I spoke to Siva on the phone yesterday and they were in the town of North Horr, east of Lake Turkana. Their trip seems to be going well so far. They found a few zebras a couple of days ago — although I didn’t hear where exactly. I’ll keep you posted when I hear anything more about their progress!
-Corinna
Today I’m heading off to northern Kenya on “the big trip” several colleagues and I have been planning for almost two years now.
The purpose of the trip is to look for remnant populations of Grevy’s zebra in the vast area of northern Kenya. Historically, this area was the heart of the Grevy’s range. Now, Grevy’s are found almost exclusively in the far southern part of their former range, in Samburu and Laikipia districts. (Interestingly, Grevy’s were never found in Laikipia until a few decades ago; now, Laikipia – where I do most of my work – is home to more than a third of the remaining Grevy’s).
The area north of Laikipia and stretching on up to the border with Ethiopia is a huge, arid terrain with very little infrastructure. It is in many ways the “Wild West” of Kenya – where livestock rustling and banditry still prevail. Over the next three weeks, we’ll be traveling up through the “frontier” town of Laisamis, continuing north along the eastern edge of Lake Turkana, then northeast to the Ethiopian border, down to the Chalbi Desert, and back down to Samburu and Laikipia through Marsabit. See the map below prepared by my colleagues Guy and Zeke from Marwell Wildlife:
Based on past surveys and anecdotal information, we only expect there to be a few hundred Grevy’s left in this large area. We know little about Grevy’s in this area because of its remoteness and poor infrastructure. During the trip, we’ll be looking for zebras and trying to figure out what steps might be taken to save them. We’ll be interviewing local people to learn where they may have seen Grevy’s (and any other wildlife), what they know about Grevy’s conservation status, and what threats there might be to Grevy’s in those areas.
With this information, we hope to identify areas where conservation projects and investment might help to save – and ideally rehabilitate – remnant Grevy’s populations.
I’ll be traveling along with a group of close collaborators from Grevy’s Zebra Trust and Marwell Wildlife. We’ll be a total of 13 people in three Land Cruisers. We’ll have to take all our fuel and provisions for the whole trip, finding water along the way wherever we can. We’ll have a satellite phone for emergency communications, but I won’t be able to post anything to the blog until I come back. Corinna will be posting some updates.
I’ll ook forward to telling you about the trip when I get back in late February!
-Siva
We were lucky enough to get a clear view of the annular eclipse over Kenya this morning. The morning dawned sunny and bright, but by 7:30 AM the sun was becoming strangely less powerful than usual… It never got fully dark and the birds didn’t stop singing; the little ring of sunlight left at 8:30 was enough to keep the day bright, about as bright as it usually is just after sunrise.
One of the most mesmerizing things about the eclipse was the way it affected the shadows around us. Trees next to the house were transformed into a series of hoops and circles on the ground and walls. It was a very unusual and beautiful way to start the day!
It’s not just wildlife that sprout up out of nowhere, after it rains!
The other morning I took my camera along on my early morning dog-walk. Here are some of the colorful flowers I saw along the way…
This is the one we callt he "tissue paper flower" because from far away it looks like discarded tissue, but up close it is quite pretty:
A delicate little violet:
Commelina:
Thanks to everybody who expressed an interest in the monitoring manual! The "ready to use" Version 2 will be available by the end of February. If you want me to send you a PDF copy when that’s ready, send me an e-mail ( criginos at gmail.com) and I will add you to my list of people to send Version 2 to.
In December, we were happy to release Draft Version 1 of Monitoring Rangeland Health — a simple guide to monitoring rangelands in the Horn of Africa region.
This manual has been my (Corinna’s) main project over the last few months, with Siva also contributing substantially to it. As some of you remember, we traveled around quite a bit last year doing background research for this project. All our efforts finally came together at the end of 2009, when we unveiled the "final first draft" of this manual.
In December we held several workshops and lots of meetings, both in Kenya and in Ethiopia, getting feedback on the manual. We were joined by our collaborator from the US Department of Agriculture, Jeff Herrick. Jeff has spent the last 10 years working on issues of monitoring in the western US. We tend to think that, together, we’ve written a manual that is scientifically sound, yet simple and easy to use.
Fortunately, other people seem to agree! In the workshops, we found that workshop participants were quick to pick up the simple methods for monitoring changes in land health. This group in Ethiopia actually seemed to be having fun practicing the methods!
We got so much good feedback and positive support for the project that we’re already busy working on Version 2 — which will be ready for wider distribution and — hopefully — adoption in April.
What’s actually involved in monitoring rangeland health? More about that another time!
One of the magical things about this place is how many animals appear when it greens up like this. It’s as if they’ve been in hiding (where?) during the whole drought and have suddenly come out. On a regular basis we’re seeing big groups of zebras and elephants (one just trumpeted as I was writing this). The other day we drove through a huge mixed herd of impalas, waterbuck and giraffes.
Yesterday, as we were driving home, we came across a group of about 50 giraffes browsing on this hillside. See how many you can count in these two photos (and there were more!). Amazing, to see so many long necks peeking out among the acacias…
I think it’s funny and fitting that a group of giraffes is called a "tower." This certainly was a big heap of long creatures.
Happy new year! 2010 has started well so far in Laikipia. We can’t yet say that the drought, which has now stretched on for more than a year, is fully over — but there has been a bit of respite, at least. It has been raining every day since just before Christmas. The grass is green and growing, and the rivers are roaring now. Take the case of the little Nanyuki River that flows by our house: in April it was reduced to a few, tiny, slimy pools of water. Now it is full, the water fast and white as it rushes past:
We hope this rainy spell provides a bit of relief to all the hungry wildlife, livestock, and people.
Meantime back home in Laikipia, the drought that has been going on for nearly a year has finally broken – somewhat.
Up until the middle of October it had still hardly rained at all – just a few scattered showers. The humanitarian crisis and extreme livestock death rates have been in the international news quite a bit, lately. Back in Laikipia, we started to notice that wildlife, too, were dying. Many animals were rib-skinny, with new carcasses showing up daily. Usually in a drought like this, big animals like buffalo and eland are some of the hardest hit. Our friend Heather Larkin found this skinny eland along the (dry) Ewaso Nyiro River.
Plains zebras are pretty tough. How have the Grevy’s been faring? We didn’t hear any reports of Grevy’s dying from drought directly, but there have been some lion kills, and it’s quite possible that Grevy’s become more susceptible to predation when they are weak from a drought like this.
The first rains bathed Laikipia in mid-October, bringing relief, hope, flying termites, and a few shoots of green grass. Since then it has been raining sporadically, perhaps less than hoped for but a start, nonetheless. With at least a month still to go in the rainy season, we can hope that more rain will bring green grass and health back to the region.
Sorry, dear readers, we’ve been a bit remiss in keeping up the blog lately. Getting back on track now.
We left you in the middle of Ethiopia, which was a bit unfair, we admit. So to conclude our trip…
After two fascinating days in the area around Yabello, we stopped for one more meeting (with a group called SOS Sahel that is doing some great participatory mapping work) and headed out. Our hosts at CARE had suggested that we go back to Addis via a different route. Our drive took us west of Yabello and into the land of the Konso agro-pastoralist people.
The Konso live by actively conserving their meager soil and rain water. The steep hillslopes of their land are intricately terraced with stone walls to retain soil and prevent runoff. They plant a number of grains in these terraces, mixed with a particular tree, the leaves of which (we were told) they eat like cabbage.
We continued on to the town of Arba Minch, in the Rift Valley, where we took a peak into the Nechisar National Park. Nechisar means “white grass” but to get to the grasslands you have to drive through a steep, narrow piece of terrain between two lakes: Chamo (blue water, full of huge crocodiles) and Abaya (red ferrous water).
The plains themselves were gorgeous, but sadly lacking much wildlife. Again, we were moved by the beauty of the landscape and thoughts of what it must have been like a hundred or two hundred years ago.
The rest of the return to Addis was mostly uninteresting roadways (with lots of the road under construction). In Addis we had several more meetings before we returned to Kenya.
The trip left us with a lot of impressions of a country so close and in many ways similar to Kenya, and in many ways so different. Less developed, but perhaps more relaxed than Kenya. A rich cultural landscape sadly lacking the wildlife we are lucky to have further south. A country proud never to have been truly colonized by Europeans, but with its own sad history of political upheaval.
All taken, however, we loved it, and we are excited to go back in December, when we will be running several workshops on monitoring rangeland health, giving something back, we hope, to all the people who gave so much of their time to us on this first trip.
Donations made here are
safe.
Jan 28th Gomathy N USD 57.50 Dec 30th Margaret K USD 17.25 Feb 27th Anna C USD 11.00 WildlifeDirect is separately registered in the US (501-(c)3 not for profit) and Kenya (not for profit), aimed at helping endangered animals worldwide. No administration fee is taken for the funds
that are transferred through us so that the financial support, net only of bank fees, can go where it was intended in its entirety.
WildlifeDirect ensures that 100% of your financial support (net of bank transfer fees) reaches your intended purpose.
Thank you for your support towards the core costs of WildlifeDirect.
