Video: Wildlife Chronicles – Cagan Sekercioglu

As a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, I am greatly honored to be a part of this legacy of science, exploration, discovery, and dissemination of knowledge. In celebration of this historic day, I decided to write about some National Geographic firsts we achieved this fall in eastern Turkey while studying the conservation ecology of brown bears in the Sarıkamış Forest-Allahuekber Mountains National Park of Kars and Erzurum. These are:

1-Initiating the first study of the wildlife use of Turkey’s first wildlife corridor

2-First National Geographic wildlife research grant for Turkey

3-First National Geographic Crittercams used in Turkey

4-The first combined CritterCam and GPS transmitter deployed

5-Turkey’s first National Geographic wildlife documentary filmed

Turkey’s Biodiversity Crisis and Northeastern Turkey’s Spectacular Wildlife

Turkey (Türkiye) is the only country covered almost entirely by three of the world’s 34 global biodiversity hotspots: the Caucasus, Irano-Anatolian,and the Mediterranean. However, Turkey’s globally important biodiversity is experiencing a major conservation crisis. After studying this biodiversity for years, I founded the environmental organizations KuzeyDoga (Turkey) and Nature Turkiye Foundation (USA) to study, promote and protect Turkey’s biodiversity.

My ecology and conservation work is focused on northeastern Turkey. This region, with high biological, cultural and historical diversity, is a high plateau located at the intersection of two of the world’s global biodiversity hotspots, the Caucasus and Irano-Anatolian. Our work takes place in Kars, Ardahan, Erzurum, Artvin, Iğdır and Ağrı provinces, much of it reminiscent of Montana or Colorado in its climate, vegetation, and beautiful scenery consisting of mountains, wetlands, rivers, fields, meadows, and pine forests, with some Utah-like scenic arid lands thrown in.

This is also one of the most important places in Turkey for carnivorous mammals such as brown bears,wolves, lynx, and wild cats (Felis sylvestris), especially in the Sarıkamış Forest-Allahuekber Mountains National Park of Kars and Erzurum. Even leopards, once widespread in Turkey, may remain in the region, as they occur in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Iran that border Kars and its neighboring provinces Ardahan and Iğdır. Kars’ carnivores are top predators at the peak of the food chain, are indicators of a healthy environment, and comprise flagship and keystone species. Large carnivores need large areas because of their ecology and size, but are increasingly threatened worldwide.

Since 2006, we have studied northeastern Turkey’s carnivores with camera traps. Among 15 mammal species, our research documented wild cat and two subspecies of lynx (Caucasian and European) in eastern Turkey, discovered a new breeding population of lynx in Kars, and obtained the first photos in Turkey of lynx with young. Last year, for the first time in Turkey, we captured, collared and tracked gray wolves, in collaboration with Prof. Josip Kusak of Zagreb University. We obtained the first home range estimates for wolves in Turkey and showed that in only two months these keystone predators use an area 13 times larger than the Sarıkamış-Allahuekber National Park they were captured in. However, legal and illegal logging of Sarıkamış’ shrinking old-growth forests continue.

These isolated forests provide inadequate habitat for large mammal species, increase their vulnerability, and potentially reduce their genetic diversity. Lack of sufficient carnivore habitat, as well as people hunting and poaching carnivores’ natural prey species (e.g. wild boar, ibex, red deer and roe deer) contribute to wolves and brown bears feeding in garbage dumps and on livestock, increasing the human-carnivore conflict in the region. With support from the Christensen Fund, UNDP and the Whitley Fund, we are continuing our camera trap research and also working on local environmental education, outreach and ecotourism, in order to reduce the human-carnivore conflict in the region.

Will Brown Bears Use Turkey’s First Wildlife Corridor?

Turkey's First Wildlife Corridor

We had a dream team from Turkey, Croatia, Switzerland, and the USA, composed of myself (University of Utah) and my KuzeyDoga team, students and scientists from the universities of Bosporus, Kafkas, Zagreb, and Zurich,  the National Geographic CritterCam team, and filmmakers from National Geographic Channel Turkey. This extremely important, ambitious, risky, and unique project on the threatened brown bears of eastern Turkey succeeded thanks to a great team, our years of field experience in the region, months of planning, meticulous preparation, a highly professional, dedicated and integrated team, advance planning, and of course, a little bit of luck.

In only 17 days in September and October, we succeeded in catching and releasing 11 brown bears with no harm, fitting them with state-of-the-art GPS/GSM transmitters and Turkey’s first National Geographic Crittercams, and collecting vital data for their conservation. While all this was happening, a seven-person National Geographic documentary team from Turkey and the USA filmed it all to create Turkey’s first National Geographic wildlife documentary. Simultaneously, Crittercams, for the first time combined with GPS collars, filmed the world through brown bears’ eyes. This documentary, also using unique footage from Crittercams, will be aired this spring in Turkey, generating widespread awareness about the ecology and conservation of brown bears and other wildlife in the beautiful wildlands of the Sarıkamış Forest-Allahuekber Mountains National Park in Kars and Erzurum provinces. The ecology, movement, and behaviour data we collect from the transmitters and from National Geographic CritterCams are extremely important in helping conserve these bears and in shaping the creation of Turkey’s first wildlife corridor we initiated last year.

These are European brown bears (Ursus arctos arctos), the same species as the North American grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis). The European brown bear is smaller than the grizzly, on average, but in the Kars region, our bears can reach grizzly size. Naturally, these animals are highly dangerous when caught, requiring extensive experience in handling them. Fortunately, we had the perfect person for the job, Prof. Josip Kusak from the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He has studied brown bears, wolves, and other wildlife of Croatia for many years and is a trained wildlife vet. We also worked with him in 2011 to track wolves with GPS/GSM collars for the first time in Turkey.

Thanks to his experience and our teamwork, we were able to catch 11 bears in only 17 days, processed each bear within 1.5 hours of capture, and released each bear unharmed and in good health. KuzeyDoga’s Kars team, consisting of biologist Emrah Coban and wildlife veterinarian Aysegul Karaahmetoglu, worked around the clock with Josip to set up the bear traps, taking care of all the logistics, and tracking the bears after their release. We also had extensive help from Dr. Gabrielle Cozzi, a postdoc with my good friend Prof. Arpat Ozgul at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Not only Gabrielle provided seven of the transmitting collars we put on the bears, he also helped us every night in the field and spent most of his days tracking the collared bears. Gabrielle will be analyzing the tracking data along with my Ph.D. student Mark Chynoweth. During the project, Ayse Mergenci, a Ph.D. student co-advised by me and my good friend, Prof. Rasit Bilgin of Bosporus University, Istanbul, collected scat, hair and blood samples for her Ph.D. research. Prof. Zati Vatansever of Kars’ Kafkas University Veterinary Faculty also helped us with the project and collected bear ticks for his research. Prof. Sean Anderson of California State University Channel Islands was an all-around helper and entertainer-in-chief. General Directorates of Forestry and Nature Conservation and National Parks of the Ministry of Forestry and Water facilitated our work in the region.

 Turkey’s First National Geographic Wildlife Documentary

Perfectly complementing the scientific team were the National Geographic Crittercam and documentary teams. Greg Marshall and Kyler Abernathy flew in from the National Geographic headquarters in Washington DC with the state-of-the-art CritterCams they developed and perfected over the years. Thanks to their expertise, the CritterCams worked as planned, dropped when they were supposed to, signaled their locations with VHF transmitters, and captured the first-ever CritterCam footage from Turkey.

The entire process, from the adrenaline-surge of tranquilizing a bear to the thrill of tracking one hidden behind bushes only a few meters away, was filmed by the excellent National Geographic Channel Turkey documentary crew led by Emre Karberk and Gokberk Kocal. These brave fellows were constantly with us in the thick of the action, professionally filming every angle and capturing every sound, while remarkably not getting in the way. Their job is still not done and they are now busy editing days of footage. In a few months, the results of their labor, including Turkey’s first CritterCam footage, will be aired as part of Turkey’s first National Geographic wildlife documentary.

The Process

Catching, collaring, and releasing these large and dangerous animals required meticulous preparation, perfect coordination, and complete dedication. As the bears mainly feed at night in this region, this required our team to be ready all night to deploy at once with all of our field gear. I could not help but think of firefighters. Just like them, we slept in our clothes and took off as soon as the alarm came. The traps had a high-tech alarm system that sent us a text message as soon as a trap was triggered, so that the bear would not wait for long. Each of our cell phones got the message and we alternated two-hour watches through the night so the others could sleep and rest. When the alarm came, the watch person woke up the others. We were down in a few minutes and roaring to the trap in our 4WD Toyota LandCruiser. Thanks to our immediate response, we could arrive within 20 minutes of the capture, and finish processing the bear within 1.5 hours of capture. This was an important factor in all the bears waking up and heading back to the forest in perfect health, also confirmed by tracking them the next day.

Josip was the “tip of the spear”, certified and experienced with a tranquilizer gun. Josip and Aysegul, both expert wildlife vets, prepared the necessary drugs. For safety, we always drove to the traps, which were placed within the dart-reach of our vehicle. We checked the trap quickly to see if a bear was caught and to estimate its size for the required dosage. Then we drove away not to disturb it unnecessarily and prepared the tranquilizer dart. We drove back, got into position quickly and Josip darted the animal with the ease of years of experience. We drove away again to minimize stress and waited for the drug to take effect. Once the bear was asleep, the real work began. Every person had a role and knew what to do. We worked all together to maximize the data collected. Simultaneously, dozens of measurements were taken, blood, hair and tick samples collected, ear tags attached, a GPS/GSM collar put on, the CritterCam attached, both of them checked to make sure they were transmitting, while the watchers scanned the surrounding forest with spotlights to deter any curious bears from coming our way. Once everything was finished, we weighed the bear with a scale we had custom-made for this purpose. We then got into the field vehicles nearby and we waited until the bear woke up and walked away.

However, that did not mean we could sleep the rest of the night. Often, we would get multiple alarms in one night, as many as five. Unfortunately, most ended up being false alarms, whose frequency increased after the first week, as the bears figured out the traps! They would carefully approach the trap and somehow trigger it without getting caught. Once, we came soon after dawn to find a cow caught in the trap! Our team spent most of the days resetting the intricate traps, tracking the bears with collars, finding CritterCams, and taking the samples back to Kars, so we were getting quite exhausted towards the end. Meanwhile, the documentary crew had to film all this while making sure they interviewed each one of us and got all the necessary shots, so they were also running on fumes. However, the excitement and success of this project gave us the energy to do it all. The first week was especially productive when we caught five bears in five days and the remaining 12 days produced six bears. Not a single bear was caught twice.

The Findings: Why Does a Bear Watch the Sunrise?

After years of anticipation, months of preparation and weeks of hard field work, we succeeded beyond our expectations. Recovering the first CritterCam was especially nerve-wracking, as we did not know if it would work at all. After all, the bear could have moved it around, broken it or there could have been a technical problem. If all worked but the transmitter did not, we would never find the Crittercam in hundreds of square kilometers of land these bears roam.

When we found the first CritterCam, the female bear was sitting on  after it automatically fell off her. We waited until she left, carefully retrieved it and rushed back to watch the footage. It was an incredible thrill for all of us to sit down and watch Turkey’s first CritterCam videos, which were recorded while the CritterCam dangled from a brown bear’s neck. Seeing the world through a bear’s eyes is an unequaled experience.  As we expected, much of the footage was of bears sleeping, walking and resting, but unique moments and fascinating behavior of bears’ eating various fruits, drinking water, digging a day bed, staring down a wolf, walking away from a wild boar, and even one female watching the sun rise above a beautiful canyon for 20 minutes, made the whole effort worthwhile.

Nat Geo Crittercam video captured by brown bear walking through Sarıkamış Forest

CritterCams are programmed to drop off after 2 to 10 days, so that stage is only the beginning. Our GPS/GSM collars are programmed to stay on these animals for one to three years and collect detailed movement and habitat use data. These are state-of-the-art collars that not only collect accurate GPS points and other data, but also text message us these data to our cell phones. That’s right. We get text messages from brown bears. Because these bears roam far and wide, at programmed times the collar will “wake up” and look for the cell phone network. If there is coverage, it will send the data. If not, it will save the data, turn itself off and try again next time. If there is no coverage for days and no text messages come, one can track down these collars using “old school” VHF vehicle/foot tracking and download all the data rapidly using dedicated VHF or UHF receivers. Fortunately for us, the GSM system worked like a charm and we started getting text messages from the bears immediately. That success led to an unexpected problem. We were getting hundreds of text messages. We had to upgrade the text message plans of the bears’ collars in order not to pay a fortune…

The results were startling. Because these bears spend a lot of time feeding at a nearby garbage dump, especially before their winter hibernation, we did not expect them to travel much, although we very much hoped they would. Our hopes were realized beyond our expectations. The first bear crossed the entire Sarıkamış forest and back in 2 days, a distance of over 40 kilometers. The best surprise came from #87, a male. Within a week of his release, he walked nearly 100 km north and back, using the exact route of Turkey’s first wildlife corridor I had proposed to the government in 2008! Just like we expected, he spent the daylight hours hidden inside forest fragments, walking across deforested gaps only at night. He was like clockwork. As soon as the sun went down, he started walking to the next forest patch and at dawn, he rushed into the nearest forest cover before it got light and people could spot him. His behavior proved that brown bears would use and benefit from Turkey’s first wildlife corridor. The corridor will give them forest cover where they will be able to find shelter, food and a safe place to travel between forest patches. The government officials are very excited that at least one bear was already using the route of the corridor.

With 10 bears currently being tracked, which has doubled the number of brown bears ever tracked in Turkey, we hope to collect a lot more critical data on brown bear ecology and conservation for the years to come. These data will show us the most important parts of the region for these bears, indicate where to focus our wildlife corridor reforestation efforts, show us where bears cross the highways so we can ask the government to build wildlife passages, and help improve the conservation of bears and other wildlife in the region. We closely work with local people to raise awareness and the data we collect will also help us provide them with advice to reduce the ongoing human-bear conflict. National Geographic CritterCam footage is already revealing the bears’ fascinating behavior, and we expect to make other discoveries that would not be possible without the CritterCam. Equally importantly, Turkey’s first National Geographic wildlife documentary, focused on the brown bears of Sarıkamış National Park, will have an enormous impact in educating the public in the fascinating lives of these threatened animals, promote northeastern Turkey’s ecotourism value, increase local pride, and improve the conservation of brown bears and other wildlife of northeastern Turkey.

Honoring Sarıkamış’ Fallen Soldiers by Protecting All of Sarıkamış Forests

One cannot spend a day in Sarıkamış without remembering the nearly 120,000 soldiers of the Ottoman and Russian armies that died during the Sarıkamış battle between December 22, 1914 and January 15, 1915. Most of them were Ottoman soldiers that were ill-prepared for winter conditions and died of hypothermia in the harsh winter of Kars where temperatures can drop to -40 Centigrade (or Fahrenheit). Sarıkamış Forest-Allahuekber Mountains National Park was declared in 2004 to commemorate these martys and also to protect the highest elevation Scots pine forest in Turkey. However, the national park status is deceptive. 85% of this sacred forest that has become a graveyard for WWI soldiers is still actively logged and only 15% of the forest is within the national park’s borders. Of the approximately 400 km2 of forest, only 60 km2 is inside the national park, but even in this “protected” forest, illegal logging and timber poaching by local people is constant. Local, impoverished villagers use the timber for construction and firewood, and during our field work we routinely come across horse carts full of stolen wood. We are asking  Turkey’s  Ministry of Forestry and Water Works to include all of Sarıkamış Forest inside the national park, to stop logging the old growth forest, and to rapidly reforest the formerly-forested region by creating Turkey’s first wildlife corridor. If you want all of Sarikamis Forest and its world-class wildlife to be fully protected, please write to Prof. Dr. Veysel Eroglu, Turkey’s Minister of Forestry and Water Affairs.

This article is dedicated to the memory of my beloved father, Mehmet Celal Şekercioğlu. My parents were able to join me in Kars for a few days this fall and they were thrilled to see our research. My dad was especially excited, giddy with the joy of observing up close the magnificent bears he always loved to watch in documentaries. I had rarely seen him so energized and he spent the whole night awake to help us in the field. It was to be our last adventure together.

Eastern Turkey environmental organization KuzeyDoga celebrated September 1 International Vulture Awareness Day at Turkey’s first vulture restaurant in Igdir with another first for Turkey’s vultures.  first vulture restaurantOn August 17,  we started satellite-tracking globally endangered Egyptian vultures for the first time in Turkey, in collaboration with Turkey’s Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs, General Directorate of Nature Conservation and Natural Parks and the University of Utah. The transmitters are communicating with the satellites, all three birds are flying actively, and one of them may have already started its migration south.

My team and I have been monitoring Egyptian vultures in Kars and Igdir provinces since 2003. We showed that they breed near the intersection of the Aras and Arpacay rivers, especially in the 88 km long and spectacular Arpacay canyon that forms part of Turkey’s border with Armenia. KuzeyDoga has observed two to three dozen vultures in the region regularly and with the collaboration of Igdir Directorate of Forestry and Environment, established Turkey’s first vulture restaurant in Igdir in 2009. Our research and conservation efforts received a major boost and international recognition in 2010 with a grant from the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund.

Leaving road kill at Turkey’s first vulture restaurant. Mt Agri (5137 m) in the background. September 2009.

Working near the vulture restaurant close to the town of Tuzluca, the vultures were trapped with specialized and harmless methods. We placed three GPS/Argos satellite transmitters provided by Turkey’s Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs on three Egyptian vultures ranging in age from immature to breeding adult. The operation was successful. Each of the vultures is behaving normally and the transmitters are working without problems, sending the daily GPS locations of the vultures . Thus Egyptian vultures’ habitats, their migration routes, seasonal movements and feeding strategies will be better understood. We also hope to track their fall migrations from eastern Turkey southward and back. The data will be used to improve vulture conservation in Turkey.

As a result of KuzeyDoga team’s committed work, the first satellite transmitter was placed on an immature Egyptian vulture weighing 1840 grams. The individual was named ARAS after the Aras River in the region and KuzeyDoga’s bird banding station there. The data ARAS will send will let us know the locations that he visits, the migration route he takes and the sites he uses. A white wing tag with TR01 was placed on his wing for people to recognize him and ARAS’ transmitter started to send data on the same day. Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) is the smallest of Turkey’s four species of vulture and is globally endangered. They feed on carcasses, garbage, eggs of other birds, small vertebrates and insects. Their numbers declined rapidly worldwide due to poisoning from the diclofenac drug given to cattle in India, from the decline of wild and domestic animal carcasses in the wild, and from powerline collisions and poisoning from bait left for carnivorous mammals in Africa. Fortunately, Egyptian vultures are still breeding in Turkey in good numbers although we need a good estimate of their population in the entire country. Eastern Turkey provides some excellent locations because it is the livestock capital of Turkey and most of the livestock are free-ranging. Diclofenac is not a problem although stray dog poisoning campaigns may have adverse effects. Aras Valley and Arpacay Canyon in Kars and Igdir provinces in eastern Turkey are the two hotspots where Egyptian vultures breed regularly, but neither of these two sites are protected.

Video: Releasing Turkey’s first satellite-tagged Egyptian vultures Aras and Arpacay

We are excited to have achieved another first for ornithology, wildlife ecology and nature conservation in Turkey. KuzeyDoga team, led by our field biologist Emrah Coban, has worked hard and showed impressive commitment by waiting to catch these vultures during the hot summer days of Igdir where temperatures can reach 45 C in the shade. We finally succeeded in catching these wary and clever birds without harming them, fittem them with GPS/Argos satellite transmitters and released them back safely. ARAS, which is our first bird, has not started its autumn migration yet. Even so, while feeding around the Tuzluca district of Igdir, with occasional forays into neighboring provinces and Armenia, ARAS has already covered nearly 1000 kilometers in two weeks. Our second vulture, ARPACAY, apparently began its southerly migration only 2 days after it was tagged on August 22. It is about 300 km southeast of where it was tagged and has already traveled through Armenia, northern Iran and parts of Azerbaijan. We are curious to see if it will head further south to Africa. Our third Egyptian vulture, a beautiful adult bird we named after the IĞDIR province where we work, has not started its fall migration yet. The project has already grabbed the public’s imagination and has been covered by the national news agency, national TV, and some of Turkey’s leading newspapers. We hope that the migrations of the Egyptian vultures will be followed by the public and will engage young people, students, and the rest of the public in Egyptian vultures and their conservation.

First three days of satellite tracking of the Egyptian vulture Aras

In 2007, the global status of Egyptian vultures crashed from Least Concern to Endangered, dropping three levels, one of the worst one-year declines in conservation status among more than 10,000 species of the world’s birds. Among all the bird species in Turkey, the Egyptian vulture has shown the worst recent decline in global conservation status.

The populations of Egyptian vultures, one of planet’s most distinctive vulture species with their white feathers and yellow faces, are declining rapidly in India, Europe and Africa. The medication given to some Indian livestock, whose carcasses comprise an important part of the Egyptian vulture diet, cause lethal kidney failures. The other threats to Egyptian vultures are lead poisoning, intentional poisoning, poaching, the disturbance of the nests, power lines, wind turbines, disappearance of their prey and habitat destruction. It is estimated that the world population of Egyptian vultures is 21,900-30,000 individuals. Their European population declined by half in the last 42 years whereas the Balkan population declined by half in the last 8 years. Egyptian vultures suffered from food shortages when traditional livestock breeding ended in Europe, slaughter houses and garbage dumps were closed and the wild animals disappeared from large parts of Europe. To help Turkey’s four vulture species breeding in the region, in 2009 KuzeyDoga Society and the Igdir Directorate of Forestry and Water Affairs established Turkey’s first vulture restaurant in the Green Belt Forest of the Igdir province. The vultures coming to this restaurant to feed on the carcasses of dead animals and leftovers of slaughter houses may attract wildlife photographers and nature tourists. However, the future of Turkey’s first vulture restaurant is unclear due to the lack of support.

With this satellite tracking project, supported by Turkey’s Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs, General Directorate of Nature Conservation and Natural Parks and the University of Utah, KuzeyDoga’s goal is to improve the conservation of Turkey’s Egyptian vultures, understand their breeding, migrating and wintering locations, and draw attention to their plight. Arpacay Canyon and Aras Valley where these vultures breed have no conservation status. It is extremely important for Turkey’s four vulture species breeding in this region to have official protection status for these two canyons and to expand the scope of the vulture restaurant that provides a safe food resource for the region’s vultures.

Turkey (Türkiye) is the only country covered almost entirely by three of the world’s 34 global biodiversity hotspots: the Caucasus, Irano-Anatolian,and the Mediterranean. At the nexus of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, Turkey’s location, mountains, and its encirclement by four seas (Black, Marmara, Aegean, and Mediterrenean) have resulted in spectacular biodiversity, making Turkey “the biodiversity superpower of Europe“. Of over 9000 native vascular plant species known from Turkey, one third are endemic. Large carnivores such as brown bear (Ursus arctos), wolf (Canis lupus), Caucasian lynx (Lynx lynx dinniki), caracal (Caracal caracal), striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena), and possibly even leopard (Panthera pardus), still roam the wild corners of this diverse country that covers 783,562 km² and hosts nearly 75 million people.

 Kars is also one of the most important places in Turkey for carnivorous mammals such as brown bears, wolves, lynx, and wild cats (Felis sylvestris), especially in the Sarıkamış Forest-Allahuekber Mountains National Park. Even leopards, once widespread in Turkey, may remain in the region, as they occur in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Iran that border Kars and its neighboring provinces Ardahan and Iğdır. Kars’ carnivores are top predators at the peak of the food chain, are indicators of a healthy environment, and comprise flagship and keystone species. Large carnivores need large areas because of their ecology and size, but are increasingly threatened worldwide.

In the past six years, with my environmental organization KuzeyDoğa and in collaboration with the General Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks (GDNCNP), we have been doing long-term, community-based conservation, ecological research, and village-based ecotourism work focused on northeastern Turkey’s wildlife. Our work in Kars’ Sarıkamış Forest-Allahuekber Mountains National Park has been supported by Born Free Foundation, Christensen Fund, GDNCNP, Turkcell, United Nations Development Programme, and Whitley Fund. We studied northeastern Turkey’s carnivores with camera traps and last year we started the first wolf tracking project in Turkey, in collaboration with Prof. Josip Kusak of Zagreb University. Our research documented wild cat and two subspecies of lynx in eastern Turkey, discovered a new breeding population of lynx in Kars, and obtained the first photos in Turkey of lynx with young. We also obtained the first home range estimates for wolves in Turkey and showed that in only two months these keystone predators use an area 13 times larger than the Sarıkamış-Allahuekber National Park they were captured in. However, legal and illegal logging of Sarıkamış’ shrinking old-growth forests continue.

These isolated forests provide inadequate habitat for large mammal species, increase their vulnerability, and potentially reduce their genetic diversity. Lack of sufficient carnivore habitat, as well as people hunting and poaching carnivores’ natural prey species (e.g. wild boar, ibex, red deer and roe deer) contribute to wolves and brown bears feeding in garbage dumps and on livestock, increasing the human-carnivore conflict in the region.

Turkey’s first wildlife corridor will cover 23,500 hectares and will extend for 82 km, from our conservation and research focus Sarıkamış Forest-Allahuekber Mountains National Park, through the provinces of Kars, Erzurum, Artvin, and Ardahan, all the way to the Caucasus forests on the Turkey-Georgia border. Bigger in area than the 22,900 hectare national park it connects, this corridor will provide additional habitat for large carnivores, will connect their isolated populations, and hopefully will also help reduce the local human-carnivore conflict. As Ardahan’s Posof forests are connected to Georgia’s Akhaltsikhe forests that border the 85,000 hectare Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park, Turkey’s first wildlife corridor will also promote transboundary conservation in the region.

For me, 2011 started with a great post by David Braun, so I will thank him by ending the year with my first National Geographic piece, about my country Turkey (Türkiye). Turkey is the only country covered almost entirely by three of the world’s 34 global biodiversity hotspots: the Caucasus, Irano-Anatolian,and the Mediterranean. At the nexus of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, Turkey’s location, mountains, and its encirclement by three seas have resulted in spectacular biodiversity, making Turkey “the biodiversity superpower of Europe“. Of over 9000 known native vascular plant species, one third are endemic. Large carnivores such as brown bear, wolf, Caucasian lynx, caracal, striped hyena, and possibly even leopard, still roam the wild corners of this diverse country that covers 783,562 km² and hosts 75 million people.

Turkey’s Globally Important Biodiversity In Danger

Two papers I published with my colleagues this month highlight Turkey’s growing conservation crisis, the worst in the country’s long and fascinating history. “Turkey’s globally important biodiversity in crisis“, our detailed review of Turkey’s biodiversity, habitats, and conservation issues was published in the December 2011 issue of the journal Biological Conservation. This comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Turkey’s natural wealth and environmental problems, elaborated below, has been engagingly summarized by the New York Times, and the Treehugger.

“Turkey’s rich natural heritage under assault“, published in Science last week, highlights the scale and extent of these threats, in particular all the environmental laws that were changed in the past two years to make it easier to replace Turkey’s crucial habitats and protected areas with mines, dams, tourist resorts, and other types of “development”. As Jennifer Hattam states, this “arbitrary, development-obsessed environmental policy-making is greatly threatening Turkey’s ecosystems“.

Undammed Çoruh River, Artvin

Turkey currently ranks 140th out of 163 countries in biodiversity and habitat conservation. Although Turkey’s total forest area increased by 5.9% since 1973, endemic-rich Mediterranean maquis, grasslands, coastal areas, wetlands, rivers, and even some old-growth forests are disappearing, while overgrazing and rampant erosion degrade steppes and rangelands. The current developmentalist obsession, particularly regarding water use, threatens to eliminate much of what remains, while forcing large-scale migration from rural areas to the cities. According to current plans, Turkey’s rivers and streams will be dammed with almost 4000 dams, diversions, and hydroelectric powerplants for power, irrigation, and drinking water by 2023.

A dam being built on Çoruh River, Artvin

Unchecked urbanization, dam construction, draining of wetlands, poaching, and excessive irrigation are the most widespread threats to biodiversity. Preserving Turkey’s remaining biodiversity will necessitate immediate action, international attention, greater support for Turkey’s developing conservation capacity, and the expansion of a nascent Turkish conservation ethic.

KuzeyDoğa: Conservation Action in Northeastern Turkey

Conservation biologists should not be content with only publishing scientific papers and expecting other people to do the boots-in-the-mud grassroots conservation. Conservation biology is a crisis discipline and its practitioners need to practice what they preach. In 2003 I began my biodiversity research and conservation work in Kars, northeastern Turkey, a wild, remote and impoverished corner of the country where the Caucasus and Irano-Anatolian biodiversity hotspots meet. As our conservation, biodiversity research, ecological restoration, and village-based ecotourism projects grew, in 2007 I founded the nonprofit environmental organization KuzeyDoğa that works to promote biodiversity research and conservation in Turkey. In eastern Turkey, threats to wildlife are many, but grassroots conservation and wildlife research efforts are scarce. We work hard to fill this gap, conducting community-based conservation, education, research, and ecotourism projects that cover the whole range of ecology and biodiversity, from ethnobotany to wetland restoration and from bird lice to lynx. With the help of hundreds of dedicated volunteers from more than 20 countries, we monitor migratory and resident birds at eastern Turkey’s first bird banding station, situated in the Aras River wetlands near breathtaking Mt. Ağrı (5137 m). We study bears, wolves, lynx, wild cat and other mammals of the Sarıkamış-Allahuekber National Park with camera traps, molecular fingerprinting and radio tracking. We created Turkey’s first vulture restaurant, built Turkey’s first bird nesting island and are working with the Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs to create Turkey’s first wildlife corridor. Equally importantly, we work with local villagers and students, undertake environmental education, promote village-based ecotourism, and regularly communicate the importance of biodiversity conservation to students, citizens, and decision-makers in the region and throughout Turkey.

Video: Kars Lake Kuyucuk by Sir David Attenborough

You can learn more about our conservation work in eastern Turkey here and here. For a fascinating and funny account of our work that weaves Russian literature with northeastern Turkey’s rich history, culture and biodiversity, I recommend you read the New Yorker article “Natural Histories” by Elif Batuman and listen to the related podcast.

Mt. Ağrı (5137 m) of eastern Turkey seen from Lake Kuyucuk of Kars, 137 km away. © Çağan H. Şekercioğlu