Why a crowned eagle?
Keeping with the theme of feeding bushbuck and the health of the forest habitat. Lets look at a classic ecological rule.
The idea was clearly described by Simon Barnes in his great editorial article in the RSPB magazine “Birds” May - July 2008 Volume 22 No 2 page 31. He writes: “The bigger and fiercer you are, the rare you must be: a basic rule of ecology. In a wood, there will be millions of caterpillars. They will be eaten by dozens of blue tits; the blue tits will be eaten by a single pair of sparrowhawks. If there is a terrible year for caterpillars, you will end up with a mere handful of blue tits. You will also end up with no sparrowhawks at all. The blue tits will recover: the sparrowhawks are gone.
So if humans chop down the half the wood, there will still be caterpillars and blue tits: but the wood is no longer big enough to support enough blue tits to feed a single family of sparrowhawks.
But the thing can work the other way. If you have a successful pair of sparrowhawks, what does that say about your wood? It says that is in very good shape: if it wasn’t it couldn’t support the sparrowhawks. So every time you see a bird of prey, it is the most clear and obvious sign that the place you are in is doing all right.”
The above is a story from Britain but you are living in Zimbali. What are the parallels to this story? Well you have a pair of breeding Crowned Eagles. So you must have millions of insects with many plants to feed on who in turn feed many birds and other animals. Because you are dealing with a large bird of prey that instead of eating birds it eats larger mammals like Vervet Monkeys, Blue Duiker and young Bushbuck. So this must be a comparatively larger system.
Also remember that you have a pair of breeding African Goshawks, a pair of breeding Yellow-billed Kites and a pair of breeding Little Sparrowhawks. The African Goshawk is a bird eater; the Yellow-billed Kite eats mainly road kill and scraps that it can find in the area plus many flying termites; the Little Sparrowhawk eats small seed-eating birds and many large insects and reptiles like chameleons and geckos that live in the forest.
So you have 4 avian predators all breeding in the confines of your Estate. Not a bad state of affairs. They are here because the habitat is large enough, it is intact, just: and it has to be increased so that after the housing development wave has swept over the landscape by re-planting the plants in the density, diversity and complexity of a forest. This complexity is what keeps the foundation of all the little caterpillars alive then the walls are the various birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians with the roof being the larger predators like the Eagles, Goshawks, Kites and Sparrowhawks.
This is what we are taught at school is a food web or triangle. Each one of these triangles is interlinked with another triangle ad infinitum to make up the planet we live on. Believe it or not but we are also part of these triangles that hold this whole ecosystem together. Damage a part of a triangle and the knock on effect is dramatic maybe not catastrophic but keep damaging triangles and the effect will be catastrophic at some point. Human kind is getting to that tipping point rapidly. So celebrate what you have and minimise the damage to the planet by ensuring that the Crowned Eagles of this world have a place to live. Do this enough times in any given place and there might be hope for us yet.
Compiled by:: GEOFF NICHOLS
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