Wildlife declines in Kenya

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My In Box of yesterday carried an interesting Kenya-based article from the Wildlife Diseases News Digest. The somewhat over the top headline “Kenya on the brink of recording big five extinction” is at least an attention grabber. It came from the East African Standard and highlights, once again, the problems that plague the country’s wildlife situation.

The article, dated June 7th, is by one Joe Kiarie and tells how four cows were killed by lions in the community of Oloolaimutiak within the Masai Mara National Reserve. Naturally the villagers reacted and laced the carcasses with poison. ONE young lion died within 100 metres of the scene and four others are missing. The inevitable “by-kill” of vultures occurred.
No poison is named, but it is a racing certainty that they used Furadan. Important questions remain. How did they get the stuff? Was it some residual stock or were they able to purchase it in a village shop? In the past many shops carried signs such as “Agricultural Supplies” and in them Furadan was readily available. As those who saw the CBS 60 Minutes show in March this year will recall the manufacturers of the chemical stated that they would discontinue its supply. If you missed it, I referred to it in my blogs of March 15th & 29th.

It is not just lions and poison that Kiarie mentions. He states “Three days before, a poacher was shot dead after he was caught removing a horn from a black rhino in Laikipia.” This picture accompanies his article. He goes on to mention some other species. These include roan and sable antelope (the black one with the huge horns), Hirola, or Hunter’s antelope and Grevy’s zebra. Rather than bore with numbers, the Grevy’s shows the trend. In 1970 there were thought to be some 20,000 head in East Africa (many in Ethiopia). Perhaps there are 18,00 today, and many of these are on private reserves. This picture, taken by Dick Neal in Kenya in 1975 shows a mixed aggregation of the common or Burchell’s zebra, with their broad stripes, and the taller, large eared Grevy’s with the narrow stripes. It has been suggested that there may be fewer Grevy’s zebra than there are the much higher profiled black rhino in Africa.

In a related article by Beatrice Obwocha of the 11th of May this year the plight of one of the world’s great sights, the massed ranks of flamingos on Kenya’s Lake Nakuru. In a nutshell, the numbers are at an all-time low. There may not have been more than a thousand of them after the long drought between November and March. Contrast this with numbers that were once thought to exceed half a million.
And why? Partly the drought (an estimated 100,000 returned between March and May), but a much bigger and long-term problem comes from human activity. The water source for the lake lies on the escarpment above it. Water levels are down, alkalinity is up, and the algae upon which the birds feed are not thriving. On top of this the nearby town of Nakuru has grown enormously and the sewage and agricultural waste from the surrounding farms all drain into the lake.

What neither author mentioned up front is the core problem of human population expansion, which inevitably leads to crowding for space and diminishing resources. When people’s livelihoods and way of life are threatened they will react, either vigorously, in the case of lion attacks, or insidiously, even unknowingly, in the Lake Nakuru example.

Writing and bird photographs

Writing this from the cottage in Gilgil, Kenya where six years ago I started working in earnest on the first draft of the manuscript that would become The Trouble With Lions. I already knew, at that time, that this would be the title of the book, that the lion would simply be the symbol of what is happening to Africa’s wildlife, and that I would have stories about many of the areas of the continent where I had worked with wild animals.

What I had not known was that our hosts, Nigel & Muffet Trent had an active and effective bird feeding and watering station right outside the verandah of their house, and that I would only have to walk a bout 20 metres to sit there and be able to photograph the birds that came to feed or drink. These included cordon blues (this one is a male, identified by the red spot on his cheek), purple grenadiers, speckled pigeons and any number of bulbuls.


Yesterday we visited a new lodge that is sited right above Lake Elementaita, with a great view down over the water and across to the land that is now Soysambu Conservancy. The folks who own the lodge also offer balloon rides over the area. On the far side of the lake, and not visible trough the haze or at this distance, is the only known breeding colony of the Great White Pelican in East Africa.

There are two remarkable features of this colony. First, the young birds are pitch back in colour, and second the adults have move off to a neighbouring lake, either Naivasha or Nakuru, to find food. Being pelicans, they do this most efficiently when the heat of the day has started up a series of thermals, so one can see the birds circling in flocks as they gain height.

Giraffe taxonomy

For years there has been a usually friendly debate among taxonomists and biological scientists who fall into one of two camps. These are the “lumpers” and the “splitters”. I have always been a fence-sitter on this, as I do not know enough about the pure science to make a meaningful contribution. A recent report that reached me through the newsletter of the International Giraffe Working Group (IGWG) may lay the debate to rest, at least as far as giraffes are concerned. This beautiful image, which appears here in the on-line journal BMC Biology is not a fanciful depiction of a multi-coloured palm leaf, but shows how six different groups of giraffes can be divided at the species level through the wonders of DNA technology. Many of the species separated as long as a million years ago. The ten-author study was led by David Brown, from the University of California, Los Angeles.


There are some obvious differences in appearance among the species, the most striking of which is the chocolate-coloured and clearly delineated coat pattern of the reticulated giraffe from Kenya’s north-east, which here in the first picture, taken at Borana. For those who wonder, the mountain at the back is Mt. Kenya. As for Borana, you can find out more about the idyllic lodge and setting here.

A closer view of these striking beasts show four of them in close association. Two are “necking” a competitive activity which ecologist Richard Estes describes in these terms (the) “Movement and counter movement appear rhythmical and synchronized, imparting the sinuous grace of a stylized dance”.

There are two other species of which I have my own photos. This one shows a group of Rothschild's giraffe, in Uganda’s Murchison Fall NP.

This photo of Rothschild giraffes taking the midday shade under a Fever Tree, was taken in Lake Nakuru NP, to which the founding herd had been translocated from western Kenya when the land they lived on had been developed for farming. Lake Nakuru is outside their traditional range, but the herd has been used as a source for subsequent translocations, notably back to Uganda, where numbers have been in decline ever since the ravages of Idi Amin and his armies.

And then there is the Masai giraffe, which is the first kind that I saw as I left Nairobi Airport (before it was named after Kenya's first president) in 1965, three days after graduating from veterinary school in Scotland and 16 years after leaving the country of my birth. I saw this group below the Ngong Hills, just outside Nairobi a few months later. Sadly there are not may there now, as poaching pressure with gun and snare has been relentless.

The speciation may not stop at six. Author David Brown and his colleagues in their paper in the BMC online journal state that

"The discovery of potential giraffe species may not be over. The Thornicroft's giraffes are a morphologically distinct population of giraffes endemic to the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, and a key link between the African continent’s north and south populations. The population is biologically isolated from other giraffe populations and as such is ecologically and potentially genetically unique."

In common with much else in the wildlife world, all over the globe, the numbers of giraffe are declining, in concert with expanding human populations. As Brown and his colleagues state

"There has been an estimated drop of 30% decade to less than 100,000 giraffes remaining on the continent."

Nowhere is this more apparent than in West Africa, where bushmeat hunting activity is rampant. Here is what Brown and his co-authors have on this part of the story.

"Within the peralta group of West-Central African there are only about 200 giraffes remaining in all of West Africa west of Cameroon where until the mid-20th century there were perhaps thousands"

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There are several other fascinating articles in the IGWG newsletter that is edited by Dr. Julian Fennessy, so for those as captivated by these magnificent animals as am I, I suggest that you make contact with him. I cannot give you his email address here - that would be inappropriate, but he may choose to add it in the comments section to this posting.