Baraza

Amboseli is famed for the spectacular views of Mt Kilimanjaro and the elephant population made famous by Cynthia Moss, Joyce Poole and the Amboseli Elephant Project.

Amboseli was severely affected by the Kenyan drought, and even though it is now officially over, this is no paradise for wildlife.

It is extremely hot and dusty and there is hardly any grazing. According to local scientists, over 95% of the wildebeest and nearly all the zebras and other wildlife perished from starvation in the drought. In addition the drought took 50 – 80% of the Maasai cattle herds. Predators lost their prey base, and lions, already critically endangered in Kenya also faced starvation so they turned to killing the few remaining cattle and other Maasai livestock.

According to the Maasai on the ground, in a normal year five cattle are killed by lions, currently lions attack five times per week!

To avert the situation the Kenya Wildlife Service mounted the largest wildlife operation in Africa, to translocate 7000 zebras and wildebeest to the park to provide food for the lions and no doubt, to restore the touristic attraction to Amboseli.

We witnessed day 20 of the operation – the goal was to capture 50 zebras in a dawn operation. Everything started at 5.30am.

The Kenya Wildlife Service helicopter rounds up zebras and drives them into a cleverly hidden funnel

Once inside, the funnel is closed with curtains behind the zebras

The zebras are completely confused but not panicked. They settle down until the chute and trucks are in place.

Rangers make noise banging the floor and sides of funnel with sticks to move zebras into the chute.

Zebras run from funnel into the chute and directly into the waiting truck

KWS rangers and veterinarians count the individuals and make sure all is going according to plan

49 zebras are captured. Zebras are compartmentalized in the truck in groups of 10

Six hours adn 300 km later the first zebra truck arrives in Amboseli

The container is opened and zebra makes first tentative steps out

then race for FREEDOM!

The last foal looked a little lost at first

But quickly followed the others running to the elephants in the swamp – causing a minor panic by the pachyderms!

The next day the zebras had figured out where the grass and water was. Of 49 captured 48 survived the first day. One individual ran directly into the swamp and the jaws of waiting hyenas. Its carcass was rescued and taken to a hungry lion pride wtih 6 cubs.

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My name is Kathleen Morriss and I am a 3^rd year university student at Princeton University. I’m spending 3 months studying ecology and evolutionary biology in Kenya.

“My life is not my own, it is my children’s – everything is for them.” This heartfelt statement from Teresia was the pervading theme throughout our conversation in the warm sun outside her boma as we discussed her feelings towards wildlife and Kenya Wildlife Service. Over the past week our class of 13 Princeton University students has been trying to understand how the Maasai people who live along the border of Nairobi National Park view the wildlife that the Park is increasingly struggling to preserve.

One of our teachers, Dino Martins, translating questions and answers during our discussion with Teresia.

On our first day of interviews we met Nixon, a participant in the Land Lease Program – a conservation initiative that pays US$4 per acre per year to land owners who agree not to fence the land they commit to the program. As Nixon described it, wildlife can be problem, but he understands the value of them and greatly appreciated the Land Lease Program because it provides money for education. He strongly believes education is key to future success, an attitude perfectly characterized by his brown t-shirt featuring the slogan “I <3 Wildlife.”

Nixon’s pro-wildlife shirt.

Like Nixon, Teresia is a strong advocate of education, especially for her children. Unlike Nixon, Teresia does not view the wildlife and government programs in a positive light. Teresia is not part of the Land Lease Program and her answers to our queries brought stories of long nights burning cow dung around the boma to discourage lion attacks and long delays associated with government programs. Teresia repeatedly told us how she and the other members of her women’s group struggle to pay school fees and feed their children while lions kill calves and zebras eat the grass she is carefully conserving for the high quality cow she hopes to purchase.

Burned cow dung piles around the calf boma.

Teresia told us that she understands that wildlife is an important part of the landscape and beneficial for Kenya as a whole, but that she only experiences the costs. She does not want anything for herself, she only wants education and a better life for her children. As of now, wildlife only hinders that goal by destroying her attempts at agriculture or killing her calves.

What struck me most about these two people, both of whom were open and welcoming to our group, was the contrast in attitudes that a simple compensation program produced. The wildlife cause similar problems for both Maasai, but for Nixon they also bring regular cash payments that pay his brothers’ school fees or buy food in times of drought. For Teresia the wildlife are a source of grief and expense – an obstacle to her efforts to better her children’s lives. After our discussions with Nixon and Teresia I am thoroughly convinced that successful conservation programs need to focus on bringing benefits to those suffering from the costs of preserving wildlife. The Land Lease Program’s success comes from its ability to provide economic benefit for a commodity (wildlife) that was previously viewed only as a nuisance.

Technorati : Dino Martins, Maasai, Paula Kahumbu, Princeton University, Wildlife, community conservation, conservation, masai, wildlifedirecdt
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Hi, My name is Erin, I’m a 3rd year student from Princeton. This is my first time to come to Africa and I’m interested in wildlife conservation. This blog is about the similarities and differences between my home town of Rosalia and Kitengela in Kenya.

Technorati : Conservation, Kenya, Nairobi National Park, Paula Kahumbu, Princeton University, Rosalia, Wildlife, WildlifeDirect, community
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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.

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.

Dear all,

After the death of a child in Kenya from ingesting Furadan, and with the US Environmental Protection Agency banning carbofuran in America, we feel that there is no justification for delaying banning it in Kenya.

Watch this video and share with your friends. Please support our campaign to save lions.

Thank you

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!

Dear Friends

I just wanted to let you know that I am at PopTech  and it is amazing. I wish my entire team from Nairobi and all our WildlifeDirect bloggers could be here with me!

In the PopTech Fellows program I will be talking about WildlifeDirect and working with a team of professional marketers, strategists, communicators and planners to learn more about what we can do to take WildlifeDirect to the next level.

We are all at Point Lookout Resort and Recreation Center  near Camden and they days are filled with exercises and meetings. It is going to be very intense and I am really looking forward to the results!

Andrew Zolli is an expert in global foresight and innovation, studying the complex trends at the intersection of technology, sustainability and global society that are shaping our future

Andrew Zolli runs PopTech and he told us that we had each one of us 16 fellows had been selected from hundreds of applicants and that his team had investigated each and every one of us to determine if we would be the perfect team. I wasn’t alone in feeling deeply honored that they had selected me. The other poptech fellows are doing earth shattering social innovations in energy and ecological solutions, education, medicine and design. It’s overwhelming. The PopTech team are fantastic – we already have a few nicknames like “Mushroom man” and I’m being called “Kenya”. You can meet all the other PopTech Fellows here

We were blessed with a spectacular sunset after our first day at the PopTech fellows. Wow!

I will continue blogging and tweeting about Poptech here and on Twitter at @paulakahumbu. You can follow other Poptech tweeters by searching #poptech and following @poptech

You can also read Erik Hershmans blog here

Before I sign off I want to thank Ollie Wilder (great name) and his parents and family who have taken me under their wing in Camden over the last week. I especially want to say “Thank you” to Trink and Kent for adopting me into your amazing family.

If you haven’t made a donation yet on WildlifeDirect, consider this

There are days when can not sleep because of fears that WildlifeDirect  cannot survive this disastrous economic crisis. Fund raising has not been easy nor fun lately – and it’s affecting or ability to do effective conservation of endangered species.

Because everyone is affected by the economic crisis, many of our donors are telling us that they can’t contribute anymore, and the average donation of those generous donors who have continued to support us have declined by about 50% from an average donation of $100 to $47.

Despite the drop in funding, our bloggers remain convinced. We now have over 80 conservation blogs from the frontlines in Africa, Asia and South America. Half of these bloggers get funds every month and every month more people inquire and ask to join our network. It is so rewarding to know that good conservationists believe in us. This is what keeps us going at WildlifeDirect.

Here are some reasons why you should support projects on WildlifeDirect

1. It’s direct – you can choose the blog, item and place you want your funds to go to
2. It’s accountable – you can see your money working by reading the blogs
3. It’s easy  - we use paypal and you will get a tax receipt
4. It’s quick – you can respond to any wildlife conservation emergency and make ….But what I like most about this is that
5. It’s cost effective – a little money goes a long way in Africa where $100 can pay for a rangers salary for a month! Our bloggers only ask for essential things –rations, petrol for patrols , critical equipment, food for animals and basic field costs. They are working on shoe string budgets – many of them volunteer.

Watch our video and Join us

WildlifeDirect has had a far greater impact on bloggers than we ever imagined. Next I will be interviewing Anthony Kasanga (lionguardians) about how his life changed after he started blogging on WildlifeDirect.

THANK YOU EVERYONE WHO HAS STAYED WITH OR RECENTLY JOINED WILDLIFEDIRECT.   YOU ARE ALL AMAZING PEOPLE:)

While at the Jackson Hole Film Wildlife Festival the winner of this years winner was announced, it’s a film called “Green” by Charlie Hamilton James, Frederic Fouge. I met Frederic who surprised me when I asked for a copy of the film

- it’s available for free download on the interent. Here’s a great opportunity for every single illegal video store in the world to download this film legally for free and to show it to as many people as possible.

I’ve just downloaded it myself from this site

Charlie Hamilton James, Frederic Fougea