EEP Crowned pigeon number 4

EEP STUDBOOK CROWNED PIGEONS
6.5.4 The Lakekamu Basin
The Lakekamu Basin is located at the border of three provinces: The Gulf Province, Morobe
Province and the Central Province. The Basin comprises scattered small community villages
within a vast expanse of pristine rainforest, low hills and sharp-forested ridges rising up to the
summit of Papua New Guineas central cordillera. The area is about 1.700 km 2 , which covers a
large area of unbroken forest with a rich wildlife and provides an important habitat for large
birds and mammals which are threatened elsewhere in the country. Due to its high
biodiversity, the Lakekamu Basin was selected by Conservation Needs Assessment for
conservation purposes in Papua New Guinea (Pupang, 1996).
The Lakekamu Basin has some of those unique virgin forests and some of those rare
unpolluted rivers in the country. It was noted that forests far from the villages were not very
much disturbed by humans and this is mainly primary forest. Those, which are close, have
been heavily disturbed by people mainly when making gardens. The development forests near
the communities are of secondary forest resulted from abandoned gardens. There were more
secondary forest developed as people move inner in to the virgin forest to make new gardens.
And this is one of the factors, which shows a decrease in virgin forests and an increase in
secondary forest near the village.
Social history of the Lakekamu Basin
Environmental conditions in the Lakekamu Basin have been affected by centuries of human
occupation and use. Therefore, most of the rainforest is secondary rainforest. The social
history of the Lakekamu Basin is thus a necessary complement to the analysis of local
biological diversity. This information is also integral to proposed conservation initiatives in
the region (Kirsch, 1997).
There are four main villages in the Lakekamu Basin: Tekadu, Kakoro, Nukeva and Okovai,
but all of them consists of more settlements. The number of people living in the Lakekamu
Basin is estimated between 1158 (Pupang, 1996) and 2000 (Kirsch, 1997). There is little
known about the fluctuations of the population, but studies done by McArthur in 1971 have
shown that there should be no growth in the population at the Lakekamu Basin due to four
factors.
1. Abortion.
2. Mothers obstain from sexual intercourse for longer period after birth for health reasons
while breast-feeding.
3. Breast feeding delaying conception.
4. High infant rate is added to low birth rate.
However, according to actual field observations and reports from the village recorders, it has
shown that the population increased for the past years (Pupang, 1996). On the contrary, in
times of drought, like 1997, the population is declining very fast, because there is not enough
food to feed everybody and people are dying from sicknesses caused by a decreased
resistance.
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