FLIPPING BOOK CHRONICLE 2024

Award for the Best Conservation Team in Africa. Nine years previously they had been awarded the tender for a concession of 58 000 hectares inside the Niassa reserve, which they now manage in partnership with a village of 2 000 people in addition to their carnivore conservation work. This is the only concession inside the reserve that is a legal partnership with a community. This tchova-tchova (a local term) community conservation partnership is now thriving as it reaches its ten year mark, and was recently mentioned in a National Geographic article on Niassa, a testament to the tenacity, integrity and focus that Keith brings to everything he does. Together with their largely local team, they have built the 35-bed Mariri Environmental and Skills Training Centre that serves the people of the Niassa reserve, with children and adults regularly coming to the centre for courses in conservation education and skills training. In 2019 they launched the Mpopo Trails Camp, a community conservation-tourism camp to create a sustainable income for Mbamba Village. In the Niassa reserve, Keith and Colleen still live in a tent under the same sausage tree on the banks of the Lugenda River, and continue to use film and photography to complement their conservation work and provide an artistic outlet. In 2008 Keith completed their directorial filming debut with Badger Quest: The Honey Hunters of Niassa . The film won the award for Best Animal Behaviour at the Japan Wildlife Film Festival and was a finalist for Best Human-Wildlife Interaction and Independent Film at Missoula’s International Wildlife Film Festival. In 2011, highlights from the National Geographic Snake Killers film suddenly, and rather surprisingly, went viral on the internet, generating more than 100 million YouTube views, a burst of “Honey badger don’t care” merchandise, editorials and advertising, and one of the most enduring global wildlife YouTube memes. In this way, Keith became well known internationally for his extraordinary work on the honey badger. In 2014 his work to gain a deeper understanding of peoples’ spiritual relationship with wildlife inside the Niassa reserve resulted in Spirit Creatures: Niassa’s Invisible Realm. This film highlights beliefs held by Keith and Colleen that understanding and respecting local culture helps support more effective, long standing and ethical conservation. The film won several awards, including Best Independent Film at the Green Screen Nature Festival in 2014 in Eckernförde, Germany, and a special jury prize at the 12th Matsalu Nature Film Festival in 2014 in Estonia. Keith is currently the operations director and a conservation pilot for the Niassa Carnivore Project, where he works with his co-directors, wife Colleen and Agostinho Jorge, to continue to lead a conservation programme that is values based and outcomes driven. To both Keith and Colleen it has become increasingly important to focus on the goal of passing this programme into the safe hands of their team, so that it truly continues as a Mozambican-driven and locally led initiative. This will be the ultimate success of their efforts. Keith’s work and life and his intense focus, work ethic and passion for both conservation and film-making and photography are exemplified by this quote from LP Jacks, an American philosopher and minister, who said: “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” 40

Two years later, Keith joined forces with Colleen to start the first in-depth study of the honey badger in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in South Africa. There they spent four years living out of their Land Rover following habituated honey badgers across the dunes. While Colleen collected data for her PhD on honey badgers in the Kgalagadi, Keith was mentored in the craft of natural history documentaries by Emmy award-winning film makers David (a Michaelhouse Old Boy) and Carol Hughes. The resulting film, Snake Killers: Honey Badgers of the Kalahari , featured in the National Geographic Explorer Special in 2002 and won five international film awards for Animal Behaviour. Keith was already on track to receiving international acclaim. On hearing that honey badgers were being killed by beekeepers in the Western Cape, Keith initiated a conservation project to find solutions to support the species which he and Colleen had spent more than 5 800 hours watching in the Kalahari. Through working with beekeepers, hiring an extension worker and in collaboration with three South African conservation NGOs (WWF Nedbank Green Trust, Endangered Wildlife Trust and Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa), the badger beekeeper project was able to create awareness and reduce the conflict between honey badgers and commercial beekeepers in South Africa by finding simple, cost-effective ways to protect hives. This project won wide acclaim for its focus on practical solutions, such as honey badger-proof hives, and for providing incentives for change through consumer pressure for “honey badger-friendly honey” in collaboration with major retailers like Woolworths and Pick n Pay in South Africa. This project is an enduring success, and “badger proof” hives can still be seen across the Western Cape and beyond. In 2004 a lifelong dream was realized when Keith and Colleen published a story and photographs in the September issue of the National Geographic Magazine on the Kalahari honey badgers. They used the money earned from this article to buy a Land Rover to travel more than 39 000km across southern and eastern Africa for five months looking for a new place where they could make a difference working on honey badgers and other carnivores. It was on this trip that they twice visited the Niassa Special Reserve in northern Mozambique. This was where Keith and Colleen would spend the next 20 years of their lives and where they would raise and homeschool their children, Ella and Finn, in a remote, simple camp on the banks of the Lugenda River. The Niassa reserve, which spans 42 000km, is one of the largest and most important wilderness areas left in Africa. It captured their hearts and became the epicentre of their work in collaboration with other partners. In 2003 they founded the independent Niassa Carnivore Project – where they work in collaboration with local communities and the Mozambican management authority to find ways for people to thrive alongside lion, leopard, spotted hyena and African wild dogs – and in 2004 the Ratel Trust, which would later become a not-for-profit foundation funding conservation across Africa. Today, the small project started by Keith and Colleen and two staff supports more than 100 Mozambican conservationists, and has spawned and mentored many Mozambican conservationists, research studies, scholarships, and new ideas for conservation. This, naturally, demonstrates the impact of the work of Keith and Colleen on an entire country. Their work centres on finding practical, community-based, locally derived solutions to retaliatory killing and bushmeat snaring, while supporting human well-being. In 2007, the Niassa Carnivore Project received a Rufford Innovation Award for their lion conservation work in the Niassa reserve, and in 2021 the Africa Conservation