Hunting territories and land use overlap in sedentarised Baka Pygmy communities in southeastern Cameroon

Abstract

A significant number of Baka Pygmies in Cameroon have been sedentarised in roadside villages, in contrast to their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence of the past. Although this change in lifestyle has had important consequences on health, most Baka villages still supplement their diets from forest products, especially wild meat. We used a combination of participatory methods and monitoring of individual hunters to map hunting territories in 10 Baka villages in southeastern Cameroon. From these, we determined whether wild meat extraction levels per village were related to the size of hunting territories, measured habitat use by hunters and finally defined the overlap between hunting territories and extractive industries in the region. Mapped village hunting areas averaged 205.2 ± 108.7 km2 (range 76.8–352.0 km2); all villages used a total of 2052 km2. From 295 tracks of 51 hunters, we showed that hunters travelled an average of 16.5 ± 13.5 km (range 0.9–89.8 km) from each village. Home ranges, derived from kernel utilization distributions, were correlated with village offtake levels, but hunter offtake and distance travelled were not significantly related, suggesting that enough prey was available even close to the villages. Hunters in all village areas exhibited a clear bias towards certain habitats, as indicated by positive Ivlev’s index of selectivity values. We also showed that all village hunting territories and hunter home ranges fall within mining and logging concessions. Our results are important for local understanding of forest land uses and to reconcile these with the other land uses in the region to better inform decisions concerning land use policy and planning.

The drivers of wild meat consumption in rural Cameroon: Insights for wild meat alternative project design

“…As the poorest of Cameroon's regions, many of the inhabitants adjacent to the DFR rely on subsistence farming for food security and livelihoods (World Bank, 2013) and on wild meat hunting as an additional livelihood and source of protein (Bobo et al, 2015). Inhabitants come from a number of different ethnicities predominantly from the east and southern region of Cameroon, namely the Badjoué, Boulou, Fang, Nzimé, and the Baka (UNESCO, 2021), who have different subsistence patterns (Ávila Martin et al, 2020; Fa et al, 2021).…”

Coupling paraecology and hunter GPS self‐follows to quantify village bushmeat hunting dynamics across the landscape scale

“…Participatory monitoring is not uniform in form nor does it occur in a vacuum: there are gradients in the degree of local involvement, and different degrees are appropriate for different scenarios (Danielsen et al, 2008). But generally, community bushmeat monitoring involves participating hunters voluntarily recording their offtake and other aspects of their hunting, often through reporting to locally trained "observers" (Ávila et al, 2019;Bizri et al, 2020;Constantino et al, 2008;Constantino et al, 2012;Dunn & Smith, 2011;Fa et al, 2021;Marrocoli et al, 2019;Martin et al, 2020;Ohl-Schacherer et al, 2007;Parry et al, 2009;Pattiselanno & Koibur, 2018;Pattiselanno et al, 2020;Read et al, 2010;Shaffer et al, 2017;Vieira et al, 2015;van Vliet et al, 2017;Yasuoka, 2006). Two hunting monitoring projects in South America took participatory monitoring beyond observers by employing paraecologists (Luzar et al, 2011;Noss et al, 2004Noss et al, , 2005, defined as a "resident professional with local knowledge who lacks formal academic training [but has] full-time employment underpinned by extensive [on site] training" (Schmiedel et al, 2016).…”

“…How many follows are needed to capture general trends? The availability of simple GPS units now enables hunter self‐follows (Fa et al, 2021; Nunes et al, 2020); use of this nascent approach should rapidly increase in years to come.…”

Wild Meat

“…Other BRI outputs -including focused work with communities (see Section 5.3), much of it novel -have influenced regional and global perspectives. BRI's work has also generated a better understanding of Indigenous Peoples, including broader perspectives on the global distribution of their lands (Garnett et al 2018); the distribution of Pygmies in the Congo Basin (Olivero et al 2016); the importance of Indigenous Peoples' lands for biodiversity protection (Fa et al 2020;O'Bryan et al 2020); health issues afflicting Pygmy groups in Cameroon (Funk et al 2020a(Funk et al , 2020b; and the importance of wild meat hunting to African Pygmies (Fa et al 2016(Fa et al , 2021b.…”

“…In addition, hunters participated in mapping their hunting territories (Figure 6. ; Fa et al 2021b). As shown in other hunting studies of Baka communities in southern Cameroon, most hunters engage in short hunting events, target a low diversity of relatively abundant species, such as small duikers and large rodents (porcupines and rats), and hunt fewer large-bodied species.…”