Environmental Education For Shimoni School Kids
Category: Coastal Forest, Environmental Education, Shimoni Forest | Date: Jun 11 2009 | By: gvikenya
These last few weeks have seen an exciting new development for GVI’s forest team here in Kenya. For one day a week we’ve decided to swap our boots and compasses for chalk and lesson plans!
Over the last few months, GVI has started working more and more with the Shimoni Base Academy, a new school tucked away in Shimoni village. It is part funded by private donations, which allows the fees for children from poorer families to be subsidised. One thing that shocked us was the revelation that the children at Base Academy were not being taught science at school. It seemed like such a shame that these children were living right on the edge of one of the most important habitats for biodiversity and endemism in the world – Shimoni’s Coastal Forest.
And as we are conducting research in the forest, and know it rather well, we thought that dedicating an hour a week to environmental education based around the forest they live next to, could have a massive impact on the children and in turn could help to protect the forest in the future.
We spoke to a few of the children and discovered they knew very little about the forest, and didn’t even know what animals lived there. So we created a short-term syllabus to kick things off, starting with a basic introduction to forests in general, and the important roles they play in things such as the water cycle and preventing soil erosion.
We then led onto why Shimoni Forest in particular was so important, touching on its role as a international biodiversity hotspot, how it protects the in-shore coral reefs and its capacity as a vital natural resource. After that we moved onto the animals of Shimoni forest (the lesson we think they enjoyed the most!) including the threatened population of the sub-species of Angolan black and white colobus, and the rare Zanj elephant shrew. The lesson planned for this week will be based on the consequences of Shimon Forest disappearing. Hopefully this will highlight to the kids the importance of the forest in every aspect of their lives, now they are more aware of what it gives them! The overlying theme for our environmental education lessons is going to be instilling a sense of pride in Shimoni Forest, which is actually their forest, so that they will go away with a better understanding of its role in their lives, and their role in its safe keeping.
Biodiversity in the Forest, Bush Babies in the Kitchen & Bush Pigs at the Bar!
Category: Birds, Coastal Forest, Colobus, Elephant Shrew, Shimoni Forest, Small mammals, Uncategorized, bush baby, chameleon | Date: Jan 21 2009 | By: gvikenya
It was only a matter of days after the arrival of our expedition members, before we were back in Shimoni’s coastal forest and underway with our research programme. The beginning of 2009 did not disappoint… within just the first week it felt like we’d seen an expedition’s worth of biodiversity. Heading out at 5.30am on bird surveys was made more than worthwhile with groups of colobus seemingly in every tree above. With the onset of the dry season, the leaves are falling and we were treated to clear views of colobus crashing through the branches and Syke’s monkeys scampering below.
The bird surveys delivered a hatrick of hornbills - crowned, silvery-cheeked and trumpeter. Elephant shrews were in evidence every day, hurtling over the leaf litter as were the small suni antelope. The night walk provided everyone with a clear view of a suni as it stood in our torchlight for a minute before disappearing in to the bush and bush babies too, their bright orange reflective eyes giving them away. However the most exciting ‘cameo’ of the week was a little chap that we hadn’t recorded since our first sighting nearly three years ago… an impressively cryptic species in the dry leaf litter, it seems remarkable that we should see it at all, and very satisfying to have a short-tailed (or bearded) pygmy chameleon make a reappearance on our casual observations database.
However, it seems that we didn’t need to go to all the effort of 5.30am departures and hot sweaty treks to the furthest reaches of our transects to enjoy Shimoni’s rich wildlife… we didn’t even need to leave the kitchen. Having quietly cursed rats for leaving half chewed bananas on the kitchen floor, I was proven wrong when two brown bundles of fur climbed through the window. The short-eared bush babies have returned every night since, and I can happily report that mangoes make for a suitable alternative to bananas for our uninvited dinner guests. And just when we thought our forest week was over, and we could relax with a cold beer at Smugglers, the biggest surprise of them all dropped by… a bush pig behind the bar!
Tags: biodiversity, bush baby, bush pig, chameleon, coastal forests, Colobus, Elephant Shrew, galago, hornbill, primate, sengi
GVI teach Shimoni’s School Children about their Forest
Category: Coastal Forest, Colobus, Community Conservation, Environmental Education, Shimoni Forest | Date: Sep 06 2008 | By: gvikenya
Back in November of last year GVI Kenya helped found the community-based organisation ‘Friends of Shimoni Forest’, our research having raised awareness amongst members of the Shimoni community that their forest was simply too valuable to lose. Friends of Shimoni Forest set out with the aims of conserving the indigenous forest and its biodiversity, supporting further research and raising awareness amongst surrounding communities. It’s been a slow process at times, but with our coastal forest research back up and running and a petition for the gazettement of Shimoni forest’s Kayas ready to be submitted to National Museums of Kenya it was very satisfying today to have the awareness underway with Shimoni’s school children.
19 Shimoni Primary School students drawn from standards 6, 7 and 8 gave up their Saturday morning to join us and learn about the biodiversity on their doorstep, play some educational games, take a walk in to the forest to understand more about the colobus and the array of other wildlife and finally watch a video that presented the diversity of tropical forests in an unforgettable way.
As important as the messages on biodiversity, the morning was exceptionally fun for everyone involved and engaged the children in wildlife that is often overlooked. We plan to run this every Saturday morning and reveal the secrets of Shimoni’s forest to many more of Shimoni’s children.
Tags: coastal forests, colobus monkeys, Community Conservation, Environmental Education
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