Nature reserve preserved

Yacoub Makdelah seems to have an almost preternatural attachment to the animals he cares for, especially the endangered Persian fallow deer.

By BEN HARTMAN
carmel deer_521 (photo credit: Ben Hartman)
carmel deer_521
(photo credit: Ben Hartman)
‘You have a saying in Yiddish – from sadness you can find happiness. We have it in Arabic, too. I call it an Arabiddish saying.”
Daliat al-Carmel resident Yacoub Makdelah wandered around the Hai Bar nature reserve he manages on Saturday, calling a group of Persian fallow deer to come feed. Above, the setting sun painted a neon tangerine sky above the Carmel as fire-fighting planes dumped water and flame retardant on the forests below.
He has worked for the Nature and Parks Authority for 30 years and seems to have an almost preternatural attachment to the animals he cares for, especially the endangered Persian fallow deer he helps raise and release into the wild.
“They were very afraid when the fire was burning around here. I’m like their psychologist; we understand one another and we try to calm one another. They can’t speak to us, but we see it in their eyes; their eyes tell us everything. Today I look in their eyes and I see them saying, ‘Yacoub thank you.’” The animals and the reserve they call home survived the fire due to the help of firefighters and fire-fighting aircraft from abroad, along with dozens of NPA volunteers who came from across the country when news of the fire broke last Thursday. The volunteers defended the perimeter of the reserve from the flames and made sure the animals were all accounted for. By Saturday, after the fires surrounding the reserve were extinguished, it was found that not a single animal was lost.
As the fire raged, on Thursday and Friday, the media reported that the reserve and the animals who called it home perished in the flames. A spokesman for the NPA said Saturday that the confusion occurred because police were using the code name “Hai Bar” to refer to the forests in the Carmel south of the University of Haifa. The spokesman added that by Saturday, the fires were a kilometer away from the Hai Bar reserve.
The 6,000-dunam reserve breeds, raises and releases into the wild a number of rare animals, including the mountain gazelle, roe deer, whitetailed eagle and griffin vulture. On Thursday, the fires caused serious damage to the cages housing the eagles and vultures, but the birds were kept free from harm.
The jewel of the reserve’s crown is the Persian fallow deer, an endangered species whose reintroduction to the biblical lands is a story of equal parts espionage and ingathering of exiles.
The deer, which are mentioned a number of time in the Bible, had disappeared from the Land of Israel and were in danger of extinction a little over three decades ago. In the late 1970s, a population of the deer were living in Iran, where they were a protected species. In 1978, as the Iranian revolution was gaining steam and time was running out for ties with Iran, Israeli diplomats worked to spirit four of the deer out of the country.
In December 1978, with rioting in the streets of Teheran, military attache Yitzhak Segev snuck through the streets of the city, hiding his identity while he located the four deer and prepared them for the flight to Israel. On December 8, the deer flew out of Teheran on the last El Al flight, squeezed onto the plane between the belongings of local Jews fleeing the country as the violence of the revolution increased.
“These animals are from the Bible. Don’t you think they deserved to make aliya, too?” Makdelah said, pointing toward a group of fawns in a pen.
Today, more than 600 of the fallow deer live in Galilee, Mount Carmel, the Golan Heights and the hills outside Jerusalem, where four of the deer were released in December 2009.