Butterflies bring new hopes to war torn Iraq

Not an oxymoron, Nature Iraq is the name of the country’s leading conservation group. Since it was founded in 2004, it has set up a series of projects to understand and protect the wildlife of Iraq. Now it is able to reflect on three years of effective work which has brought great benefits, both to humans and to wildlife.
You might think that compared with other problems being faced by people in Iraq, those that concern the distribution of butterflies are pretty insignificant. But you’d be wrong. Butterflies matter to the world: and perhaps they matter more to Iraq than to any other nation on earth.
That’s because conservation is one of the arts of peace. Preserving wildlife is important at all times and in all places; but when it comes to the healing of a shattered and broken country, a butterfly has a significance that towers above the trivialities. So here are a few examples of what Nature Iraq has been getting up to.
For a start, it has been running a study and education program in Iraqi Kurdistan, in the north-east of the country. The group is supported by the Darwin Initiative, funded by the UK government; by the Centre for Middle Eastern Plants, based in Edinburgh; and by Birdlife International, with headquarters in Cambridge. So it’s a business that rises above local troubles. It has a global input and a global significance: wildlife conservation in one place is possible only through the efforts of people in many other places.
Nature Iraq has established an on-line course on biodiversity and conservation, in partnership with the University of Sulaimani in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah. It’s been running for three years and 60 students have now completed the course. Another 60 have just signed up. Then there’s a nationwide citizen science project on the distribution of butterflies and dragonflies. Thanks to the widespread use of smartphones, photographs of these insects are now flooding in to Nature Iraq, which has already identified four species new to the country. The organization has set up a team of experts across the world, so that every species can be properly identified and mapped. It’s important to know the location of troops in times of war; and it’s important to know the location of butterflies if times of peace are ever to be appreciated.
The mountain of Peramagroon, which covers an area of 100 sq km, is a spectacular spot that’s home to Egyptian vultures and a flycatcher called the Kurdistan wheatear. It has a species of wild goat and a good population of spur-thigh tortoises. A survey of the area’s plants revealed 650 species, more than twice the number previously known from the area; among them were several species new to science.
A study of land use on Peramagroon will enable Nature Iraq to establish a proper conservation action plan. A series of school visits have been made to the area, and children have been setting up nest boxes as a result. Nature Iraq is also field-testing a phone app that will help to identify birds in Peramagroon; it contains details of 130 species. The long-term aim is to develop this and similar apps for use across the Middle East.
When it is more important to identify a saker falcon than a Black Hawk helicopter, you know that an important step towards peace has been taken. Bwar Khalid of Nature Iraq said: “I hope we can do more projects and activities in the future, especially in our country where there has been nothing except war and destruction.”
Butterflies and dragonflies matter. People are looking for butterflies and dragonflies matter. Unknown species of mountain plants matter. Children setting up nest boxes matter. The fact that a Kurdistan wheatear is different from an eastern black-eared wheatear matters. All these things matter if you wish to turn a country deeply harmed by war into a place where life is worth living. It’s a mistake to think that humanitarian aid is the only thing that counts. You can’t solve a terrible situation just by stopping things getting worse: you also need to show that there’s a way of making things better. And part of rebuilding a country hammered by war is to re-establish contact with its wildlife and to look after and cherish such wildlife as remains – not just for its own sake, but because it’s a powerful symbol of the need to reclaim the country for its people, and heal it.
New Year’s resolution: a new start, one in which better things will surely be possible. Hope comes in a butterfly; in an eastern rock nuthatch; in the flora of a mountain; in people dedicated to looking after them all.
In this country we responded to the end of the Second World War by rebuilding old towns and establishing new ones. The commitment to war has to be followed by a commitment to peace. In war, everything apart from life and death is trivial. But when it stops, even for a moment, people can take a wider view: there were soldiers who went bird-watching in the trenches and in prisoner-of-war camps.
It’s called the affirmation of life: and nothing in a war or after a war is more important than that. Once concern can spread beyond the immediate needs of family and our own species, then everybody will be a little richer and of course a little more optimistic!