African Wildlife & Environment Issue 77 FINAL ISSUE

GENERAL

Dr John Ledger EDITORIAL This is rather an important issue of our magazine, for a couple of reasons. The first is that we have a brand-new feature aimed at our younger readers. Nature Notes, starting on page 43, is an educational, fun section dealing with spiders and their silk. We expect this and future articles to be of great value and interest to young naturalists, and to teachers who need to prepare lessons or project sheets. But the wonders of electronic publishing allow us to go one further. On page 44 we read "Time to watch a clip…". We click on the button, and wow! There is a video on spiders and their silk!

We can now say very much the same about African Wildlife & Environment . We can distribute unlimited copies of the e-magazine, reaching people all over the world. Our advertisers can now reach a massive audience, and can even embed videos of their game lodges, guest houses and nature trails into the magazine! We can play bird calls and croaking of frogs, and much more! One disadvantage is that in many regions of Africa there are no Internet connections or digital technology. In such regions, often in rural villages around wildlife areas, printed magazines are eagerly consumed by teachers and children alike, for they are rare resources in a world that simply does not have access to such materials.We would like to hear from our readers about YOUR thoughts on this brave new world of digital publishing. This issue is full of interesting articles. We pay tribute to the life of Keith Cooper, one of WESSA's most faithful servants and a wonderfully kind and knowledgeable man who will be sorely missed. We look at the tricky issue of elephant hunting through the eyes of Gail Thompson, who writes very perceptively on this sensitive subject. Professor Anthony Turton again educates us about water matters in a fascinating article.We visit an Aloe farm, learn about heathlands in Africa, and birders get new views of the African Pygmy-goose. All this and more in your latest electronic magazine. Welcome to the digital age, and enjoy the read!

We are now into the second fully digital issue of African Wildlife & Environment magazine. Many of our readers have asked when (and if) we will return to the familiar printed magazine that we all got so fond of reading in the years and decades before Covid-19 turned our worlds upside down. I want to share something my friend Athol Franz wrote recently. He is the editor and publisher of one of the finest aviation magazines in the world, called African Pilot. He was responding to a similar question from a reader about when his magazine would again be available in paper form. Here is an extract from his response: "My honest answer is that African Pilot will probably never go back to a printed magazine. The reality is that the world has evolved and this COVID-19 shut down just brought the inevitable closer. With today's technology, there is no reason to cut down trees to print thousands of publications that are eventually discarded in landfill sites anyway. The benefits of African Pilot digital magazine: • You receive the magazine instantly when it is published. • The SA Post Office has become notoriously pathetic in delivering magazines to subscribers. • The new technology allows for a large amount of copy, unlimited photographs, plus embedded videos and picture galleries. • The magazine is now on the world stage, attracting international interest which was never possible in the past. • Every article is printed in high resolution, while e-mail and website addresses are hyperlinked to further readers' interests."

Dr John Ledger Consulting Editor john.ledger@wol.co.za 083 650 1768

1 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 77 (2020)