Protecting roosting swallows in West Africa: Pierfrancesco Micheloni and Ebbaken-Boje

Anyone who keeps a blog will spend a great deal of time online - sometimes just messing about “researching” (comparing your writing with other bloggers, wondering how you can present your photos a little better, joining Yahoo groups), and sometimes reading as many websites as possible to learn as much as possible! For me one of the most exciting aspects of this particular blog, which is focussed primarily on birds and has an increasingly high conservation content, is the potential for meeting other conservation-minded people and promoting conservation projects - two passions of mine…

Many “meetings” will of course take place online - I’d like to be in all places at any one time, but even a job with an airline can’t work that particular magic - and it was while I was doing some of the “research” referred to above - that I came across a reference to the “Ebbaken Project” in Nigeria.

Run by a 39 year old Italian birder and conservationist called Pierfrancesco Micheloni, the project was concerned with protecting the vast numbers of Barn Swallows Hirundo rustica that stage and winter in the Ebbaken Boje region of eastern Nigeria’s Cross River State (at 06° 17′ N; 8° 55′ E), close to the Afi Mountains Wildlife Sanctuary on the Cameroon border. According to Pierfrancesco’s research as many as 2,000,000 swallows use the area - but, critically, he had found that around just one small village many thousands of swallows were being killed annually.

I had to learn more…

I started a correspondence with Pierfrancesco, offering to help out in any way that I could - perhaps visiting Ebbaken one day, but the most practical being promoting the Ebbaken Project on this site.

None of us who’ve tried to make projects like these work will ever turn down an opportunity to reach more people, and the article that follows is based on the growing number of emails that we’ve exchanged so far, and one meeting in November 2005 when we found ourselves in Lagos (Nigeria) at the same time.

I find both Pierfrancesco Micheloni and the Ebbaken project a remarkably inspiring story, and I hope anyone reading this article will do so too…

Barn Swallows prior to roosting in Ebbaken. Photo © Cyril Ruoso

Introduction:
Data from banding (ringing) recoveries showed some years ago that most of the UK’s Barn Swallows spend the non-breeding season in South Africa, roosting in reed-beds and grasslands in the Cape (though 80% of Barn Swallows wintering in SA apparently come from Russia). Banding projects begun in the 1980’s were soon returning valuable information and enabling mapping of the entire route that British swallows took through Africa to their wintering grounds.

However, what was less well-known was where the swallows breeding in southern and eastern Europe staged and wintered. Even as recently as 1994 nobody at all knew where Italy’s breeding swallows wintered, for example…

A young bird bander from Recanati with a passion for swallows, Pierfrancesco Micheloni (photo left, Lagos November 2005), decided that he’d find out. Working with Dr Fernando Spina (Co-ordinator of the Italian Ringing Centre and former Chairman of EURING - the European Union for Bird Ringing) and under the auspices of the Instituto Nazionale per la Fauna Selvatica (National Wildlife Institute), he (and ringers across Italy and other parts of Europe) banded thousands of swallows on their southern European breeding grounds - and waited anxiously for any news of “recoveries”.

In March 1995 a letter arrived from Gerhard Nikolaus, a German ringer, containing hundreds of rings collected from dead swallows he’d found while visiting the village of Ebbaken Boje in the Cross River State, eastern Nigeria (06° 17′ N; 8° 55′ E). Many of the rings were from the very swallows Pierfrancesco had banded himself. Pierfrancesco’s remarkable banding efforts were already leading to discoveries of huge significance to any future plan to protect these birds therefore: a major wintering area for Italy’s Barn Swallows had been found - but why were so many swallows dying there?

The only way to find out, Pierfrancesco decided, would be to travel to Ebbaken Boje and have a look for himself - preferably during the following winter.

Ebbaken Boje:
Organising the logistics for a trip at such short notice requires a great deal of help, and, usually an invitation from an NGO or individual working on the ground who is known to the local government. Up stepped Dr. Philip Hall of Pro Natura International, an enthusiastic and influential British ornithologist based in Lagos who had already started work on the region’s swallows, and later that year, Pierfrancesco - on a self-funded “holiday” as no funds were available from the Insitute to finance his trip - found himself in an impoverished village where temperatures regularly reached 35C with a humidity of 70%, where malaria was a common killer (Pierfrancesco has had two malarial attacks and lives with the knowledge that he could have another at any time), and where there was no electricity or running water.

More importantly, though, the village was next to grasslands where as many as 2 MILLION Barn Swallows went to roost. Every autumn vast numbers of Barn Swallows would appear over the Afi Mountains on the Nigerian/Cameroon border, and many were now found to be settling at night in two large patches of 5 metre tall elephant-grass Pennisetum purpureum on steep slopes behind Ebbaken village. There appeared to be an almost constant ebb and flow in the numbers at the roost, and it became clear very quickly that it would be impossible without long-term research to know for certain how many swallows were passing through on their way to wintering sites elsewhere, or how many would remain for the entire winter.

(In fact in the winter of 2005/06 the roost appeared to hold as many as 4 MILLION birds - probably due, according to Pierfrancesco, regular rain and high humidity which caused huge numbers of termites and other insects to be on the wing above the forests where the swallows are known to feed!)

So huge huge numbers of Barn Swallows were roosting around Ebbaken. The important question was why had so many bands/rings been found?It didn’t take long to find out. The villagers, living in a harsh environment where food was scarce (most of the wild animals in the primary forest that surrounds the village had already been hunted unsustainably), were supplementing their diets with about 3.5 tons of swallow meat during the winter months - in real terms it meant that they were catching and killing as many as 200,000 of the swallows annually.

At this point a considerable dilemma arose.

For Pierfrancesco, finding “his” swallows dying in this way was emotional and distressing (as it probably is to most birders looking at the photos below) - but he knew that to the villagers themselves - who of course don’t have access to supermarkets or fast-food outlets - catching the swallows was a matter of life and death. Every year a huge protein-source arrived on their doorstep and it would take considerable persuasion - and considerable benefit - for them to see the swallows as anything other than food.

Trapping Barn Swallows using palm fronds coated in forest-sourced “glue” made from the latex of the Strophantus hispidus vine mixed with citrus juice and palm oil. Swallows stuck to the fronds attract others with their cries which are then also caught. Photo © Cyril Ruoso

 

Dinner in Ebbaken: Long-term economic resource or short-term food item?
Photo © Cyril Ruoso

Achievements:
It takes courage for a relatively wealthy and young white European to drop into an economically undeveloped region of Nigeria and ask local villagers to give up one of their few food sources - especially when the skies appeared to be full of the very birds he wanted the villagers to stop eating. Naturally enough, these proud people wouldn’t have taken kindly to being lectured or brow-beaten - particularly by someone who could easily leave when the going got too tough and return to a well-stocked fridge-freezer.

Pierfrancesco needed both to be accepted BY the villagers and to work WITH them. To do that would take time and effort. It would take a sense of humour and real determination. How best to do it though? His strategy would be to use revenue from eco-tourism (from birdwatchers or bird ringers) to help enable the villagers to develop their local economy and to see the swallows as a sustainable source of income, and just as importantly to help develop alternative sources of food.

Right: Stanley Obi Ofun, son of an Ebbaken chief, removes a swallow from a net prior to banding. Photo © Cyril Ruoso

The project has had measurable successes. Pierfrancesco persuaded the villagers to supplement their meagre diets with fish (mackerel and tilapia brought in every two weeks from Calabar on flat-bed trucks packed with blocks of ice) rather than swallows and is the process of establishing a small poultry farm. A small enclosed piggery has been built - and though there have been problems organising proper management of the farm it is now up and running with about thirty animals being raised for slaughter (though without electricity for freezers, the villagers complain quite fairly that storing such large amounts of meat is problematic).

He has also helped train volunteers and leaders from the community to assist with banding, and through his passion the locals began to take pride in “their” swallows.

Valuable and much-appreciated support came from the philanthropic A. G. Leventis Foundation, which for a number of years paid salaries to villagers to work as guards at the roosting site. Pierfrancesco has also organised banding trips to Ebbaken where thousands of swallows were processed (see Table 1 below). The villagers benefitted financially straight away from the influx of “eco-tourists” - coming to see that the swallows could form the basis of a new economy (although so far the numbers of overseas visitors has remained quite small).

There has been (well-deserved) success on a personal level too. Pierfrancesco began to work with a young woman from Ebbaken, Justina Abang, who - though initially just curious - slowly began to understand why this peculiar white man was coming all the way to Africa, to her village, to save birds. (Justina has written about her village and the swallows - go to Justina).

Several years on, in Italy on a LIPU-sponsored course in organic farming, she and Pierfrancesco became closer - they are now married and have a son.

Once an efficient swallow hunter (she first started hunting swallows at the age of ten), Justina (photo left) has become an important advocate for their protection, and she and Pierfrancesco now work together to improve the lives of the villagers in Ebbaken - and thus help ease the pressure on the precious swallows.

If all this sounds like a smoothly linear progression from ‘overhunting and unsustainability’ to ‘conservation success story’ it’s worth pointing out that there have of course been setbacks and suspicions to overcome.

Pierfrancesco tells a wonderful story, for example, that highlights the unique problems he’s been faced with: having convinced the villagers of the value of the swallows to their local economy, the swallows mysteriously disappeared from the roost in the winter of 2002/03. The locals were very surprised and worried - their theory, spelt out in a letter, was that Pierfrancesco had stolen a root of elephant grass “and planted it in Italy to protect the swallows better”, thereby removing the swallows for good and robbing them of their potential income! Apparently this became the view of the whole village, and it wasn’t until the swallows returned in huge numbers the following year that their faith in the project - and in Pierfrancesco himself - was restored…

Is the effort worthwhile?
Some conservationists in Europe questioned whether removing a (relatively) small percentage of swallows from such a huge population would be likely to have much of an impact on overall numbers, undermining the project’s efforts by questioning its worth.

To Pierfrancesco questioning the project on the basis of “numbers” is simply not scientifically valid.

Firstly, at the time these questions were being asked no-one knew whether the birds being killed represented a much larger percentage of a specific breeding group rather than a small percentage of the total Palearctic breeding population, meaning that the impact would be relatively much greater. In fact recent recoveries (see map right) suggest that the Ebbaken Barn Swallows are from eg eastern France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland (possibly 100% of the swallows breeding in both Belgium and Switzerland winter here), Germany, and northern Italy. Secondly, with deleterious pressures on swallows throughout their range increasing, any threat that could be nullified at such an important site would potentially have a long-term benefit on the population as a whole.

Clearly data is lacking and needs to be gathered before any suppositions about impacts on extant or future population sizes can be fully supported - but this works both ways of course, and rather than just accepting the loss of so many birds as a regrettable statistic I think we should be looking further into the future.

Ebbaken is just one of a group of villages that were taking huge numbers of swallows annually. In the Central African Republic there are 100 villages like Ebbaken still taking huge numbers of hirundines and other birds annually. Pierfrancesco estimates, for example, that between October and mid-December 2000 a staggering 600,000 Barn Swallows (and 8000 Sand Martins, 3000 European Swifts, 200 House Martins and about 1000 local swallow species, swifts and bee-eaters) were killed for food across the Central African Republic. To put that another way, he thinks it’s likely that every year between 2% and 5% of the entire European Barn Swallow population is taken for food in the CAR (see image below).

Were a catastrophe to occur to the swallows either on the breeding grounds or on the wintering grounds (the accidental or deliberate burning of wintering roost areas, for example) it’s highly unlikely that villagers would adjust their “take” accordingly in time. An abundant species can become uncommon in a surprisingly short space of time.

For proof of that look at what happened to the world’s one-time most abundant bird species, the now extinct Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius - wiped out by over-hunting and habitat destruction in the 1800’s, or the once-common vultures of India - annihilated by mis-use of the livestock anti-inflammatory drug Diclofenac in just the last ten years, declines of over 90% have been noted in some species.

Any work that ensures that the people of Ebbaken continue seeing swallows as a resource worth protecting rather than as merely a short-tem crop has to be worthwhile.

The Future:
Sadly, despite a huge amount of work, the project began to founder a couple of years ago. Though many people were initially interested in the Ebbaken Project, support began to drift away as, in Pierfrancesco’s words, the way the project was initially organised has led to confusion, a complicated structure with too many people from too many organisations on board, and - regrettably rather a common story from Nigeria - profit-taking.

This hasn’t weakened either his or Justina’s involvement though. Undaunted, they are both committed to carrying on, confident that “we are in position and we have the experience to start a new phase”. Key to this “new phase” is the building of a guest-house…

In October 2005 both Pierfrancesco and Justina went back to Ebbaken to finalise buying some land in the village - far easier said than done, given the logistical problems of buying land which is partly-seen as “communal” - and to begin laying the foundations for the guest-house (complete with a generator to ensure a steady supply of cold beer - a creature comfort that’s seen as a pre-requisite for any visiting birder or researcher!). Pierfrancesco is financing the land purchase and the construction himself, and as yet another illustration of the extraordinary problems he faces, when we met in November the equatorial rains were still falling and the dirt roads into Ebbaken were impassable - meaning that the trucks bringing in the cement and sand for the building-work still hadn’t arrived…

Justina stands by the foundations of the Guest-House, December 2005 Photo © P Micheloni

By early December though the situation had improved considerably: purchase of the land had gone through, and the foundation blocks were being laid (see photo above). By early 2006 the building was taking shape (Phase 2 of a planned 10 was finished) and Pierfrancesco was well on the way towards bringing a water-pump to the village. Determination was again winning through…with a great deal of personal support, Pierfrancesco would like acknowledging, from Lagos-based Jo Sievers.

Update 16 Dec 2005: A fully updated pdf of the 142 bird species recorded by Pierfrancesco Micheloni around Ebakken Boje is now online: Ebakken: Dry season Checklist (pdf)

Once complete, the guest-house will become a “project research centre and visitor centre” - a permanent statement of Justina’s and Pierfrancesco’s long-term determination to protect the swallows. They will start to reach out to bird banders again in the hope of kick-starting the project, determined to get it right this time. They will be providing information on the other species of birds that the forest around Ebbaken still holds to attract birders and bird tours.

Importantly work will start soon (perhaps in mid/late-2006) on an open platform hide by the swallow roost by Mr Mbeson Emmanuel Bessong of BokiBirds, a Nigerian colleague of Pierfrancesco’s, with money from the A. G. Leventis Foundation and Dr. Philip Hall of Pro Natura International.

To many of us used to seeing hides at reserves and game parks all over the world this may not seem much of a big deal, but the importance of building a permanent hide here shouldn’t be under-estimated: not only is going to make visiting the roost a great deal more comfortable for overseas birders but it’s also another very important statement of intent. It says that Piefrancesco and others are serious about bringing eco-tourists to what is (even in African terms) a very impoverished part of Nigeria; it further demonstrates to the villagers that their swallow roost is hugely important - important enough for scarce resources to be spent on a building just to watch birds; and it shows another long-term commitment to the area.

More than anything though actions like this will continue to motivate the local villagers, because without their continuing support and enthusiasm for the project there is little hope of protecting anything….

Importantly there is also work being done in Ebbaken by an NGO (again supported by the A. G. Leventis Foundation) with much the same aims, The African Research Association managing Development in Nigeria (DIN). DIN works with its community partners to protect forests, improve farming and reduce poverty and is a community action project of the African Research Association and linked to the Africa Research Trust, a UK charity. DIN staff live in the villages where they work and assist very poor cultivators and pastoralist communities to protect forests and endangered plants and animals, manage grasslands and farm more profitably by sustainable methods that protect the environment. They also encourage alternative livelihoods which increase income and reduce poverty. Though they may be coming from a slightly different philosphical background, hopefully DIN’s and Pierfrancesco’s work will combine and help the swallows by helping the community: I sincerely hope that between them they can keep the local villagers on board and maintain the protection currently given to the roosting areas.

In my opinion the world needs many more people like Pierfrancesco Micheloni - dedicated researchers who understand that working with local people and helping them develop alternative sustainable economies is key to the success of projects like this.

Though various NGOs and individuals have been involved in the past (eg Dr Hall of Pro Natura International, WWF International, Nigerian Conservation Foundation, Pandrillus, BirdLife International, LIPU (Italian BirdLife), the Ebbaken Project is now very much being driven by this one committed man.

When I first put this piece together I wrote that “it’s easy to question the motivation and commitment of someone you’ve never met, but I have no doubts about Pierfrancesco”. A few lines at the end of an email he sent me in October 2005 summed up (for me) the depth of his feelings: “I don’t know if you believe me, but there remains 20 days before I go to Lagos, but I’m already emotional, making my countdown every day, I’m in a hurry to reach the suffering place of Ebbaken, to see the people and the swallows, I have many things to do there, I feel almost more emotion than my wife, I’m so happy when I’m moving behind a motorcycle inside the forest, there I forget Italy, the tax to pay, the traffic, etc…”

Now that I have met him (in Lagos, in November 2005), I am even more convinced.

Pierfrancesco is a quiet man, but he has enormous reserves of determination and good humour. He shrugs off the (huge) problems of working unfunded and almost unsupported in a country like Nigeria (with its systemic corruption and massive differences in the lives of the well-educated, rich minority and the poorly-educated, poverty-stricken majority) with a shrug of his shoulders. He has been coming to Africa for twenty years now, paying his own way, taking all his leave from a full-time job in Italy to be able to keep returning. His commitment is tangible. Ask him why he does it and he smiles: “I love swallows”. It’s that simple…

Support needed…:
Can Piefrancesco Micheloni keep the work at Ebbaken going? He completely understands why there is a reluctance to donate to his efforts: aid money has disappeared into the vast pockets of Nigeria’s rulers for decades. But the project does need supporting. The total cost of the trip to Ebbaken in November 2005 (tickets, community work, medicines for villagers, building work etc) was around 10,000 Euros - of which 500 Euros came from much-appreciated donations from members of the Swallows-Martins-Swifts-Worldwide Yahoo group and the rest came from Pierfrancesco’s savings!

While Pierfrancesco will go on spending his personal money for as long as it lasts, even small donations - or sponsoring an advertising space on this page - would have a great impact on the ground. For example, the villagers need support to buy more poultry (the most practical replacement for swallow meat) and they need to be taught how to look after them. The project wants to be able to keep paying salaries to villagers to “guard” the elephant grass. The Ebbaken region is a superb area for growing cocoa: Pierfrancesco wants to be able to establish “Fairtrade” links, and raise the living standards of the villagers.

There are many small things that could be done to improve the lives of these extremely poor people: if those improvements can be made by a project that protects swallows, there will be strong and lasting associations made - “protect the swallows, improve life…”

To offer support or to contact Pierfrancesco directly - email micheloni”AT”libero.it

A fully auditable bank account in Pierfrancesco’s name has been set up under the auspices of Pro Natura International to recieve donations. If you’d like to donate to the Ebbaken Project please use the following address: PIEFRANCESCO MICHELONI PRO NATURA INTERNATIONAL BANCA DI CREDITO DI MONTERENZIO PIZZANO ITALIA Transfer is FREE for EU citizens if the amount is less than 12500 Euros and if you mention the exact IBAN and BIC or SWIFT code. These codes are : IBAN: IT18V0867236941015000015264 BIC/SWIFT: ICRAITMMIO0 (NB - the last figure is a zero)

*** if you live outside the EU, please contact your bank for the appropriate method of transfer ***

Table 1: Barn Swallows banded at Ebbaken (Total = 31296).

A small selection of other species also banded at Ebbaken:

Black Saw-wing Psalidoprocne pristoptera petiti (upper) - a page looking at the “black swallows” banded at Ebbaken is online at Charlie’s Bird Blog: Black Swallows, Dybowski’s Twinspot Euschistospiza dybowskii and Green Twinspot Mandingoa nitidula schlegeli (middle), Red-vented Paradise Flycatcher Terpsiphone rufocinerea and African Pygmy-Kingfisher Ispidina picta (lower).
All photographs copyright Pierfrancesco Micheloni

Rings for use in Ebbaken were provided by

• Italian Ringing Centre (INFS)
• International Birding & Research Centre - Eilat (IBRCE)
• Helgoland Ringing Centre

Pierfrancesco would additionally like to thank BirdLife International trustee and ringer Stephen Rumsey who has supplied and funded British ringing expeditions to Ebbaken.

Interested in swallows and swifts? Join the Yahoo Group “”Swallows, Martins & Swifts WorldWide”…go to groups.yahoo.com/group/Swallows-Martins-Swifts-Worldwide for details…

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