According to my colleague Alice Ward-Francis, São Tomé is "totally awesome". Alice is working with our Portuguese BirdLife Partner SPEA on a project to ensure the future of three Critically Endangered birds (the dwarf olive ibis, the São Tomé fiscal and the São Tomé grosbeak) and a host of other species that depend on the remnant forests for their survival, including a massive tree-frog, bats, reptiles and amphibians, and of course, the plants themselves.
Apparently Alice is not the only one who thinks that São Tomé is an incredible place – Dr Ana Rodrigues, a researcher at the CEFE-CNRS institute in France, agrees. Dr Rodrigues and her team recently analysed the world's 173,000 nature reserves and identified 138 that were "exceptionally irreplaceable" - São Tomé's Obô National Park came in at number 17. You can read more in the Guardian on-line or see the paper in Science if you have a login.
To identify areas of interest for São Tomé's critically endangered bird species, the BirdLife team surveyed the south of the island in August and September, around the south and east borders of the National Park. This area is the only one where all of the São Tomé endemic birds are known to occur and it is also here where oil palm plantation concessions have been granted, covering a minimum of 3500ha – so conservation action is extremely time-critical. The results from this extensive work will be used to help plan more sensitive land-use, hopefully with protection for the most important tracts of forest. Fortunately, the São Tomé government and the main oil palm company are involved in detailed discussions with the team, and with Alice leading the charge, I have high hopes that Obô National Park and other areas of São Tomé will continue to be exceptional into the distant future.
The team would like to thank the Mohamed Bin Zayed Species Fund for their support for the project, which would not have been able to go ahead without this funding.