Born Free Foundation - Keep Wildlife in the Wild

EWCP celebrates the first Wolf Day in North Ethiopia

26 September 2012

Categories: Homepage News, Wolves Campaign News

The EWCP education officers, Fekadu and Zegeye, address the crowd at Muja Wolf Day

Our Wolf Ambassador in Aboi Gara, with the EWCP North Ethiopia monitor, Gebeyehu

Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme (EWCP) recently celebrated the first Wolf Day in North Ethiopia. The event was held in Muja, North Wollo, a village only a few kilometres from wolf range. The purpose of EWCP Wolf Day is to bring people together for a celebration of the Ethiopian wolves and their Afroalpine habitat, through games, sporting events, art competitions, and drama productions. More than 300 school children, villagers and administrators took part in the festivities, with Muja Primary School receiving the football trophy, and Wondach School winning the volleyball. The audience was also treated to a number of poems and a wildlife quiz, aimed at highlighting the conservation issues affecting the wolves and their habitat. The EWCP education officers, Zegeye and Fekadu, also took the opportunity to hand out information brochures to the audience that explained the concept of sustainable resource use in the highlands. The day was a real success, and we are hoping to make next year’s event even bigger and better.
As one participant remarked, “Conservation is very important, but it can also be fun!”

EWCP’s community ambassadors keeping a watchful eye on the wolves

There are four wolf populations in North Ethiopia and EWCP has been monitoring all of them since 2000. These populations are very small and vulnerable to extinction, however due to a limited budget, EWCP only has one wolf monitor to cover all four populations.  In order to improve our monitoring presence in the North, and to gather more information on these wolves and the threats they face, EWCP approached the local community in the Wollo highlands for help. We have now recruited three ‘Wolf Ambassadors’ in these core wolf areas, who are our eyes and ears when our monitor is elsewhere. One of these ambassadors is Tesfaye Milashu from Aboi Gara, a friend of EWCP’s since we first visited the Afroalpine range in 1999. Our Wolf Ambassadors, who have been trained and equipped with binoculars and GPS’s, represent EWCP in their local areas and monitor the wolf packs there. They are also alert to problems such as disease outbreaks or persecution. We are working on a similar concept in the southern Arsi Mountains, home to the third largest wolf population in Ethiopia, and hope to extend the ambassador programme into more wolf areas in the future.

If you would like to adopt our Ethopian Wolf Family the 'Web Valley Wolves' for just £2.50 a month and help contribute to the EWCP, then you can do so through our shop.