#16 Lost Birds, Beards and Bonobos with Ian Redmond OBE. 2 of 2

Jul 31, 24

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Ep. 16 Lost Birds, Bonobos and Beards. In conversation with Ian Redmond OBE – part 2/2

[00:00:00] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Hello and welcome to episode 16 of the East Africa Travel Podcast hosted by me Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Mzungu. Thanks for tuning in.

In today’s episode, we resume the conversation with Ian Redmond, OBE. Mandevu “the bearded one” is one of his local African names. He’s also known as Shabadeux, and his wife Caroline, Nyabadeux.

[00:00:39] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Listen to this episode to find out why.

I spoke to Ian at their family home in Stroud, Gloucestershire, a small town in the UK.

Ian Redmond is “a self-confessed gorillaholic who’s been hooked for 40 years!” He’s a tropical field biologist and a conservationist.

In last week’s episode (episode 15) we talked about the interconnectedness of life and how the elephant, chimpanzee and gorilla gardeners of the forests of the Congo Basin are connected with a loaf of bread in England and – importantly – how local people can benefit financially from the ecosystem services of animals that are often regarded as a nuisance to local people when the animals trample, tread, or eat their crops, or endanger human life.

We also talked about Ian’s role in the mountain gorilla story and his mentor, Dr. Dian Fossey. He told us about the turning points in his life: the killing of Digit, the young silverback gorilla, and Charles the elephant.

[00:01:38] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Today we talk about the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a recently identified rare bird. We talk about Kahuzi Biega National Park, how safe it is (or not) to travel there, and I ask Ian whether there’s any other thing as good a model as gorilla tourism. He tells me all about bonobos, a great ape I’d love to see one day, and a phenomenon called “the primatologist’s neck.”

Which great ape is his favourite? Will he answer that question or not?

Ian has very many claims to fame: he coached Sigourney Weaver how to grunt like a gorilla for the film “Gorillas in the Mist” that came out in 1988. She was nominated for Best Actress for that.

[00:02:20] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Another little known fact I learned recently: in 1999, TV viewers in the UK voted for the “100 greatest TV moments” and they put Sir David Attenborough’s sequence with the gorillas at number 12, ranking it ahead of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and the wedding of Charles and Diana.

If you ask a British person about the gorillas, nearly everyone has seen that clip on TV many, many times, and it really kindled an interest and a deeper appreciation of gorillas, who until that point had been seen as scary monsters.

We now know mountain gorillas as gentle vegetarians. (Ian was part of the team who filmed Attenborough’s TV and conservation milestone).

[00:02:54] Charlotte Beauvoisin: There’s been an interesting discovery: a new bird, a Yellow-crested helmet shrike.

[00:03:06] Ian Redmond OBE: I didn’t see that.

[00:03:08] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I saw the story about it yesterday. It’s in the Congo. I think it’s an American university that funded it. It was only when I was halfway through reading the story that I realised it’s in the Albertine Rift. A long list of Congolese researchers are credited, and I think they found 18 birds. Absolutely stunning.

[00:03:29] Ian Redmond OBE: “Listed as a lost bird by the American Bird Conservancy, it hadn’t been seen in nearly two decades.” Nice.

[00:03:38] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Where were they?

[00:03:39] Ian Redmond OBE: Itombwe.

[00:03:41] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Which part?

[00:03:42] Ian Redmond OBE: Itombwe Massif. That’s south of Kahuzi Biega.  Near Bukavu, and the most southerly gorillas in Africa. And there’s very little in the way of resources going in to conserve it, so people are very worried about the rate of deforestation and exploitation of minerals and so on.

[00:04:02] Charlotte Beauvoisin: So this is gorilla habitat?

[00:04:03] Ian Redmond OBE: It is gorilla habitat and chimpanzee habitat and forest elephant habitat. It should be a jewel in the crown of the DRC, but it’s getting some protection. There are some people working there to try and get conservation going.

[00:04:20] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Perhaps the discovery of this long lost bird will help boost conservation and tourism in the area?

[00:04:27] Ian Redmond OBE: Yeah, anything like that, a story like that, is going to help.

[00:04:30] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I think Kahuzi Biega, which is to the south west of Lake Kivu, so bordering Rwanda is fairly accessible and – in terms of safety – I think it’s quite safe, isn’t it for tourism?

[00:04:47] Ian Redmond OBE: It depends.

[00:04:49] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Yes, okay, it’s a blanket statement.

[00:04:51] Ian Redmond OBE: You almost have to check on the day that you’re planning to cross, if there’s been any incident. If you’ve got an arrangement with the park then they will tell the border that you’re coming for gorilla tracking and they give you a sort of day visa for a fee. But that depends on if there’s just been an outrage, atrocity, by the bad guys with guns who are still lurking around in the forest there.

[00:05:18] Ian Redmond OBE: They’re mainly after minerals and other natural resources, so their primary means of income isn’t robbing tourists or holding them to ransom. But no-one wants them to get into that business either, so security is of concern. And, because of all the unrest in both North and South Kivu, the State Department in the U.S. and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the U.K. advise against all travel to the region.

[00:05:45] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Right, okay.

[00:05:47] Ian Redmond OBE: Which means that it’s not impossible, but your travel insurance wouldn’t cover you, unless you take out sort of “hostile territories” travel insurance like a war correspondent. And then that’s probably more expensive than most people want to put into a trip.

[00:05:59] Ian Redmond OBE: So you can wing it for a day or two. But if something goes wrong, then you don’t have travel insurance and whatever nationality you are, your diplomatic representative in that country might be limited in what they can do to help you, just because of the insecurity in the area.

[00:06:17] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Talking with my tourism hat on, we get so exasperated by these travel advisories because often they are – I kind of understand the rationale of them because the British government would be responsible for a British tourist in Uganda – but often they feel like they’re scaremongering and blowing things out of proportion. It can be immensely frustrating because if you get that travel advisory, it can affect a destination for years.

[00:06:43] Ian Redmond OBE: Yeah, it’s serious and it affects the lives of the people who live there who might have been dependent on tourism income. But given some of the awful things that have happened to tourists, you can understand why the warnings are there.

[00:06:57] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Yeah, it is understandable, despite the frustrations of those of us on the ground.

[00:07:03] Ian Redmond OBE: The terrible things that have happened to a very tiny number of tourists compared to the hundreds of thousands who have had a wonderful holiday in the region!

[00:07:10] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Yeah, I mean look what happens in London, in the States, in every country that you can name, but Africa feels like we are unfairly written off.

[00:07:22] Ian Redmond OBE: I agree, and this idea that when something bad happens in one African country, you don’t go to the continent is just absolutely ludicrous.

[00:07:30] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Going back to gorillas, I was reading this article in Travel Africa magazine; people are always interested in gorillas, and there’s a nice feature, and it asks “is there a better example of how tourism can drive conservation and sustain communities?”

[00:07:46] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Dian Fossey would have been immensely – she would have been overjoyed, wouldn’t she?

[00:07:51] Ian Redmond OBE: I think she’d be proud of it. She was always very disparaging of many tourists who she – she had a term to describe them as “idle rubberneckers” – but that was partly because we were coming into her home, the Karisoke Research Centre, rubbernecking into her window and she sometimes said she would hide under her desk because, you know, she was trying to get on with her work and tourists would want hours of her time. There was one lady who was in her 80s who made it up to camp and Dian sat her down and made her tea and was really impressed that she’d done that, so she could be hospitable.

[00:08:25] Ian Redmond OBE: But it all got a bit too much because, as she became more and more of a world figure, then people would make that pilgrimage and she would not be as welcoming.

[00:08:35] Charlotte Beauvoisin: That’s understandable, of course.

[00:08:37] Ian Redmond OBE: It was her home and she wasn’t there to be on show as a tourist attraction. In one sense, the fact that people climb up to her grave, for some, it is like they want to go and pay their respects to someone they admire greatly. And that’s very touching because it’s a beautiful location to be buried. But the thought that people have to buy a ticket to go and see Dian’s grave is slightly distasteful. Again, though, I’m sure Dian would think, “well, okay, I think it’s helping to fund the conservation of the park.” So I think she’d go with that.

[00:09:08] Ian Redmond OBE: Just as when she came to the UK in 1984, when the British edition of her book, Gorillas in the Mist, was published, she came and did some interviews and one lecture in the Linnaean Society in London. And it was well attended; it was packed. And she held the room as she could, speaking very softly, at times making the audience laugh in delight.

[00:09:33] Ian Redmond OBE: And during her lecture, she recognised that tourism was helping to bring resources into the park and the gorillas were safer, even though she had feared – because before Bill Weber and Amy Vedder used her methods to habituate gorillas for tourism, the tourists who tried to get to see gorillas were doing so without permission, and the only habituated groups were the research groups, so they were interfering with the research and disturbing the gorillas, and it was generally a bad thing. But, thankfully, Bill and Amy set up “the gorilla rules” and although they’ve been amended slightly [over the years], it went from six people to eight people [allowed to track each habituated gorilla family] per day, the one hour [maximum time allowed with the gorillas] has stuck and the ‘one visit a day’ has stuck.

[00:10:16] Ian Redmond OBE: And so if some, you know, civil servant in the capital city of any of the three countries [of Uganda, Rwanda and the DR Congo] decided, “oh, no, they can manage two visits a day,” it would happen, but it hasn’t. This respect for the gorillas and their wellbeing is central to the success of gorilla tourism, just as I think where there are some whale watching activities where people go and see whales. And if they’re respectful and keep their distance and the whales aren’t stressed or disturbed, the whales will come over to you to investigate these boats with these peculiar little creatures on them. And that’s a very positive thing. And the boat owners and the people in the hotels and the restaurants in the nearby town where the tourists come and stay, are all benefiting from the whales.

I don’t know that there’s anything quite as successful in terms of the economics as gorilla tourism. About 20 something years ago, I did a project for Born Free in Churchill in Manitoba, where polar bears are the big attraction for part of the year, and they have three tourist seasons in Churchill: bears, birds, and belugas.

[00:11:13] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Amazing.

[00:11:14] Ian Redmond OBE: And so bird watchers come at one time of the year, beluga whale watchers come at another time of the year, and the polar bear watchers come when the bears are there. And there, the only people who benefit from the bear tourism are the private sector, there is no park entrance fee. And, it kind of works because everyone values bears because the tourists come and if you’ve got a vehicle and you can take people out, you’ve got a living, but there is no direct fee; and then those businesses pay their taxes and the government uses some of that tax money to protect areas. But, a lot of the bear activity is not in a protected area. It’s in the town sometimes. So it’s very different. And with orangutans, you know, Indonesia has never capitalized on the interest that visitors have in seeing the shaggy red apes, so when I first took tourists there, with the Orangutan Foundation, I think the park ticket was it was something like 17.5 pence [less than US50 cents], most of which went to the capital, not to run the park. So, it’s gone up a bit since then, but it’s still nothing like the price that people pay to see gorillas.

It’s unfortunate that tourist attraction animals are treated so differently, you know, you’d think you’d want to pay the same to see a chimpanzee or a gorilla, but as you know, the tickets are different; more for gorillas.

And if only the DRC would become secure, both for the people and the wildlife, bonobos, would be a massive attraction. So many people who’ve seen gorillas and chimps and want to see the other African ape can’t do so because the travel insurance won’t cover them to go into the DRC.

[00:12:51] Ian Redmond OBE: So that’s frustrating, but it will come I’m sure, eventually.

[00:12:54] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I’d love to see bonobos. How would you describe a bonobo in comparison to a gorilla or a chimpanzee?

[00:13:01] Ian Redmond OBE: Well, there’s sometimes, the two sort of chimp species, the same genus, Pan troglodytes used to be called the common chimp, but of course its numbers are declining.

[00:13:10] Ian Redmond OBE: It’s sometimes called the robust chimp, to compare it with the bonobo, which is called the gracile chimp. So they’re more slender, they’re not particularly smaller, but they are lighter, and, there’s maybe similar height, but a more slender build. Very different society. Bonobos are south of the curve of the Congo River.

[00:13:32] Ian Redmond OBE: And chimpanzees are from West Africa to Uganda and Tanzania, north of the curve of the Congo River, so a much wider distribution of chimpanzees. 21 countries have chimpanzees in Africa, and only one has bonobos. And it’s the DRC, which makes it difficult to visit them.

I had the good fortune to take a film crew in to film bonobos, and it was an amazing experience.

[00:13:57] Ian Redmond OBE: They are so graceful and adept at moving around in the canopy. And you’ve heard of tennis elbow, well there’s a phenomenon called primatologist’s neck! You’re going to get a crick in your neck for constantly looking up in the canopy. So I would lie on the ground, and use my binoculars, and watch. And I was watching them feeding overhead.

They were feeding on the leaves of these massive trees. And as they moved, one of the leaves fluttered, fluttered, fluttered, fluttered, fluttered, fluttered down and landed on my chest.

[00:14:24] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Wow!

[00:14:26] Ian Redmond OBE: Oh, thank you very much. And I tasted it. It was delicious. A sort of slightly lemony, aromatic taste. And I thought, whoa!

[00:14:33] Ian Redmond OBE: If you could harvest those leaves and put them in packets, you could sell them in a supermarket for a huge price. But as it is, I don’t even know the species. It was just a tree that bonobos like to eat the leaves off. And one of them gifted me, by chance, landed on my chest. I couldn’t believe that. And it was very, very tasty.

[00:14:52] Ian Redmond OBE: I always try ape food plants to see what they’re like, because, you know, we’re apes and some of them are quite bitter. You know, some of them are okay, but some of them you think, “Whoa, that’s great!” And that was one of those. I can’t even tell you what species it was because I was only visiting and, I didn’t have a botanist with me – and I ate the specimen!

[00:15:16] Charlotte Beauvoisin: They are celebrating a gorilla birth at London Zoo, how do you feel about that as a gorilla lover and on behalf of Born Free? I mean that gorilla being in captivity (it’s not a mountain gorilla).

[00:15:29] Ian Redmond OBE: A birth is, in almost every respect, a celebratory event. It’s wonderful for the mother. It’s a new life. And by chance, I was speaking at the Primate Society of Great Britain Spring Scientific Meeting, which is being hosted by ZSL, Zoological Society of London.

[00:15:48] Ian Redmond OBE: And the night before the conference started, this mother gave birth. So of course, a whole hall full of primatologists wanted to go and see the baby. And I took photographs of this baby. But you have to ask, well, what is the future for that baby?

[00:16:01] Ian Redmond OBE: She might live. He or she, I’m not sure what the sex of the baby was, but he or she might live for 40 or 50 years and if it’s 40 or 50 years in a yard, the size of many people’s back garden, with a little bit of environmental enrichment, but every major decision in life, taken by the humans that control that gorilla, who you can mate with, how long you spend with that family, whether or not you get on well there, if the computer says, “Oh, we’ve got too much genetic representation of this line here, we have to move this gorilla somewhere else.”

[00:16:34] Ian Redmond OBE: You take them from your friends and family and put somewhere else, you just get settled down again, and it might happen again. I don’t think that respects the bonds between the individuals, the friendships, the family relationships. Which in the wild are what makes gorilla society work,

[00:16:55] Ian Redmond OBE: Gorillas are autonomous beings. They grow up, learn the culture of their group and learn how to utilize their habitat and all that is taken away from them in captivity. So it’s lovely seeing a baby gorilla, but tinged with sadness.

[00:17:11] Ian Redmond OBE: For what future there is, unless more zoos follow the example of the Aspinall Foundation. The late John Aspinall dreamed of putting gorillas back in the wild and his son Damien is making that a reality. And they’ve reintroduced in some cases, or introduced in other cases, gorillas from Kent, from Howletts Wild Animal Park, Kent, UK and from Portland, into two projects, one in Gabon and one in Congo, Brazzaville.

[00:17:35] Ian Redmond OBE: And those gorillas are now having babies in the wild. There have been some deaths because these are gorillas that do not have an immune system that’s used to African diseases and African foods. There have been more successes than failures and the potential of restoring them to their natural habitat is good for them because they get their autonomy back.

[00:17:57] Ian Redmond OBE: They become self-governing individuals and the habitat – which has been depleted of gorillas or had gorillas absent for decades – is suddenly more complete. So you’re putting the gardeners back into the forest, which improves the forest and makes life, in my view, much better for the gardeners. So that’s my concern, that I know Born Free shares.

[00:18:21] Ian Redmond OBE: I’ve been working with the Born Free Foundation since Dian was killed, actually. The year that Dian was killed, a few weeks after her death, I was living in Bristol. The phone rang- it was a phone on a wire in the hall! So I went out to the hall and picked it up. And it was Virginia McKenna, you know, an actress who I grew up watching in Born Free and Ring of Bright Water and all those films that she and her late husband Bill (but then he wasn’t late) made. Dian had been an advisor to the then charity called Zoocheck on gorilla matters.

[00:18:58] Ian Redmond OBE: And they said, would I mind taking on that role? And I was flattered to be asked and said, yes, of course. And since 1986, I’ve had this very positive relationship with the Born Free Foundation and I act as a part time consultant for them, which is why I was representing them in Uzbekistan, talking about migratory species.

[00:19:19] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Let’s talk about African names. Your name is Mandevu. Is that right?

[00:19:25] Ian Redmond OBE: I have got a beard.

[00:19:27] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Is that what it means?

[00:19:28] Ian Redmond OBE: Mandevu is bearded one, yes. But in Bukavu and Kahuzi Biega National Park, I’m known as Shabadeux.

[00:19:37] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Shabadeux, okay.

[00:19:38] Ian Redmond OBE: This means I’m a father of two, because my wife and I had twins.

[00:19:42] Ian Redmond OBE: So if you have twins, it’s quite a special thing in some cultures.

[00:19:47] Charlotte Beauvoisin: You’re Salongo in Uganda. That’s what you would be called.

[00:19:51] Ian Redmond OBE: Maybe the people in Uganda don’t realise that I’m a Salongo.

[00:19:56] Ian Redmond OBE: I’m Shabadeux and my wife is Nyabadeux.

[00:19:58] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh, fantastic!

[00:19:59] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Which great ape is your favourite, by the way?

[00:20:04] Ian Redmond OBE: My wife.

[00:20:08] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Which non-human?

[00:20:09] Ian Redmond OBE: No. I’m sorry. I’m a Shabadeux, father of twins. We don’t have favourites.

I’m an equal opportunities conservationist, and all species are amazing in their own way. I have of course the deepest roots and the longest experience with mountain gorillas. But at the times that I visit Western lowland gorillas, there are now some habituated families that you can go and visit in a similar way.

[00:20:31] Ian Redmond OBE: Those are extraordinary and they’re much more arboreal. They look more muscular actually, in the way that Bwindi gorillas look more muscular than Virunga gorillas. Because there are more fruit trees, so they spend more time clambering about, working out. And so they’ve got a much better definition.

[00:20:51] Ian Redmond OBE: Mountain gorillas in the Virungas tend to sit around and eat celery. There’s not so much exercise involved. They’re still pretty strong, but I think you don’t quite get the definition. And in Kahuzi Biega, the eastern lowland gorillas, or Grauer’s gorillas, which is the largest subspecies in terms of the population, recorded male size (that has been shot by a hunter and measured), those are even more muscular. Again, because there’s so many fruit trees and they’re spending their time up in the canopy, working out, eating, being in the gardens of the forest.

[00:21:22] Charlotte Beauvoisin: They’re more “musticular,” as Ugandans might say. That’s Uglish for you. Ugandan English.

[00:21:48] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Okay, thank you so much for your time.

[00:21:50] Ian Redmond OBE: It’s a pleasure, nice to see you. And I hope next time I see you we’ll be at Sunbird Hill.

[00:21:56] Charlotte Beauvoisin: You’ve been listening to the East Africa Travel Podcast, hosted by me, Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Muzungu, a blog that I’ve been writing since 2008.

The 20th edition of Kwita Izina, the gorilla naming ceremony, takes place in Rwanda this year, and the 2024 event will be on the 18th of October. (I’ve just had confirmation from Rwanda Development Board).

[00:22:18] Charlotte Beauvoisin: If you’ve enjoyed my conversations with Ian, please check out the show notes. There’s a long list of further reading and links to some of the organizations that he works with and represents.

During lockdown, Ian posted regular updates and the hashtag #BrightenYourDay showcased all kinds of interesting creatures, big and small, many of them from Ian’s garden in Gloucestershire.

You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X, formerly known as Twitter. Links are in the show notes.

If you’re looking to replace your mobile phone, and you’re at all disturbed by anything that was mentioned about the DRC in our conversation, then you might want to look up Fairphone.

[00:23:08] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Ian was very keen to tell me about the Fairphone that he has. The instability in the DR Congo, it doesn’t get much press attention, but millions of people have been displaced or killed or living in awful conditions because of the ongoing wars and battles for resources, particularly coltan, which goes in mobile phones.

[00:23:29] Charlotte Beauvoisin: And if you’re at all interested in environmental issues and the future of the Congo and its people and the gorillas, you might want to look up Fairphone. I recently had a shocking statistic that there are 120 million unused phones in our homes and drawers and so on.

[00:23:47] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I’m guilty of having an unused phone, because I’m always thinking, what happens if mine breaks or mine gets stolen? It’s good to have a backup. But I hadn’t thought about the fact that there are the unused resources sitting there, lying there. If we were all to recycle these phones, and certainly please don’t ever throw a phone in the bin, then perhaps we could help in a very small way reduce the pressure on the Congo and its people and perhaps contribute to reducing some of the suffering there.

[00:24:13] Charlotte Beauvoisin: You might think I’m going off at a tangent, but it’s all related. Another of Ian’s projects that we didn’t talk about is EcoFlix. It’s a similar model to Netflix, but has beautiful nature, environmental, and all kinds of interesting coverage from around the world. It’s carefully selected as well so when children watch it, they’re not going to be too disturbed by anything they see.

[00:24:36] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Schools and other institutions can get free access, otherwise for you and me paying adults, there’s a subscription fee. Ian is Head of Conservation at EcoFlix.

Huge thanks to Ian Redmond for being one of the first guests on the East Africa Travel Podcast. It’s been an absolute honour to speak to him and I’ve learnt so much, as with every interaction with him.

[00:25:01] Charlotte Beauvoisin: If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends. Or give us a review on Apple or Spotify, or write a comment on Diary of a Muzungu. See you next week!