381 | A Heart for a Baobab

CONSERVATION

The Okavango tour members busy placing stones around a Baobab seedling.

This young Baobab tree seems to have survived its first three critical years of age.

African Baobab

The African Baobab, with its multiple uses, is a long-lived tee, some being over 1 000 years old. With its swollen trunk it reaches a height of 18-25 m. The irregular globular shaped fruit, measuring 10-45 cm, contains a dry, edible, powdery pulp that covers the hard black kidney-shaped seeds. Especially elephants eat these fruits, dispersing seeds and braking the seed dormancy and thereby encouraging regeneration. But with elephants now being in danger of extinction because of habitat destruction and poaching, the natural regeneration of Baobab is badly affected. Furthermore the survival of Baobab populations is being threatened by environmental degradation and climate change. Baobab seedlings get gobbled up by livestock and can't tolerate drought for its first three years.

This is a matter of concern and BirdsConTour created the A Heart for a Baobab project. Wherever BirdsConTour encounters a young Baobab tree a heart of stones is placed around it, in a way of creating awareness about the threat to Baobabs.