning she walks to a shelter hidden at the edge of a unique “forest elephant clearing”. Supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the US government, she conducts research into the life of forest elephants and tries to contribute to their protection.

Who discovered this “elephant clearing” and when?
This clearing is called Dzanga and and it has always been known for the wildlife. I have a German friend who first came here in the 1960s and he filmed here. Now he is in his 70s but he comes back periodically to film. He came here when there was no road to Bayanga, he walked all the way with his equipment. He walked all through this area and filmed. Before he came in the 1960s, the areas was, of course, known to the Bayaka, Pygmies. When you talk to them about this area, even the older ones, they remember as very small children walking to this area and hunting. Now, it is a national park, so hunting is not allowed but they have always known this area. There are also other clearings in this area but none of them are alike Dzanga where you can see 40-100 elephants a day.

Why do so many of them come to the clearing?
They come for minerals. They dig big holes in the dry season and now you see them pumping through water and that’s to get down below to the minerals. These minerals are probably helping them digest the food they are eating. A lot of the food they get in the forest is very poor quality. The best quality food they get is fruit but it is very seasonal, that only found during a certain period of the year. So when they cannot get fruit, they are eating leaves and bark and whatever they can get, and it probably has a lot of poisons in it. So they come here to eat the soil and it is sort of medication because it lessens the toxicity of the food that they are eating.

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Miroslav Bobek et al., 17 June 2009

The Dja biosphere reserve in the south-eastern Cameroon is guarded by four units of rangers called “ecoguards”. This sixty-strong force is supposed to protect more than half a million hectares of tropical rainforest. With worn-out shoes and no tents or communication technology they confront hordes of armed poachers.

Djoum is more than 250 km from Yaoundé. While the first three-fifths of the distance is a nice drive along a good tarmac road, the rest is a dirt road navigable only for 4×4 trucks, and sometimes not even for them in the rain season. Djoum is the seat of the subprefect, it has a health facility, primary schools and a lyceum, a large market, and most of the area is covered by mobile phone signal. Most importantly for us, though, one of four units of the ecoguards who protect the Dja biosphere reserve is stationed there.

“Everyone eats bushmeat,” ecoguard Tomi told us when we first met. “And almost everyone hunts. We cannot be overly strict with people but rather try to convince them to kill fewer animals and avoid hunting the most strictly protected species.”

Whereas three years ago, we had problems finding and photographing bushmeat in Yaoundé, it was completely different in Djoum this time. We were offered bushmeat for lunch even in the auberge we were staying in.

“Do you have some other kind of meat?” we asked.
“No,” was the answer.
“Can’t you get us chicken or something?”
“Sure, but… chicken is not meat, is it?”

Photos from the patrol are available in the article On duty with ecoguards.

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“She’s playing the young quite well! And the peacock, too…” producer Honza Jiran noted when choosing an actor for the French rendition of the gorilla fairy tales among 10 short-listed native speakers with more or less extensive acting experience. He eventually selected the one who interpreted the young and the peacock so nicely - Mélanie Ruppe.

After the success of the gorilla story book among schoolchildren in Cameroon (see Related Links in the category Book of gorilla fairy-tales) we decided to record a French rendition of the same as another way of helping children in Africa realise that gorillas deserve protection and that they, too, can help. (We should note that many people in Central Africa continue to perceive wild animals, including gorillas, as nothing more but a source of meat… I remember how surprise children in a forest village were to find out when browsing our book that a gorilla can have a name just like a human.)

We prepare a publication of the book of Gorilla Stories for Congo. Without public subvention we can not develope this idea further. We would be glad if you contribute to achieve these efforts.

• The Revealed charitable account finances protection of western lowland gorillas and educational activities in al countries where this subspecies of gorilla lives in the wild. To support the cause, you can send your donation to 555 555 552/0800, IBAN: CZ35 0800 0000 0005 5555 5552 or donate through wildlifedirect.

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Three years we observed gorillas in Prague Zoo. We wanted to present their stories so that people identify with them and understand how important is to help conservation of gorillas in wild. Like this we get to Africa. Within the project The Revealed we try to bring informations about african wildlife and its conservation but also raise funds for that purposes (as I wrote below, we published the Gorilla stories book, we supported educational project in villages north of Dja and now we would like to equip the ecoquards in Djoum).

During our trip to Africa we made a lot of  interviews with people who work in field and here is one of them… An interview with primatologist Daniela Hedwig.

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When we offered you the photogallery of forest elephants two weeks ago, we did not expect how they attract you. After our arrival from Africa, we launch forth the elephants once again – this time in global panoramatic view in the clearing.

By the way, do you know how many of elephants are there? :-) Try to count them! First three of you, who count them correctly and send us the answer on email odhaleni@rozhlas.cz until 18 May, get a little present.

You can look around the clearing by holding left mouse button and moving left and right. For zooming use cursor keys up and down.