Louis Phipps

This website will probably serve as a conduit to demonstrate what can be done to enhance the ecological value of relatively intensive farming systems (albeit at a small scale), at the same time as producing food profitably (agriculture is an industry after all) at the mercy of a supply chain driven by supermarket retailers competing to keep prices as low as possible for consumers. I might also occasionally discuss hunting and the sustainable harvesting of wild animals as a source of food in an era when (western) populations are increasingly disconnected from the food production system. Related to this, I feel passionately that one of, if not the main issues that must be addressed is that of inequalities in food waste and the proportion of household income that is spent on food (and other essential items) in the richest versus the poorest nations. In reality, the website will most likely become a repository for photographs and videos of wildlife and habitats that I'm interested in and would like to share with others! 

I'm very open to constructive discussion and advice and am keen to learn from other peoples' experiences and expertise, so please do get in contact!  

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Background:

I grew up on a small dairy farm in Oxfordshire which had been in the family for a couple of generations and was managed by my parents. Although I loved working on the farm, there was never really a prospect of me earning a living from it, illustrated by the pressures brought about by the BSE and foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in the 1990s and 2000s. This eventually led to the sale of the Holstein Friesian dairy cattle because it was costing more to produce a litre of milk than the sale price. The cattle went to Cumbria to replace a herd that has been lost through the second foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. My dad retained some of the offspring of the dairy cattle to start a small-scale suckler herd to rear beef cattle, eventually buying in some Hereford heifers. 

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Around this time, although I worked on the farm at weekends and during school holidays when I enjoyed haymaking and stacking bales in the summer (despite chronic hayfever), I realised that the closest I could get to farming for a livelihood would be to work with wildlife. I had always been interested in wildlife, particularly birds, largely due to my fortunate exposure to it when on the farm, or out walking, fishing or shooting with my dad. In my teenage years I was a keen birdwatcher but kept it quiet from my mates as it was still seen as a bit of a "geek's" hobby then! For one of my birthdays my mum took me to look for the red kites that had been released near Christmas Common as part of the reintroduction project in England. As we hardly ever saw buzzards in the 1990s, it was incredibly exciting to see my first red kite in the distance, against the grey February sky!  After seeing Roy Dennis give an inspiring talk about the osprey release project at Rutland, I was totally hooked on raptor conservation and the science behind it, particularly the tracking technology that was answering so many long-standing questions.

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I applied to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, but wasn't accepted and fortunately ended up studying Zoology at Durham, where I had a great time and made some fantastic friends. The highlight for me was a field trip to a private game reserve in the North West Province of South Africa where we learnt a range of ecological census techniques alongside being taught about the practical management of the reserve. This included grazing management in the form of burning regimes and tightly-controlled culling to generate additional income through meat sales. All management activities were based on monitoring data and standard practices of game ranch management which South Africa leads the way in, reflected in their stable or increasing wildlife populations. These two weeks were a revelation for me - a perfect combination of farming practices working in synergy with wildlife conservation! 

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I was enthused and determined to get back to South Africa to learn more. I immediately enjoyed my degree a lot more as I could see how it could be applied to the real world. Within a few weeks of graduating from Durham I was back in South Africa having been accepted back at the reserve on a volunteer placement. I threw myself into all aspects of life on the reserve, including reserve management duties, such as anti-poaching patrols, controlled burning, even the camp maintenance. I really enjoyed the thrill of participating in the capture of wild animals, from impala to rhino and giraffe, to be sold to other reserves to maintain genetic diversity and also generate additional income. Eventually, after being offered a longer term position, I became involved in the culling activities which were a major source of income for the reserve, and necessary as the fences prevented emigration. Alongside all of this, we hosted hundreds of students each year on university field courses, as well as volunteers who assisted us with research into scavenger ecology as part of a long term Earthwatch project. In short, I had found my dream job - doing wildlife conservation and research at the same time as "farming" wildlife to sell to other reserves and produce food. To me, this was a great model of sustainable food production that enable the conservation and restoration of functioning ecosystems.

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While working on the reserve I was fortunate to regularly observe vultures (Cape, white-backed and lappet-faced) feeding on wild ungulate carcasses - impala, reedbuck or blesbok predated by caracal; and occasionally larger species that died from injuries, old age etc. In contrast, our friends and colleagues working in neighbouring national parks with the full range of apex predators (but no or very little hunting) rarely observed vultures. I started to look into this, and although many studies suggested that protected areas were critical for vultures, the level at which they relied upon them for foraging opportunities remained unknown and unquantified. It soon became clear that we actually knew very little about how far vultures were moving in southern Africa, or whether they preferred to forage in protected areas or on unprotected farmland. This would have implications for their conservation in terms of their potential exposure to poisoning and collisions or electrocutions on power lines (the main threats). Fortunately, modern technology had started to reveal movement patterns of wildlife through the use of near real-time tracking units which accurately recorded the locations of animals and transmitted the data using cellular or satellite networks. Following the recent collapse of vulture populations in Asia due to accidental poisoning by the veterinary drug diclofenac, and ongoing declines of African vulture populations, it was clear that a research priority was to establish where vultures forage, how far they travel and what threats the might be exposed to. After receiving support and advice from people already working on vulture research and conservation in southern Africa, I put together a research proposal and secured two years worth of funding from the Leverhulme Trust, via a Study Abroad Studentship. Over the next few years this led to many hours discussing vultures and other wildlife with local farmers; driving thousands of kilometres to collect carcasses for the vulture feeding site which I managed to research and monitoring purposes; and many, many hours waiting for vultures to enter the custom-built cage trap so we could fit them with tracking units to follow their movements. Ultimately, we learnt that both Cape and white-backed vultures traveled further than we initially thought (more than 1000 km from the capture site), frequently crossing international borders and spending most of their time outside protected areas on private farmland. We also learnt that Cape vultures regularly used pylons as roost sites which might expose them to risk of collision with electricity cables, and might be vulnerable to the changing climate. This research enabled me to gain a research MSc from the University of Pretoria (Onderstepoort) and a PhD from Nottingham Trent University in the spatial ecology of white-backed and Cape vultures, respectively.

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The link between vultures, farming and hunting is clear due to their reliance on a supply of domestic livestock and wild ungulate carcasses as their only source of food. Understanding, listening to and working with farmers and hunters is therefore essential for the effective conservation of vultures and many other species and habitats in our increasingly human-modified landscape.   

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Inevitably the writing up stages of the research took me away from fieldwork and ultimately back to the UK, and after graduating with my PhD I spent a couple of years working as research and monitoring coordinator for a fantastic elephant conservation project - the elephants were in West Africa and I was once again based at a desk back in Oxford!

Concurrently with moving back to the UK to complete my vulture research, my parents, having failed after many years of trying to prevent the sale of the original farm for development, had been pushed into a corner and took the opportunity to move to a larger mixed farm in Northamptonshire. My brother moved to the farm with his family and took on the management of the newly-established herd of stabilizer cattle alongside my dad, and I took on a very minor role in managing the countryside stewardship aspects of the farm during my spare time outside my full time job. 

This is essentially the current situation, although I have now moved back to working full time in vulture conservation rather than with elephants, and the vultures are in Europe and not Africa! In my limited spare time I am involved in the environmental management aspects of the farm, and occasionally assist with livestock farming activities.

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