Trudy Stevenson forwards the announcement about the death of Clem Coetzee in southern Zimbabwe. There is an excellent account in here of his work on translocating elephants, and the research that went into discovering the structure of elephant herds, which is important to understanding how to re-locate them.
Jack Shepherd
--- Forwarded Message from "Trudy Stevenson"
>From: "Trudy Stevenson"
>To:
>Subject: Clem Coetzee passes away
>Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 13:18:20 +0200
>Sender: grouppet-request@zol.co.zw
Pioneer conservationist dies in Zim
IOL
September 07 2006 at 09:19PM
Harare - One of southern Africa's most noted conservationists, Clem
Coetzee, died after suffering a heart attack at his farm in southern
Zimbabwe, family members and friends said Thursday. He was 67.
Coetzee, an internationally renowned veteran game ranger who pioneered
techniques to relocate elephants and a wide range of wild animals from
habitats affected by drought and environmental degradation, collapsed Sunday
after an early morning tour of his farm and its wildlife research and
breeding pens in the Triangle district, about 400km south-east of Harare.
"His death is a great loss to wildlife conservation not only in
Zimbabwe but elsewhere in Africa," said Justice for Agriculture, a farmers'
support group, in a tribute Thursday.
Coetzee developed methods to move elephants in family groups by
darting them with sedatives from a helicopter and lifting them via heavy
duty rubber conveyor belts into truck containers or freight train cars,
where they were revived and fed and given water for journeys of hundreds of
kilometres.
In the Gonarezhou nature preserve in southern Zimbabwe during a
drought in 1992 he moved at least 40 elephants to new habitats in
neighbouring South Africa in the first operation of its kind in which
electronic tracking microchips were implanted beneath the animals' skin.
Subsequent groundbreaking research showed the elephants suffered no
ill-effects of being moved as long as the family unit of bulls, cows and the
young was left mostly intact.
The technique was later used to relocate game animals in Kenya and
several other African countries.
He was also responsible for spearheading a campaign to sedate and saw
off the horn of the endangered African rhinoceros as a means of combating
rhino poaching.
Rhino horn is prized in the Middle East and Asia for traditional
dagger handles and as a medicine in its ground form.
Coetzee is survived by his wife, Em, his daughter Beth, his son Vicus
and three grandchildren. A funeral service is planned in the garden of his
farm in southern Zimbabwe on Saturday. - Sapa-AP