Saving Stripes

Category: Rangeland management | Date: Sep 09 2009 | By: savingstripes

Today we headed to the area west of the park (including, technically, part of the park), where the Karyu people live. The CARE staff had organized for us to meet with community members, and at 10 AM we met under a huge Acacia tortilis (umbrella thorn) tree. The community members were mostly old men, but unlike any community meeting we had attended in Kenya, this group included women. A cultural difference, a sign of progress in raising women’s voice, or just happenstance?

We soon learned from the community that the biggest issue they are facing is woody encroachment in their lowland grazing areas. Elders remember the area being very open, whereas now it is being taken over by bush. Accompanying this (or perhaps causing it) is a loss of perennial grasses and an increase in bare soil and erosion. The story was very similar to what we have heard all over Kenya, and it was good to see that the community members exhibited the same detailed knowledge of their land that we have found among communities in Kenya.

What was different here was the land management side of things. For a number of years, the Karyu have been keeping kalos – small plots of land that they enclose with brush. They leave these areas ungrazed throughout the growing season so the grass has a chance to grow and set seed (allowing new grass plants to establish). The main purpose of this practice is to create a dry season grazing reserve, particularly for the lactating cows that can’t migrate far from the village in search of water. But a second effect is to allow a small portion of land to rest and recover. Can this practice be scaled up to restore more of the landscape?

But it was even more interesting to learn that these pastoralists are becoming agro-pastoralists – a conversion the government is pushing. Huge irrigation canals are being built to bring water from the Awash river, and community members are being encouraged to plant maize in their kalos. Is this a good idea? We were a bit skeptical, but we also appreciated the plight of the Karyu, whose land has been taken for large sugar beet plantations, fruit farms, and the park.

After our meeting concluded, we drove around the Karyu grazing areas to see more of the landscape – noting the problems of bare ground, erosion, bush encroachment, and general degradation, except in the kalos. (As one community member said earlier, “Before the water was sinking into the land, not washing over it”).

By then it was after 1 PM, and we headed to the nearby town of Metahara where we had – you guessed it – shiro and Ambo – at a roadside café. After lunch we decided to explore the park a bit. Along our drive, we saw quite a few species of birds and mammals, some of which we had never seen before – hamadryas baboons, lesser kudu, defassa waterbuck, Salt’s dikdik, Sommering’s gazelle, Abyssinian roller, Abyssinain ground hornbill, carmine bee-eater, and more.

We also saw a lot of cattle (illegal in the park) accompanied by herders with guns. A beautiful landscape, to be sure, but one with a lot of management challenges if wildlife and people are going to live side by side in this region.