Saving Stripes

Category: Laikipia, News | Date: Oct 28 2009 | By: savingstripes

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.

One response so far

Category: Rangeland management | Date: Oct 24 2009 | By: savingstripes

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.

4 responses so far