Something

worth protecting

A man takes up the unrewarding task of saving manumea, Western Samoa’s pigeon with the ugly beak. DAVID NORTH reports on how Toni Tipamaa has infected a whole community with his cause.

In many ways Toni Tipamaa plays the Noah Idechong role in Western Samoa.

Both are grassroots environmental activists.

Both build on traditional concerns, practices and pride to encourage preser vation of nature in the islands.

And both have some support from an interesting, small-scale public interest group in Philadelphia - RARE Centre for Tropical Conservation.

RARE, now 20-years-old and with a million-dollar budget for the first time in its history this year, has followed what might be called in the US the “spotted owl strategy” of conservation. This is to focus public attention on a single, endan gered species - the spotted owl in what is left of the once-massive virgin forests of America’s Pacific northwest - seeking to save the bird’s entire environment as well as the bird itself.

RARE, however, has worked outside the US, and until it came to the Pacific a couple of years ago it used tropical par rots as its stalking birds. Before coming to Western Samoa, RARE had largely worked in the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, such as St Lucia, Dominica and the Caymans - seeking local allies and building local capacities to aid the conservation cause.

In financial terms it would be a lever age operation: if the metaphor is the civil rights struggle in the American South of a generation ago, RARE’s Philadelphia staff consists of “outside agitators.”

Toni Tipamaa’s task was to translate this mainland strategy, long honed in the Caribbean, into South Pacific terms. RARE

says he has met this challenge and much more in Western Samoa.

The bird used there is the endangered manumea, which in English is the tooth billed pigeon and in Latin is didunculus strigirostris. It is large (38 centimetres), and a bit awkward: a RARE publication says that its flight is “rather ponderous through the sub-stage of the forest, often following a noisy start.”

Most of the survivors live in the high er parts of Savaii and Upolu, and it is not found outside Western Samoa.

Tipamaa and RARE did something unusual in environmental campaigns; they conducted a bench-mark survey before they started their education work to see how familiar the Western Samoan populace was with the manumea and other endangered species, such as fruit bats and sea turtles.

Then they launched a vigorous cam paign to get the entire population - from school children to corporate executives to pay attention to these issues. They stressed local pride, and the uniqueness of the manumea. Kids wrote essays and drew pictures, there were letters to the editor of the local papers; there were contests and songs and radio news; and there were posters and bumper stickers.

After the first burst of activity Tipamaa and his colleagues conducted another survey, reaching what in the polling busi ness would be regarded as a very large sample - fully one half of one per cent of the Western Samoan population.

They found that on many levels the work had reached its goal. More people were aware of the national bird than before, more were aware that it was man

- not cyclones - that was endangering the bird (by eating it and cutting down trees), and more were interested in its preservation. They found, on the other hand, limited additional knowledge about the country’s park system.

In short, the joint RARE-Western Samoan government report on this effort is not the bland sort of document that governments often issue. When things did not work, they said so.

Given my interest in the use of postage stamps for governmental purpos es (see PIM August 1994) I found a bit of bracing honesty on this point in the report entitled “Marketing the Manumea,”

A Conservation Education Programme for Western Samoa.”

It indicated that the activists, who secured good co-operation with the gov ernment in other ways, ran into a stone wall when they tried to get the local phi latelic authorities to issue a stamp in honour of the Manumea. The notion was that this would reinforce other public education efforts in the islands, and be useful to the broader cause world-wide.

But the authorities said, in effect, that they already had a series of stamps on birds and did not want any more of them.

Maybe RARE should have intervened with the Western Samoa’s stamp whole salers, whoever they are and wherever the are - maybe 130 kilometres up the rail line from Philadelphia in New York.

My point is that reporting this setback (in somewhat more oblique terms than those used above) makes Tipamaa’s claims of success all that more believable.

Maybe he and RARE will finally save the rare pigeon with the ugly beak. ■

A girl is dwarfed by a caricature of a manumea.