Sinbad the Kakapo (Photo by Jake Osborne at https://www.flickr.com/photos/theylooklikeus/36213329345
Dear Readers, no sooner had I finished my post about New Zealand birds than I was invited to ‘adopt a kakapo’. Sadly, I soon discovered that the adoptions were ‘ symbolic, non-exclusive and do not entitle you to ownership of the birds’. Sniff. I’d rather fancied watching television with a kakapo beside me on the sofa, but nonetheless this did alert me to the sheer number of creatures that you can sponsor/adopt/fund, and of course everyone is very excited about this, what with Christmas coming up.
If you fancy adopting a kakapo, have a look here. It’s fairly pricey even with an exchange rate of .48 NZ $ to the £, but there we go. There aren’t many kakapos left, so every one counts.
If you fancy adopting an African animal, the Sheldrick Trust has plenty of orphaned elephants and rhinos for your delectation (and a couple of giraffes!)
Raha the Rhino
Ape Action Africa is a charity very close to my heart (I volunteered here in 2010, and the money is spent on the best possible care for the apes in the sanctuary). You can sponsor a chimp or a gorilla, and some of the stories really are heart-rending. Shufai the gorilla was injured when his mother was shot, contracted meningitis and ended up having part of his arm amputated, but he has grown into a strong and confident ape, with little sign of the trauma that he’s been through.
Shufai
Another important way (some would argue the most important way) to support wildlife, however, is habitat preservation. While it’s not as immediately fun to sponsor a bit of a bog or a tiny bit of rainforest that you’ll never see, it probably does more to look after a whole ecosystem than sponsoring an individual. It’s fair to say that even when you sponsor an individual creature that money will go into a pot that looks after all of the animals in the charity, but there’s more scope when it’s attempting to restore or preserve an area, with all of its ecosystem. The Wildlife Trusts enable you to adopt a bit of a meadow, a crab apple tree, a holly tree or an ancient tree in several locations across the country. Plantlife has an appeal for people to donate towards preserving its nature reserves, which are plant-rich areas across the UK. Buglife is trying to create more joined-up habitat for pollinators (which it’s calling B-Lines) and you can sponsor an area. I rather like the World Land Trust too – you can buy an acre of whichever rainforest they are currently working to preserve (mostly in Central/South America and East/South Africa) or buy a tree. And finally, if UK wetlands are your thing (and what’s not to like) you can adopt a wetland (or, unless you’re very rich, a tiny bit of one) from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust here.
Bewick’s Swan – Photo by DickDaniels (http://theworldbirds.org/), CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
And so that’s just a short list of ideas if you have any spare change rattling about (though I’m fully acknowledging what a hard time Christmas is for many people). If you have any local animal/environmental charities that might need a hand, do pop them into the comments – you never know what’s going to appeal to people, and a little can often go a long way. Over to you, Readers!