Saving Stripes

Category: Competition | Date: Feb 27 2009 | By: savingstripes

Competition with livestock is one of the biggest threats facing Grevy’s zebra and other wildlife here in northern Kenya. Grevy’s, like most species, live mostly in unprotected land – that is, outside of parks. This means they are relying on private and community-held land where livestock (such as cattle, sheep, and goats) are also grazing.

As you can imagine, wildlife and livestock are often competing for the same food and water. On some ‘pro-wildlife’ private properties, people want to support wildlife populations. These ranches usually keep a relatively low number of cattle, sheep, and goats, and there is plenty of grass left for wild herbivores. On other properties, especially the communal ranches, livestock numbers are quite high. Often the people living on these ranches are very poor; livestock are their main source of sustenance and income. These ranches tend to be heavily grazed, with little left behind for wildlife.

Here’s an example of what a heavily grazed area looks like – not much grass to eat:

Heavy grazing doesn’t just hurt the wildlife; it also hurts the land. When grass plants are grazed day in, day out, they eventually die. As bare soil increases, so does erosion. In time, erosion takes away all the topsoil, and what remains is bare rock. And it doesn’t take a plant ecologist to tell you that not much will grow on the land, after that!

So what is there to do? You have people who need to feed their children. You have wildlife whose populations are declining, and soil that is washing away with every rainstorm. Are there ways to manage the land more sustainably, in a way that helps people as well as wildlife?

In the next posting, I’ll tell you a little bit about a project we’re starting to try to answer some of these questions. In the meantime, send us your thoughts!

-Corinna

3 responses so far

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Feb 23 2009 | By: savingstripes

As if it’s not enough that we’re surrounded by wildlife in our daily work – we have to have a bit of wildlife inside the home, too!

Siva and I had been married for about a week when we brought home our first puppy. He was one of ten pups born to our landlords’ dog (we rent a house here in Laikipia, about 20 minutes’ drive from the Mpala Research Centre, where our work is based). Now, a year and a half old, Arcas is a bit bigger but still nearly as cute (we think) as he was the day he came home. Here’s a picture of me with him:

Keeping a dog is one thing. Raising wild creatures is another. Living out here, you often wind up the clueless but well-intentioned caretaker of some orphaned creature. A couple of months ago, a friend of ours found two baby hedgehogs. Prickly and tightly coiled in their little hedgehog body-sacs, they looked like small sea urchins at the time. Before long they had doubled in size and were ready to see more of the world:

Now we’ve got our latest project: a pair of baby squirrels. Their mother made a nest in a parked car over the holidays, and when the car’s driver returned, momma squirrel didn’t. Siva and I took in the babies – at the time, 15 grams of shivering skinniness. At first they just slept, but it wasn’t very long before they started jumping around, cheeping, chewing everything, and generally being cute with their big, beady eyes. Even the adults of this species – ocher bush squirrels – are pretty darn cute (they are only about the length of your hand), so you can imagine how adorable the palm-sized version is!

For a while I was getting worried about the squirrels. They had lost interest in the milky formula I had been feeding them (a mix of baby formula, baby cereal, and mayonnaise to add more fat). I tried giving them fruits and nuts, various vegetables, peanut butter, even a ball of Acacia sap. Once, they fought over a piece of mango, then lost interest.

I was starting to despair, when, on a whim, I decided to put a dollop of leftover vegetable biryani in their cage. Within minutes, the rice and vegetable mix was gone! I put out another dollop and they devoured it as if they had never seen food before.

Since then I’ve been giving them our typical assortment of leftovers: rice, lentils, mixed vegetables. Never mind all the Indian spices we usually cook with; the squirrels love it! In the last week they have put on more than 10 grams each (now, at 50 grams, they are slightly more than half grown).

Which just goes to show that even the squirrels know it: when there’s curry, it’s time to scurry.

-Corinna

3 responses so far

Category: Communties | Date: Feb 20 2009 | By: savingstripes

Scouts – local community members who patrol for zebras and other wildlife – are some of our most important partners on the Grevy’s zebra project. As soon as I started the project in early 2007, I began hiring and training scouts. Now I coordinate twelve scouts in six different communities in Laikipia and Isiolo districts. Up until now the scouts have been patrolling for wildlife on foot. But soon they’ll have a faster way to get around: bicycles!

The plan is to have a bicycle for each scout by the end of this month. This will really help the scouts to cover more ground, more frequently – and everyone will get more information about where the Grevy’s and other wild animals are hanging out.

Here’s a picture of me meeting with two of the scouts – Lawrence Lesingiran and Moses Loloiboni – to go over their most recent list of animal sightings:

The scouts are all Maasai or Samburu (a tribe closely related to the Maasai) and live in the communities in which they work. These communities are basically ranches that are managed by a group of families, rather than by a single owner or manager. Most of the communities support a lot of people, and a lot of domestic livestock (mostly sheep, goats, cattle, donkeys, and camels). But recently the communities have started looking to tourism as an alternative source of income. Many have set aside “conservation areas” – chunks of land in which wildlife conservation is a priority and livestock are rarely allowed to graze. A lot of communities have also established lodges or campsites for tourists in the conservation areas. The hope is that wildlife, as well as tourists, will flock to these areas.

So, one of the questions the scouts are helping to answer is whether wildlife, including Grevy’s zebra, are actually using the conservation areas. This is really critical information; we urgently need to know whether setting aside scattered conservation areas is helping threatened species like Grevy’s, or not. Can zebras cross the heavily populated community lands to reach the conservation areas? Or, are zebras using the community lands freely, just like they use the much less populous private ranches next door?

Scouts like Lawrence, Moses, and Florence Jesika (pictured above alongside her father, myself, and my research assistant, Hussein Mohammed) are helping to answer these questions. Scouts go on daily patrols around their communities. They carry a GPS, a clipboard, and a data sheet. Whenever they see wildlife or even tracks from wild animals, they record the species and the GPS coordinates where they saw the animals or tracks. I meet with them about once a month and upload their GPS coordinates to my computer.

Already the scouts’ data is starting to tell some interesting stories. We hope to analyze the data more thoroughly in the next few months and present it back to the scouts so they can see the patterns their patrols have produced.

For the future, we are considering how we can help the scouts become conservation leaders in their communities. How can they go beyond just collecting data? Can they become conservation ambassadors? What do you think?

-Siva

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Feb 18 2009 | By: savingstripes

It’s been a busy few weeks for us here, a little too busy, in fact! For the first two weeks of February, Corinna was teaching a field course for undergraduates from Princeton University (where Corinna is a postdoctoral fellow). Teaching was fun – but exhausting. Meantime, Siva was hosting a series of visitors before he had to go to Nairobi for a few days.

Siva’s main reason for going to Nairobi was to apply for permits from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). The permits are to put GPS collars on zebras – something Siva hopes to do some time in the next month or two. These collars work by taking a GPS location of the zebra’s whereabouts every 15 minutes. This data is stored inside the collar until you can retrieve it later, either after the collar has fallen off, or via a wireless download while the collar is still on (if you can get close enough to the zebra to do this!).

Here are some pictures of collared Grevy’s and plains zebras. The splash of blue on the plains zebra’s neck is an antibiotic we sprayed on him before taking a blood sample. (What else do you notice is different about Grevy’s, in comparison to plains zebras?)

This will be the second round of zebra collaring for Siva and the Laikipia Grevy’s Zebra Project. In June 2007, we collared seven Grevy’s and two plains zebras. Unfortunately, the collars had some problems and most either died or fell off the zebras within a year. But the information we got from the collars gave us a glimpse of where zebras go and how long they spend in various places. You can even see an animation of their movements at our Action Tracker website:

This time, we plan to collar eight more Grevy’s and seven more plains zebras. With the data we get from the collars, we can start answering some important questions. For example, how much land does a typical zebra use in the space of a year? Are there particular areas or habitats where zebras tend to spend a lot of time? Do zebras avoid areas where there are lots of people and lots of domestic animals? By answering these questions, we’ll be able to start understanding what habitats Grevy’s need and how to prioritize protecting land for them.

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