Talk about saving Malaysia's wildlife usually begins with the tiger. Gene begins with the ground under its feet.
The wild cats need deer. The deer need open, grassy places to graze. Lose the grasslands, or leave them out of the plan, and everything above them starts to fail. Gene is frustrated at how rarely grassland regeneration comes up when people talk about wildlife conservation, and this is where he will write about it.
Gene's argument in three links. Protecting the animal at the top means protecting everything it depends on.
Open grassy clearings, riverbanks and forest edges, where grazing animals feed. They get far less attention than forest.
Deer are the main food of Malaysia's big cats. Without places to graze and recover, their numbers fall.
Sambar deer have dwindled significantly in Peninsular Malaysia, largely from hunting.
The predators at the top can only be as healthy as the prey beneath them.
Fewer than 150 Malayan tigers were estimated to remain in Peninsular Malaysia by 2022.
“If sambar deer numbers go down, tiger numbers will too.”
Conservationists reported this link more than a decade ago. Gene wants the conversation to go one step further down, to the grasslands the deer depend on.
Malaysia once had its own wild peafowl. The green peafowl, a shimmering bronze-green bird with an upright crest, lived on the Malay Peninsula. Its populations here are now gone.
It favours forest edges, grassland, scrub and open country close to water: exactly the kind of habitat Gene believes is being overlooked. For him it is the clearest sign of what is lost when grasslands disappear, and the subject of his first article.
Gene is writing his first pieces now. They will appear here as they are finished.
The bird Malaysia lost, what it needed to survive, and whether it could ever come back.
Why grassland regeneration belongs at the centre of wildlife conservation, from the deer to the wild cats that hunt them.
Most of Gene's paintings are of Malaysian wildlife, many of them threatened: the Malayan tiger, the tapir, the serow, the leaf monkeys and the wild cats of the forest. His 2024 exhibition, Things That Move, brought conservation groups to The Godown in Kuala Lumpur to talk about the animals on the walls.
