Baraza

Its that time of the year when WildlifeDirect goes back to school – we have just spent ten days running a field course for Princeton undergraduates as part of their semester in Kenya. What have they been doing? Well, the 13 students will tell you about it through their own blogs which will appear right here on Baraza, as well as on Nairobi Park blog

Here are some photos to illustrate what we’ve been up to.

Students interviewing members of the local community in Olerai Conservancy with David Paramisia who was instrumental in setting up this far sighted approach to saving wildlife in the dispersal area from Nairobi National Park.

John Solonka and Evelyn who work for The Wildlife Foundation talk to Princeton student Patty

Rangers in Olerai Conservancy – a new wildlife sanctuary. These rangers were trained by the Kenya Wildlife Service

Most of the men were hundreds of kilometers away with the livestock so we interviewed mostly women. The women had unique perspectives on the future of wildlife in their areas.

Kohei made friends with the local kids

Interviewing Masai women was followed by song at this homestead.

Dino Martins of Dudu diaries assisted with the course and drew attention to the bugs in the ecosystem. A KWS ranger named Jacob accompanied us to ensure we were safe.

Gettings stuck – nearly every day. To reach the National Park dispersal area we had to cross the Mbagathi (Empakasi) river.

Olerai conservancy allows pastoralists to graze herds of sheep and cattle in a controlled manner to ensure that wildlife can coexist with the livestock

Children in the villages were just as interested in us as we were in them

Molly meets a baby elephant on our one day off

Patty on the suspension bridge

Adjani measuring grass recovery after the drought in a livestock exclosure

Morgan and Hillary assess grass condition outside the park which was rather overgrazed

Erin and others cross the suspension bridge in Kitengela to cross a dangerous gorge to continue our vegetation sampling.

Technorati : Maasai, Masai, Princeton University, Students, WildilfeDirect, Wildlife, conservation, elephants, wildebeest migration
Zooomr : Maasai, Masai, Princeton University, Students, WildilfeDirect, Wildlife, conservation, elephants, wildebeest migration
Flickr : Maasai, Masai, Princeton University, Students, WildilfeDirect, Wildlife, conservation, elephants, wildebeest migration

Every two months volunteers join the Kenya Wildlife Service to count wildlife in the Nairobi National Park. The count starts at 6.30 am which means we had to be up at 5 am. But it wasn’t the early start that threw us off course. We got to count wildlife in block N7, a tear drop shaped block in the southern end of the park.  On the way we met so many interesting creatures and couldn’t help but stop and enjoy – join us

First this lioness, her sister, and her four cubs just stood on the road side in front of us, and from there they watched us – as if we were to be counted! The cubs now about 8 months old were just beginning to grow manes,but they had baby written all over their faces.

We had to tear ourselves away from the adorable lion cubs and go count animals in our block

We saw rhino, wildebeest, buffalo, giraffe, gazelles, impala, zebra, kongoni hartebeest, warthog, vervet monkeys, a crocodile and some really spectacular birds including uncommon migrating European storks (nobody is surprised to see them here this year though – brrrr) and

this amazing Kori bustard in full lekking condition, displaying and defending his territory aggressively for the females.

You can tell I woke up early – I didn’t even do my hair. Thank goodness the wildlife doesn’t care – it was a spectacular and constructive way to spend sunday.

During the count we met many other enumerators and all were busy, serious and having enormous fun. It’s not just a day out, it’s a day to help the KWS count the wildlife. It’s a day when you get to participate in a real and authentic way. We will definitely be there next time. Anyone want to join us for the next Nairobi National Park Game count in two months?

Dear friends,

We greeted the new year in Nairobi with fierce storms and heavy rain. Despite the inconveniences of road blocks, downed trees, power cuts, broken bridges and flooded houses, in Africa, the rain is considered a much appreciated blessing.

2009 has been a difficult year for WildlifeDirect, however with your support and generosity we have been able to keep running. Much was achieved during the year and we look further to even further growth in 2010.

We will be a lunching  our new website in coming weeks as well as targetting specific campaigns.
Elephants and ivory trade will be a focal area of concern.  We will be reporting on the developments under the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species.

Secondly, our campaign to save lions will be stepped up through formal meetings with the Kenya Government in our effort to have a ban on carbofuran sold locally as Furadan. We are working closely with Kenyan conservationists and international groups.

In all our work we will be exploring and helping you to understand the impacts of climate change on endangered species.

Finally we will continue supporting conservationists working on great apes, especially in the Albertine Rift countries of Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo and Burundi.

We will work hard for a successful 2010 and wish you a very prosperous new year. Happy Holidays,

With Kind regards

Richard Leakey, Paula Kahumbu and the entire WildlifeDirect team.

Dear all,

We are indebted to Scott Ward for this guest post who wrote from Amboseli National Park with spectacular photographs he took there. Scott raises some tough questions. Read more about Scott Ward below.

Photo Scott Ward

As I drove into Amboseli National Park from across the long dry lakebed, I was immediately taken aback by the large number of carcasses that were dotted everywhere.  In some places it seemed as though a bomb went off and destroyed every living creation within a large area.  It seemed as though a great battle took place with no one winning.  Among the dead an inordinate amount of hyenas plundered the dead and decaying.  Of course, to me, the saddest thing was to see the giant decomposing bodies of elephants.  If elephants lived as short of lives as mice, bred like rabbits, and were abundant, I might be able to relegate their death to just a mere cycle of nature.  But I think it is more than that.  When one sees a wild elephant up close and experiences the wisdom of long years in her life and the power within her massive body one quickly realizes that we are sharing our planet with a truly wondrous creation.  The death of one of these magnificent creatures somehow diminishes our Earth.

Amboseli drought photo from http://www.elephanttrust.org

                But in the midst of the macabre dance of the hyena, there is life and green.  Rain has returned to Amboseli – maybe not in the abundance that was hoped for, but arrived nonetheless.  As I drove through the park it was wonderful to see elephants playing in the chest deep water as if celebrating themselves the return of the rains.  Cape buffalo once again have mud to wallow in.  Zebra and wildebeest are slowly returning.  Three beautiful lion cubs were feasting on a freshly caught warthog.  The Rains have returned and hope springs to life again, yet the drought has taken its toll and causes me to wonder what’s next.

Photo Scott Ward

                As I sat around the pool at our lodge, I began to contemplate that probably this swimming pool was filled with water while animals perished just a short distance away.  The freshly manicured grass was definitely kept watered through the long drought, while on the other side of the fence the grass literally dried to dust.  Tourists enjoyed a whole host of drinks and foods while the animals struggled for a drop of water or a morsel of food.  As these thoughts rolled around in my mind, I began to ask myself, “Why can’t we help?”  According to leading scientists, global warming is our fault.  Others say that we should not interfere – that we should take a hands-off approach to wildlife conservation.  Many people just don’t care either way what happens, because they have their own life to worry about.  But they did not see the casualties.

Photo Scott Ward

                I certainly don’t know all the answers, but it did impress upon me the necessity to continue my support of conservation efforts.  The lives of these incredible creatures are too precious to simply let them slide into eternity without a fight.

Scott Ward

 About Scott Ward:   My family and I are missionaries in Northern Tanzania near Moshi.  I am also an amateur photographer trying to take steps into a larger arena with my photography.  I currently have a number of images in the online gallery called Art for Conservation (http://www.artforconservation.org/artists/scottward). It is here that I have been supporting the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust with sales from my photographs on this site.  We live right next to Mkomazi National Park and have visited with Tony and Lucy Fitzjohn who run the conservation effort there. My personal portfolio website is http://www.sbward.com.  I have my sepia-toned images for sale and on display at the web address listed above.  I also have some color photographs of African wildlife at http://useatripod.imagekind.com.

We are pleased to announce that WildlifeTrackers our online wildlife mapping tool is now live. WildlifeTrackers allows anyone anywhere to submit wildlife incident reports as they happen through mobile phone, internet or email. This latest project of WildlifeDirect was initiated because we realized that wildlifedirect blogs have become a hugely valuable repository of vast amounts of information. Yet it is hard to visualize what is happening and where. Moreover, we don’t cover the entire continent of Africa but there are people in places who could contribute information to help us understand the threats to wildlife. WildlifeDirect’s WildlifeTrackers is a mapping tool that enables us to visualize the distribution of animals and their threats in real time, while enabling anyone anywhere to participate, access and contribute with ease.

WildlifeTrackers uses the Ushahidi’s open source software which enables us to collect information from the WildlifeDirect blog ‘ecosystem’ feed into the system and also allow our bloggers from wherever they are input information onto the maps.

Click on the screen shot to go to WildlifeTrackers

Victor Ngeny who set up the system states

“WildlifeDirect supports a large number of organizations and conservationists who are based in remote parks around Africa and the world, and the fact that the tool could be paired with mobile phone technology using FrontlineSMS to enable anyone anywhere in the world to send and receiving of wildlife incident reports via SMS proved god-send for us.”

We’ve spent the last few months installing the software and getting it running,with the support from the good people at Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS.   Some data is already on the site and we now welcome you to help us by submitting your sightings of endangered specie such as lions, rhinos or just share your great safari experiences, or report fires, logging, wildlife sightings, poisoning, poaching among others on the site.

Test WildlifeTrackers out and tell us what you think of it.

Researchers and conservationists from Kenya , Tanzania, Uganda and Southern Sudan concluded on 8 December 2009 that bushmeat was indeed one of the major threats to wildlife and peoples livelihoods. The experts, who had gathered for a two day workshop in Kampala, Uganda concluded that unless efforts are taken to eradicate this problem, then wildlife and peoples livelihoods would suffer.

In a press release issued by the Bushmeat-free East Africa Network (BEAN), an offshoot of the US Fish and Wildlife-sponsored  MENTOR Program, Communications Officer Iregi Mwenja said:

Despite the best efforts of governments, NGOs, the private sector and local communities to address threats to wildlife and their habitats, these threats continue and in some cases increase.

Mwenja, who says that addressing the bushmeat menace effectively requires partnerships that coordinate alternative livelihoods and protein development, increased bushmeat awareness and strengthened law enforcement and policy, feels that a network that seeks to establish consensus, identify gaps in knowledge, build awareness, improve capacity, and increase resources and dedicated action in the region on the bushmeat issue can provide this coordination.

Such a network is exemplified by the newly-formed Bushmeat-free Eastern Africa Network (BEAN) which by bringing together expertise on the bushmeat issue in a centralized network and providing support and coordination to ongoing conservation and development efforts, can help meet wildlife conservation goals.

“The partners of BEAN also plan to engage and share learning with other networks and programs working on this issue throughout Africa and other regions of the world,” he adds.

Iregi Mwenja can be reached for comments and interview on telephone  +254723713642 or via email: iregim@Yahoo.com 

Paula was one of the speakers in a recently held Technology conference in Nairobi. Mark Kaigwa (aka mkaigwa), one of the friends of WildlifeDirect, who was attending the conference on 8 August 2009, wrote the great entry about Paula’s presentation reproduced below. Thank you Bwana Kaigwa.

Engaging Conversation on Conservation in Africa
Posted on Tuesday, 17 November 2009 by mkaigwa

Paula at TEDx Nairobi (Photo via mkaigwa)

A self-confessed tree hugger, Paula Kahumbu opened by reminding us how extraordinarily privileged Kenya is as a country as far as diversity is concerned, and how most times, it’s taken for granted by Kenyans themselves. By demonstration when she asked to see those in the crowd who had been to a National Park in the last month, only a handful inferred to the affirmative. It brought life to her statement!

She shared on how Kenya has one of the world’s largest diversities of bees – over 1500 species. We assume the Maasai Migration is going to be around for generations (for those who’ve not seen it already.)

Her second confession was that she didn’t have a television. Her veranda is her television from her home on the edge of the Nairobi National Park and you can always follow her amazing tweets and extraordinary wildlife pictures.

Paula elaborated her reason why she’s a wildlife conservationist and set out to make a case. “We’ve often been told that wildlife is crucial to the economy and our economic development. However, we’ve been misled to believe that it is important for tourism alone.”

“The world’s current population is 6.9 Billion people. We’re far too many people for the planet…,” as Paula showed and while we’re now aware of our carbon footprint, we shouldn’t forget our ecological footprint. We’re using the earth, our forests, our seas and changing the landscape faster than it can regenerate itself.

“Over 1000 species are disappearing every year,” she stated. Adding that two-thirds of these species have named, they’re yet to be classified and already disappear off the face of the earth. 25% of our mammals are facing extinction. A sad reality to come to terms with.

Paula went on to share information from a recent study done in the United States where scientists conducted research and studied how valuable insects were to the economy. As insects performed basic services for human beings and the value in a year is $57 Billion and that’s a service that is free; remarkable.

The US is facing a major crisis with their bees, having lost around 80% of their bees. Bees contribute about $15 Billion a year to the US economy and that brought home a stark reality of the situation, given that Kenya has one of the largest biodiversities of bees.

She went on to elaborate on the current drought in Kenya (which has since turned into rains, and occasionally floods in some provinces). The reason why this drought is hurting, Paula said, was because we have degraded our landscapes to such an extent and silt is filling up our dams and the water is unable to penetrate the soil and replenish the reservoirs.

The global cost of saving our protected areas is $45 Billion a year for the whole world. The estimated value of these protected areas in terms of ecological services is actually $5 Trillion. She jokingly asked Aly Khan Satchu what the return on investment was.She brought the point back to order that we’re losing the race with our environment and examined the situation in Kenya with the Kenya Government and she frankly admitted that we’re losing the race to conserve our wildlife.

She also told the amazing story behind Owen and Mzee, her award-winning children’s book about a hippopotamus and a tortoise. Paula was working for Bamburi Cement in the coast running a small sanctuary, using a rehabilitated quarry where they kept hippopotamus after the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami that hit the coast just outside of Malindi.

The story, involves a hippopotamus calf that was orphaned during the tsunami and had to be taken care of. The 1 year-old hippo mistook a Seychellois tortoise for its mother, and not longer after the first pictures were taken, they quickly became viral and were abuzz all over the internet.

People were soon calling, texting and emailing asking how the tortoise and baby hippopotamus were. By this time, they had both been named, the hippo; Owen, after the man who caught him and the tortoise; Mzee – a respectful Swahili word for elderly person.

So they started a diary, written by a man who had been working at the sanctuary for 25 years, Steven Twaid. He would show what was happening with Owen and Mzee as they played, swam and grew closer together. Soon, they had over 500,000 people reading and keeping up with the life of Owen and Mzee every month. From this, they developed the children’s book – Owen and Mzee.

The book has since sold over 1 million copies and is in 24 languages across the world. From this, her meeting with Dr. Richard Leakey lead to her running Wildlife Direct which has grown from 7 blogs to over 115 different blogs, each with its own set of bloggers, volunteers and fundraisers. They’ve since raised over $1,000,000 since 2007 and now, enable people all over the world to donate and adopt projects and conservancies as they support them.

An example she raised was in the Maasai Mara where, after the post-election violence, the Maasai Mara needed funds to sustain its conservation efforts to cover the shortfall due to the nosedive in tourist revenues. They raised $280,000 towards this effort.

She spoke of the Lion Guardians project with Anthony Kasanga, a 23 year old Maasai man who is a poacher turned Lion protector. The Maasai people, as a rite of passage, have their young men kill a lion. Anthony, together with the Lion Guardians, has been able to raise $28,000 and develop a strong international following as he educates Maasai in the region on how and why to protect lions.

Paula shared on a trend that Wildlife Direct began noticing – lions were being poisoned with a cheap over-the-counter pesticide called Furadan. Kenya’s already lost 85% of lions as a result of poisoning. The impact on tourism, if this trend continues would be devastating. Luckily, Wildlife Direct rallied support and was even contacted by the US-based manufacturer of the pesticide, who agreed to take it off the market in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

The challenges for Wildlife Direct include raising support, especially in this period of the recession and developing the technology from their base in Kenya. Changing perceptions from a reliance on governments to bring environmental change is something Wildlife Direct is set on developing in Africa

A key strength of Wildlife Direct is its transparency, where all support is accounted for and results are documented by the bloggers and every action is shown and shared. The tangible impact shown to the world, shows the potential of the model behind Wildlife Direct which can be replicated and applied to different fields such as poverty alleviation and education.

Kenya just recently went through the most devastating drought in decades. It is believed that in some parts of the country, this drought was made worse by forest destruction and the resultant drying of rivers. The most dramatic case of rivers drying was experienced in the areas which source their water from the Mau Forest Complex. The Mau is the largest continuous forest area in East Africa and is the source of many rivers including the Mara River, which runs through, and is the lifeline, of Kenya’s most celebrated wildlife conservation area – the Masai Mara National Reserve.

The Mau Complex in Kenya (Map: BBC News)

For years, the Mau has suffered severe destruction as land hungry Kenyans invade the forest, sometimes with government consent and fraudulently issued legal land ownership documents. According to the BBC “During the past 15 years, more than 100,000 hectares – one quarter of the protected forest reserve – had been settled and cleared.” About 20,000 families had settled in the forest.

In the last few years, the government has been working on the removal of these illegal settlers from this forest complex which is the largest of the country’s 5 most important ‘water towers’. Now it seems that the government is succeeding, but it has not been – as usual -without its fair share of politics. Of course, where voters are concerned, the politicians will take sides depending on which block of the electorate they want to align themselves with.

That said, the first batch of illegal settlers started leaving the forest a couple of days ago. This, in environmental terms is good as the government has promissed to plant 100-million trees to replace those felled by the settlers. It is a good start but it will definitely take decades before the rivers of the Mau can once again flow as they did before the 1990s.

This eviction however introduces a sad humanitarian crisis since many of the evictees have nowhere else to go. Many have resigned to a life of squalor on the outskirts of the forest, along major roads. The government says it has plans to resettle those who are genuinely homeless in the same fashion it is assisting the IDPs who resulted from the violent fallout from the disputed 2007 presidential elections. We however know how these things work.

To really know how the government is likely to deal with this huge humanitarian burden, you just need to reflect back to the case of evictees that came from the Mount Kenya Forest. This particular group had been living in the forest when the colonial government demarcated the forest reserve in 1950. In 1989 however, they were evicted after they started encroaching further into the forest. Since then, they stayed by the roadside until July 2009 when they were allocated land in Laikipia area north of Mount Kenya. They had been on the roadside for 20 years.

Is the eviction of 20,000 humans out of the forest a good thing? I would say yes. They need to get out so that the work of rehabilitating the forest can start in earnest. But, the government should act with haste to find alternative agricultural land to settle these people so that they can once again engage in economic activities that help in building the nation.

Evictees cannot be allowed to go back to the Mau. That would make matters worse. They should not be relocated to another protected area. There are still large tracts of land owned by a few rich Kenyans. Such land is lying idle and underutilized despite the fact that it is in prime agricultural areas. The government should force these greedy landowners to sell this land and use it to settle the landless.

I am amazed! Someone took our blog post and podcast about lion vs warthog in the Masai Mara and mashed it up to produce this great Youtube video!

Thank you Tigersandme!

And all of you out there please feel free to do the same – send us links to your mashups!

The PopTech Fellows  program is sadly over – it was amazing! Now we are in for a rollercoaster with  the Pop!Tech Conference. It brings together World changing people, projects and ideas. The conference officially starts today and I’m on the line up today! I’m so thrilled to have been invited to be part of our special Wednesday session “Conservation 2.0.”  I’ll be talking about using social networking to bring out the inner conservationist in all of us save wild animals. I’ll do it by telling some stories about extraordinary bloggers on WildlifeDirect like Antony Kasanga of Lion guardians’

If you are at PopTech please consider coming to this super session

The New Edge of Conservation with Katy Payne, Healy Hamilton, and Paula Kahumbu
New tools are improving ecological conservation efforts like never before. Hear from three leading practitioners as they describe how advanced technologies are helping us amplify, protect, and support efforts to preserve biodiversity around the world. Guest presenters toiling on the front-line of conservation work will share insights, stories about elephants and whales and seahorses, and lessons learned on everything from incorporating emerging technologies to communicating the principles of conservation to children.

Here’s a sneak peak about the speakers

Cheryl Heller

Cheryl is a writer, designer and communication strategist who helps clients integrate socially responsible behavior into sustainable brand communication and promotional programs. Her firm, Heller Communication Design, has developed a process through which corporations can play a leading role in alleviating the social and environmental issues facing the world, through programs that are both easy and profitable for them.

Cheryl has written articles for Communication Arts, ID Magazine, Graphis Magazine and The Design Management Journal. She wrote a book for the AIGA on the best process for preserving innovation within corporations. Recently she wrote the lead story on creative strategy for Adobe’s online magazine, Proxy.

She has been profiled in articles in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Graphis magazine, Communication Arts, ID magazine, How magazine, Print and PDN.

Dr. Healy Hamilton

Dr. Healy Hamilton is a biodiversity scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, and adjunct professor in the Department of Geography at San Francisco State University. She is the founding director of the Center for Biodiversity Research (CBR), a program that integrates biological and geospatial data for biodiversity research, conservation and education. Dr. Hamilton and the staff at CBR conduct research into species response to climate change and make it available for large landscape conservation planning.

Katy Payne

If anyone can artfully explain how a herd of elephants is like a Quaker meeting, it is animal communication researcher Katy Payne. Payne has been studying the sounds and languages of African elephants and humpback whales—two of the world’s largest animals—for decades, but she’s also been listening to their silences. Her discoveries have led her to fascinating meditations on stillness, cognition, and how acoustic phenomena shape relationships and communities. In 1999 she founded the Elephant Listening Project to help ensure her subjects’ future. Through sound and video clips, her research team aims to monitor elephants’ welfare and movements, as well as track the effectiveness of conservation efforts. Payne is currently affiliated with the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology.

Paula Kahumbu (Yes, that’s me!)

Paula is an ecologist and a passionate tree hugger. She spent many years studying monkeys and elephants in Kenya and worked for the Kenya Wildlife Service on wildlife policy, trade and park management issues and later managed a quarry restoration company. She is passionate about Africa and conservation, saving wild species and wild places – all for a purely selfish reason, so that she can enjoy them. Her life goal is to revert the people of the world to loving nature, starting with Joshua her son.

Peter Durant will be drawing the entire conference as it happens to capture the stories in pictures. He’s amazing!