Wildlife paradise discovered in Southern Sudan

It’s tough to believe that war wrecked, poverty stricken Sudan has an abundance of wildlife but an exciting discovery made by Dr Michael Fay and his team show that southern Sudan is home to a treasure house of wildlife.

An aerial survey of Southern Sudan shows:
8,000 elephants
800,000 kob
250,000 Mongalla gazelle
160,000 tiang
13,000 reedbuck
8,900 buffalo
2,800 ostriches
4,000 Nile lechwe (the only place in the world where you can see them are in the Sudd swamps)

Plus lions, leopards, elands, Grant’s gazelles, roan antelopes, lesser kudu, hartebeest, giraffes, crocodiles, hippos, and beisa oryx were all seen.

The survey was carried out by
Dr Michael Fay, scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.
Dr. Paul Elkan, director of the WCS Southern Sudan Country Program, and
Malik Marjan, a Southern Sudanese Ph.D. candidate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Says Dr Michael Fay, "We estimated more than 800,000 kob in Southern Sudan. If you were a gold miner and hit a vein of gold, like we found in kob, you would have found El Dorado. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that this kind of abundance in nature existed in a region after 25 years of civil war, virtually unknown to the world at large."

The team started flying on Jan 17, 2007 and in just 150 hours of survey time were able to cover 58,000 square miles (150,000 square km).

Areas surveyed were: Boma National Park, Jonglei region and Southern National Park.

The project was undertaken by The Ministry of Environment, Wildlife Conservation, and Tourism, Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS).

Additional funds were given by USAID/Sudan and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

For this discovery and for exploring the wilderness of Africa, Dr Michael Fay gets the 2007 Lindbergh Award.

The explorations included:

A 15 month, 2000 mile expedition, called Megatransect where Dr Fay traveled from the rainforests of Congo to the sea shores of Gabon. He documented all the large animals, plants and signs of human impact that he saw on the way.

A 600 000 mile expedition called MegaFlyover where he flew across Africa’s wild habitats. That’s when he discovered the wildlife treasure house.

source: http://www.wcs.org/353624/wcs_megascientist