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Travelling to Africa helps conserve its National Parks

Bench Africa helps bring Emmy-winning filmmaker Bob Poole to Australia to talk about his experience conserving Africa's last wilderness, and we're glad they did.

Bench Africa helps bring Emmy-winning filmmaker Bob Poole to Australia to talk about his experience conserving Africa’s last wilderness, and we’re glad they did.

Bob Poole’s story is a fascinating one. Having moved to Africa when he was just 3, along with his parents and a sister, he grew up with a love of nature and wildlife.

Africa got into his blood.

At aged 17 he was asked to join a National Geographic trip as a camera assistant – something of which he admits at the time he knew nothing about – and then spent the next 10 years travelling with world as a camera assistant for National Geographic learning the craft inside and out.

Upon returning to his beloved Africa, he realised that the continent he knew as a boy was disappearing.

Like everywhere else in the world, the human population was growing in astronomical numbers and the delicate balance of the eco-system was being overrun by the sheer volume of people.

Bob wanted to get involved to help return Africa to its natural glory.

As things go, he was sent to do a documentary on Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. Arriving there, he noticed that there were few animals in the park but the beauty of the landscape there blew him away, it was one of the most stunning landscapes he’d ever seen.

He looked for project after project to keep him in the park, continually pitching new ideas to National Geographic.

He managed to stay in Gorongosa for several years and he started to notice that the animals were coming back.

That was good news but also bad news, as the numbers of poachers in the area was high.

With few roads in the park, the poachers could roam relatively undetected laying many dangerous snare traps along the way.

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Bob and the other team in the park looked for ways to stop the decimation of the animals in the park.

One of the best devices they started using was to equip several lions with lion collars from which they could track their movements on a GPS tracker.

As lions are social animals, they could then follow them and locate their pride allowing them to document their numbers.

When the GPS trackers stopped moving, it was often because the animals were snared, and they could then rescue the lions out of snares.

When asked about what people can do to help the conservation situation in Africa, Bob said one of the best things people can do is to visit Africa. That way, money is filtered into these parks and the government is forced to recognise that there is real value in conserving these special lands.

For more information on trips to Africa, contact Bench Africa.

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