Saving Stripes

Category: Communties, Rangeland management | Date: May 15 2009 | By: savingstripes

Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of Samburu pastoralists and their livestock migrating up and down the main public road here. I’ve been talking a lot about the breakdown of traditional migration practices, but it’s important to note that pastoralists here do still migrate – albeit on a much restricted scale than in the past. As ‘Sauwah’ points out – people are now forced to herd their livestock along public roads (where they have only a 50 m grazing zone on either side of the road). Their movements are constrained by private property lines, fences, major roads, etc. – much in the same way that wildlife are constrained.

Two mornings ago, we met this large herd of cattle moving north, away from Mt. Kenya. Other groups of animals are heading south, towards Mt. Kenya. All trying to find somewhere with a little grass! (See how skinny the cows are – all ribs and hip bones).

The people we saw on the road the other morning probably got a lucky break; it has rained pretty well every day for the last two or three days, and it looks like the rain reached even further north into Samburu District. Already with this little bit of rain, green blades of grass are pushing up through the red earth. Soon, we hope, it will be lush and green and everyone – wildlife, livestock, and people – will be a bit less stressed.

-Corinna

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Category: Communties | Date: May 06 2009 | By: savingstripes

Today I had lunch with the ranch and conservancy manager here at Mpala. We got to talking about the wind (it’s been very windy lately), the moon (growing, but not yet full) and the lack of rain. All of which are interlinked with another issue: illegal grazing. How so? Well, the moon affects the tides, which affect the wind and the rain. It’s more likely to rain when the moon is new or full. But right now we still haven’t really had any rain on Mpala, and now with the moon getting bigger by the day, illegal grazing is also becoming more of a problem by the day.

Where does the illegal grazing come from? Mpala neighbors on a number of community-held or “group” ranches – ranches where Maasai families live with their livestock. Lots of livestock. And because of all the livestock, or because they have too little land relative to people and livestock, these ranches are completely devoid of grass right now. Mpala – a ranch that tries to turn a profit, not just subsistence, off of cattle – has relatively more grass. So, at night, when the moon is bright, herders bring their animals across the Ewaso Ngiro river (flowing, but not full) onto Mpala to have a graze.

“Don’t they lose animals to lions, hyenas, and leopards?” I asked Mike, the manager. His response was, “Sure, but what’s losing one sheep to a predator, compared to losing all of them to starvation?”

It’s a hard situation, isn’t it? People who live on the group ranches live a pretty marginal existence. Their diet consists mostly of milk, maize meal, blood, and occasionally some meat. Food prices have soared in the last few months, and combined with the drought, people are on the verge of starvation. They need every drop of milk that comes from their animals. (Especially the children, like these young herders from a community a bit further north from here).

On the other side of the river, how is a ranch like Mpala supposed to stay afloat, if it can’t earn any income off of its cattle? There are other problems with illegal grazing, too. Diseases get spread, for example. Things get nicked from relatively wealthier “private” (“wildlife-friendy,” “white-owned” – however you want to call them) ranches. And of course, the land suffers – expanding the radius of overgrazing and land degradation. Which means, the wildlife also suffer, since private ranches are critical habitat for most wild animals in this region….

It all goes to show how interlinked our fates our, in a place like this. And how much those fates depend on cosmic things, like the moon and the sun, and the tilt of the earth, and ocean currents, and whether they’ll bring us some rain, or not!

-Corinna

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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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