Eden to Addo Project Manager Pam Booth with landowner and founding member Neville Ledger
Marina and Chauncey Reid, Pam Booth, David and Pauline Mostert, Hennie Homan, Lloyd and Sheldon Mostert
Keurbooms moth or Leto venus
Connecting the wilderness area of Soetkraal in the east to the Knysna indigenous forest in the west, the Keurbooms Corridor links two of the bigger protected areas of the Garden Route National Park.
In addition to being a critical watershed for Plettenberg Bay and the Greater Bitou Municipality, the corridor is also a spectacular wilderness area, remote and beautiful with limited access. These characteristics are what make the corridor and its inhabitants special. Although they have decided to live a remote and isolated existence this has not stopped them from coming together in a shared effort to restore their piece of paradise.
The Keurbooms Corridor Voluntary Association is constituted for the purposes of establishing a Protected Environment. The main aims of the Protected Environment are to:
- Provide watershed services within the Keurbooms catchment
- Consolidate the conservation corridor between two formally Protected Areas
- Improve nature-based tourism opportunities.
Named after the river that winds its way through it, the Keurbooms Corridor is also home to the Keurbooms moth or Leto venus: And a Psoralia species known as ´Bloukeurtjie´.
The Keurbooms river and its tributaries are under serious threat from pine and wattle encroachment and the declaration of this Protected Environment represents a vital step towards correcting this situation.
Like the Robberg Coastal Corridor, the Keurbooms Corridor will be one of the first two landowner-led Protected Environments in South Africa.
LATEST NEWS – July 2013
Pam Booth, founder director of Eden to Addo, has spent many hours in field in her new Eden to Addo bakkie mapping black wattle in the Keurbooms Corridor. There are days when the task is overwhelming. The infestation is so great that it seems almost an impossible task to clear the alien vegetation. Pam spent a day in the field with the Green Trust and WWF CEO, Morne Du Plessis, explaining how we were going to tackle the problem. One step at a time and with the help of the enthusiastic landowners she has begun. The Tarka pictured here, a tributary of the Palmiet River on Takamma is the first area to be cleared. Jobs have been created, wattle is being cleared on Takama and bio-mass is being produced. An enormous amount of bio-mass will be produced over the next few years. The next step is to clear the biomass. We are raising funds ( as always) to buy two charcoal ovens. The ovens will be owned by the alien veg clearing team and will be used as a small enterprise development opportunity on site. A kind donor has already contributed R 5000.00 with another prepared to donate R15000.00 to match the R15000.00 we raise. We need another R10000.00 and we will have the total required. Pam has completed a research project on the manufacture of charcoal funded by tmf and therefore decided to follow this route as a start.
