Saving Stripes

Category: News | Date: Aug 25 2009 | By: savingstripes

We’re off to Ethiopia tomorrow to meet with various NGOs and communities as part of the rangeland monitoring manual we’re trying to put together. We’ll be there for 10 days in various parts of the country. Internet will be sporadic but we’ll try to post some updates when we can!

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Category: Competition | Date: Aug 21 2009 | By: savingstripes

Here I am working on setting up an experiment in the hopes of finding ways to reduce competition between cattle and wildlife. But two days ago saw a form of cattle-wildlife competition I never expected: an elephant killed a cow, right in one of my experimental plots!

Nobody knows exactly why, except that this elephant is an angry lady (she also chased a herder, who escaped by removing his clothing, which the elephant attacked instead of him). It’s possible that the elephant and her family have come down into this region from an area further north where poaching is a problem.

One thing’s for sure: better watch out for elephants out there!

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Category: Predators | Date: Aug 10 2009 | By: savingstripes

We’ve started checking camera traps we recently put out in the field. One thing that’s blown me away is just how many carnivores there are out there! These are areas where I’ve been doing field work for many years — walking long distances on a daily basis through the bush. In terms of herbivores, I’ve seen most everything that’s out there. But it’s completely fascinating to see what creatures come out at night, and how many of them are the flesh-eating kind! (Needless to say, I’m not eager to start doing any field work at night!)

I also just continue to be amazed at the diversity of mammals in general, here in northern Kenya. It is, simply, astonishing.

Here are just a few samples of some of the carnivores we’ve captured on film (or rather, memory chip). Next time I’ll post some cool herbivore shots!

Serval:

Lovely leopard:

A non-zebra stripy creature! (striped hyena)

A curious cat… probably the same one on two different nights at two different cameras:

Rattels, or honey badgers, are notoriously ferocious:

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Category: News | Date: Aug 01 2009 | By: savingstripes

Hi everybody, sorry we’ve been offline lately. They installed a new internet system at the research centre, and we can’t post to the blog. Until they resolve this glitch, we’ll have to post when we can get an internet connection somewhere else. Sorry!

Some news: I’ve recently been setting up a bunch of camera traps for one of my projects. Camera traps are great for "catching" wildlife on film! For my research, I’m deploying them inside an experiment I’ve got. The experiment is designed to test the effects of tree density on wildlife, grasses, and the trees themselves. Why should we care about tree density? Well, overgrazing (usually by cattle) tends to "make trees" — that is, overgrazed areas tend to get taken over by trees, instead of grasses. This is a huge issue not just in Kenya, but in savannas and grasslands all over the world!

In any case, before putting out the camera traps in my experiment, I tested them out in a friend’s yard, since she said she was getting a lot of visitors. We saw an amazing number of different animals just outside her house. Here are a few of my favorites. Hopefully we’ll get some good ones in the experiment, too! (good data, that is, in addition to fun photos).

Enjoy!

-Corinna

A curious vervet monkey:

A hungry hyena:

An eland’s elegant leg:

Two dikdik reacting to something (what?):

Holy spines, a porcupine!

White-tailed mongoose stretching:

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Category: News | Date: Jul 20 2009 | By: savingstripes

Last month, between the 12^th and 18^th, we successfully collared 11 zebras. Five were Grevy’s and six were plains zebras. Last time we collared zebras, almost exactly two years ago, we had a hard time catching plains zebras, but this time, strangely, they were quite easy to capture. Maybe this was because the vet was able to shoot the tranquilizer dart from further away, or maybe we were just luckier this time.

In any case, the whole round of collaring went very smoothly. We didn’t even have to go very far, because there were plenty of zebras on the Mpala property. By now, though, many of those zebras have dispersed to neighboring properties – which is good, because it will tell us where they’ve gone and how far and wide an animal travels looking for food and water.

Typically, the collaring process goes like this: Once we’ve found a group of zebras, we pick the one we want to collar (any female, for Grevy’s zebras, since we’re more interested in their movements). Then the vet aims and shoots a tranquilizer dart (see the pink fluff on its end as it moves through the air).

 With a little luck, the dart hits the zebra, preferably in the rump or shoulder.

After 4-6 minutes, the zebra goes down. We immediately go to it and ensure that it’s gone down in a good position (flat on its side, and not in any thorn bushes). Then we start monitoring it – its body temperature, blood oxygen concentration, breathing and heart rate.

 If the zebra is getting hot, we pour some water on her so that she can cool down (the sedatives can interfere with her body’s natural temperature regulation).

As we are monitoring her, we are also doing all the other tasks: putting the collar on, taking a blood sample, taking a tissue sample, examining her teeth, and collecting some ticks from her (more on this later). By examining the teeth, we can learn approximately how old she is.

Once we have finished all of these tasks, the vet gives her a reverser drug. Within a minute or two, she gets up, takes a few wobbly steps, and runs off.

One interesting thing I noticed during the collaring is that plains zebras always seem to bray when they wake up from the tranquilizer. “Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop,” they shout to their companions. This lets them find their harem quickly and rejoin the group.

Once, when a female woke up and brayed, the stallion came running over to retrieve her; it seemed like he was just as relieved as she was! See here how he comes to get her and herds her back to the rest of the harem.

The Grevy’s, in contrast, don’t seem to be so anxious about rejoining their group. It’s interesting because it’s exactly what you would expect, given that plains zebras have such a tight social structure while Grevy’s don’t.

The collars will store the GPS location of each zebra every hour, so that we can track where they zebra has gone and how much time it has spent in different areas. We also set the collars to collect more fine-grain data (GPS coordinates every 15 minutes) for three days of each month. Why did we do this? The fine-grain data will allow us to ask more subtle questions, like how much time do zebras appear to spend grazing (in one area) and when do they walk quickly to cover a lot of distance in a short time. For example, it might be that zebras move quickly through inhabited areas during the day to avoid people and cattle, but they might graze in those same areas during the night.

Some more technical specs: of the eleven collars we put out on zebras, ten were made by a Swedish company, while one was made locally (assembled from various parts made in Europe). We are testing the locally-made collar on one zebra and several lions (including the one I helped Alayne collar in March). If these collars work well, we’ll put out a bunch more on lions in this area. This will let us see how zebras move to avoid being eaten by lions, or what kind of habitat brings zebras and lions close together.

-Siva

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Category: Rangeland management | Date: Jun 27 2009 | By: savingstripes

A number of people have been commenting or asking about restoring degraded lands. Preventing degradation is one thing, but given that it’s happened in a lot of places already, how can we begin to put back the processes that have been lost? How long does it take, and can you ever get the land to fully recover?

The simple answer is: in theory, you can restore any land if you have enough labor and money. Even in a place where all the soil has eroded down to bedrock, you could, in theory, cart in truckloads of soil and manure from somewhere else. But who’s really going to do that in a place where people scarcely know where the next meal is coming from?

On the other end of the spectrum, there are some really simple and cheap things that people can do to stop further degradation and start letting the land recover. For example, one could lay down branches or put down rocks where erosion gullies are starting to form. A slightly more involved approach would be to plant grass seeds in small furrows dug into bare soil. Anything that stops water from flowing over the surface of the land is going to help prevent erosion and improve the conditions for grass to grow.

Of course, any restoration effort takes a lot of work and a lot of time. How much and how long depends on how degraded the land is. In some cases, just removing the cause of the degradation (for example, overgrazing) is enough for the land to recover. In other cases, for example where lots of topsoil has been lost, the ecosystem may never recover to what it was before – but it might at least be stabilized and improved to some extent.

I personally find restoration a really interesting subject – first, because it offers some hope and optimism that we can (at least to some extent) reverse our mistakes of the past, and, second, because it presents a fascinating challenge: to understand enough about the ecosystems we live in to know how to put them back together.

Next up: Siva is going to tell you a little about his recent work catching and collaring zebras!

-Corinna

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Category: Rangeland management | Date: Jun 20 2009 | By: savingstripes

After we returned from the Mara, we headed north – first to our home in Laikipia, and the next day on into Isiolo and Samburu districts. We had planned to reach the community of Il Ngwesi by late morning and spend several hours with them before driving on to our camping spot in Westgate community. But unfortunately we got quite lost on the way to Il Ngwesi and only reached there after 3 PM. We had no choice but to hold a short meeting with a small group of elders before pressing on. Even so, it was 9:30 PM by the time we reached our camping site in Westgate!

Thankfully, we had the whole next day to spend in Westgate. In the morning we had a sit-down meeting with a group of elders, and in the afternoon we went with them to visit several sites on the group ranch.

Like most of the region, the group ranch was mostly shrubs surrounded by bare soil. Yet, the elders remembered the place being a grassland when they were children. As we were discussing this at one site, Jeff, the soil scientist, picked up two handfuls of soil. The first was from the area between the shrubs, a light red color. The second was from under a shrub, where less soil had eroded, and was a darker red-brown. The elders pointed to the darker soil and said that when they were young, the soil here was even darker than that. From this, we were together able to conclude that the whole top layer of the original soil has probably been lost.

On a more optimistic note, we also visited a site where the community has done some rehabilitation. In areas badly taken over by Acacia reficiens – a nasty, thorny bush that makes a thicket with no grass beneath it – they had cut the bush and planted some grass seeds. The cut brush was strewn over the ground, protecting the tender grass seedlings from being eaten. Now, several years later, there was an appreciable amount of grass between the trees – a big improvement from the desert-like bare soil that was there before!

As we concluded our day at Westgate with a goat roast for the elders, we reflected on the previous week of meetings and places we’d visited. Two very positive things stood out to us. First, we were consistently impressed by how much the people we spoke with knew about the processes going on in their landscapes. This is not to belittle them, but rather to express how deep their knowledge and understanding is relative to many other land managers in other parts of the world. Second, we were also impressed by how many similar things we heard in each place. When we asked community members what indicators of land degradation they notice, their responses were remarkably consistent: more bare soil, less grass, more bush, less grass production, more erosion, more of the undesirable grasses (one species in particular was repeatedly cited) and fewer of the desirable grasses.

We returned home the next day with conflicted emotions: on the one hand, saddened by the severity and extent of land degradation we had seen, and on the hand, uplifted by the tremendous knowledge and understanding among the people we’d met – giving us hope that the degradation of the past might be reversed.

-Corinna

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Category: Rangeland management | Date: Jun 10 2009 | By: savingstripes

The past ten days we’ve been traveling around to various places in Kenya. We’ve not had much internet connection, so I’ll have to catch up on a lot of things in the next few posts! Meantime, Siva just started collaring zebras. He and the Kenya Wildlife Service veterinary team are out today for the first collaring session. Stay tuned about that!

When we left you last, we had just been to Magadi for a very long day trip (leaving Nairobi at 6:30 AM and returning at 9 PM). The next morning, Saturday, we boarded a Safarilink flight to the Maasai Mara. I have rarely had the chance to fly in Kenya, and I found it completely fascinating. My face was glued to the window as we flew over the descending, and then ascending, “steps” of the Great Rift Valley. My fascination with plate tectonics, however, was somewhat tempered by my dismay at how much bare soil I was seeing. The massive swaths of bare red soil and huge erosion ditches highlighted, yet again, the magnitude of the land degradation issues we are facing here in Kenya.

In the Mara, however, it was green and lush. Although the rains have not been good down there, there has at least been a bit of rain, and in many places the grass was quite tall. My impressions from our 26 hours there can be summarized by a few key thoughts.

First, oh my gosh, is it beautiful there! Wide open, rolling plains of grass dotted with zebras, gazelles, impala, elephants, giraffes, eland, and more. In many ways, the Mara is the classic African savanna, and it really is stunning and replete with life.

Second, in this productive environment, cattle and wildlife have the potential to live together in relative harmony. Deep inside the park, where cattle never go, the grass was so tall that there was hardly any wildlife (except buffalo, which like tall grass). Outside the park, where some Maasai communities have set up conservancies with some - but regulated - cattle grazing, the grass was shorter and the place was full of wildlife. This illustrates that, with good management and plenty of rainfall, it’s possible for livestock and wildlife to share the land.

My third impression had to do with what we went there to look at: indicators of rangeland health. We spent a lot of our time in the Mara talking to Dickson, a Maasai man from the area who did his M.Sc. work there. Dickson was a fantastic host and a fount of interesting information about how people assess the health of their animals and the land. We learned about “hot” and “cold” areas in the landscape – areas where animals perform better or worse. In some cases, Dickson told us, cows may put on weight in a cold area. but their calves don’t survive. We also learned about various behaviors the cows exhibit when they are satiated or still hungry for something. This intricate knowledge of the cattle was impressive and humbling to us researchers – since we use many of the same indicators to assess livestock and wildlife well-being.

Before we knew it, it was time to leave this magical land – back to Nairobi and on to places further north. More on that next time!

-Corinna

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Category: Rangeland management | Date: May 31 2009 | By: savingstripes

In the last few days, we’ve started working in earnest on the “background research” phase of our project to develop a rangeland monitoring handbook for this region. Our “team” consists of me and Siva, Jayne Belnap – an ecologist from the US Geological Survey, Jeff Herrick – an ecologist and soil scientist from the US Department of Agriculture, and Jeff Worden – an ecologist with the African Conservation Centre here in Kenya.

After a day of meetings in Nairobi, we set off for our first field trip early on Friday morning. Our destination was Magadi, a lake in the Rift Valley, about 3 hours south of Nairobi near the Tanzanian border. The road to Magadi drops dramatically from a green plateau into the dry Rift Valley. Along the way we saw first-hand how large areas formerly part of “Maasailand” have been subdivided into small parcels in the greater Nairobi sprawl. Historically an important part of the Maasai grazing lands, these areas are now effectively unavailable to migrant pastoralists (something that certainly exacerbates the effects droughts like the one we are experiencing right now).

After a long drive over a very pot-holed road, we reached Lake Magadi. There we found flamingos! This soda lake is in a beautiful setting and is full of birds – as well as the dredging scars from the Magadi Soda company, which harvests salt and soda from the lake. We stopped briefly in the industrial town of Magadi (where Jayne took advantage of cell phone coverage to check her e-mail on her Blackberry while a curious Maasai man looked on) before we drove across the northern part of the lake and continued westwards.

From there the landscape became more and more stark. In many places, there was nothing but rock on the surface of the soil. In other areas, there was sand, but very little grass and a lot of evidence of erosion. Then we started noticing something very unusual: zebra carcasses. After the third or fourth carcass, we began to shake our heads. It must be very, very dry for zebras (plains zebras, here) to start dying.

This opinion was confirmed a little later, when we met with members of the Ol Kiramatian community. The chief and a number of “community resource assessors” (who are employed by the African Conservation Centre) shared their thoughts on the current drought, the changes they’ve seen in their rangelands over the last few decades, and how they recognize or monitor these changes. In fact, we learned that “Ol Kiramatian” is a Maasai name for a grass species that is very good for livestock but is no longer found in the community’s land.

After this most interesting and informative meeting, we continued on to see more of the landscapes of Ol Kiramatian and neighboring Shompole communities. These included some enormous termite mounds, some stunning views, and a lot more bare, bare land. We also encountered an interesting local sign in a small village we passed through.

It was sunset by the time we looped north again past Lake Magadi. Time to reflect a bit on this fascinating landscape and the people we had met there. It put things in Laikipia into a bit of perspective, to see this place that was so much more dry and barren, and so much further removed from tourism opportunities. And yet, the wisdom and positive spirit of its inhabitants left me, at least, feeling a sense of hope and opportunity within the place’s great challenges.

-Corinna

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Category: News | Date: May 25 2009 | By: savingstripes

On Saturday afternoon, we went down to the river in front of our house and noticed something very strange: it was black!

Lately the river water has been various shades of brown — full of silt and soil from upstream areas where rain has caused some erosion. But black? That didn’t seem normal at all.

On closer inspection, we realized what it was: lots and lots of tiny, charred particles. Back in late March, there were fires burning on Mount Kenya for about a week. We can only guess that it has finally rained in the burned areas — washing lots of ash and charred material into the river. It must have been a very heavy rainfall. Sadly, this means a lot of the nutrients released by the fire have now been washed into the river. We do hope the vegetation will recover, nonetheless!

On another note entirely, we are leaving tomorrow for our tour of various parts of Kenya, doing background research for our rangeland monitoring manual project. We will be in southern Kenya until next Monday and then in northern Kenya for a couple of days. Our internet connection will be sporadic, but we’ll try to post some updates when we can!

-Corinna & Siva

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