Kenya National Parks in Trouble

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I’m back in harness, although not yet pulling any heavy weights as I have just completed the first week of my post knee-replacement surgery. Of course this gives me plenty of opportunity to catch up on reading and to think about the trip that my family and I completed just before Christmas. We took our daughter, her husband and their two daughters to Kenya for three weeks and combined visits to a long list of old friends with trips to several game parks.

Like many visits it was mostly great, but there was one very sad thing we found out and another that I learned as soon as we got home. Both concern the destruction of game parks by massive and indiscriminate grazing of livestock.

One of our oldest friends had not long returned from a trip to Meru Game Park, a place that is dear to me for many reasons. I have written about it and its future in both of my Africa books because it was there that I launched my career as a wildlife veterinarian when I treated my first white rhino.

I even managed to scan a section of the old map of this park in Wrestling With Rhinos and share it here - or had intnded to until I discovered that my entire blog program has suffered some sort of major health attack, or maybe it has bene hacked. I had other pictures I wanted to share, but they too would not upload.

Nigel and his wife had not only visited the park’s most western areas, but had gone all the way to the Tana River and been at first confused and then horrified at what they saw. The first impression was that the maze of footprints they had seen were those of cattle, but when they came across a massive herd of about a thousand buffalo they felt better.

The situation was temporary. As they approached the river, and left the more heavily patrolled and “popular” areas of the park near the very upmarket lodge Elsa’s Kopje, which lies within a long stone’s throw of George Adamson’s old camp, they realized that things were in bad way. Much of the bush had been cut with pangas and laid on the ground, where goats had consumed all the greenery. Many of the vehicle tracks were littered with brush and the huge fig tree at Adamson’s Falls had been shorn of almost all of its greenery. Nigel took a different route out of the park through the Ura gate and the destruction changed not one whit. The eastern half of the park was completely overrun with domestic livestock.

This is simply an escalation of the situation that warden Mark Jenkins had faced in the last days of his tenancy as the park warden. In The Trouble With Lions I predicted that Meru might not last as a park. Is this the beginning of the end?

I had hoped that this might be an isolated case, but I was quite wrong. Among the pile of magazines waiting for us at home was the October-December 2011 issue of Swara, the public face of the East African Wildlife Society. There are numerous conservation articles in its 68 pages, but the first thing I read was a long four-column letter from Dave Mckelvie about an experience he had in the Masai Mara that almost matched that of Nigel in Meru. The local Masai herdsmen are taking their cattle into the reserve at night. He confirmed this by leaving camp one night and seeing “hundreds and hundreds of LED torches twinkling in the dark.” As Dave further wrote:

“The migration will come to the Marsh [the area Dave visited] expecting a feast and will leave disappointed and be pushed out by cattle. The tourists will be and are completely in the dark and oblivious to the devastation this overgrazing will bring.”

In both cases the human population explosion continues to exert relentless pressure on the whole of East Africa. Traffic is an utter shambles in Nairobi, more and more people crowd into less and less free space and national parks are bound to feel the pressure. Sad but true.

Meru National Park and two rip-offs

Linkhttp://www.kws.org

It seems as if writing a blog has both its upbeat and downbeat moments. It is a bit like an orchestra conductor.
Here is the upbeat - a picture of the yellow-necked spurfowl that I failed to get up on my last effort.

After our visit to our favourite park in all of Africa here is what I wrote to the director of the Kenya Wildlife Service.


Kenya Wildlife Service,
Box 40241 Nairobi

Dear Sir,

I write after undergoing two rather unpleasant experiences in Meru National Park. I can sum them up as a double rip-off.

The first occurred when my wife and I reached the self-help bandas at Bwatherongi. At the park gate we had paid eighty dollars per night for booking a banda and assumed that they had been upgraded considerably from our last visit as one can get quite a reasonable (although not fancy) hotel for this sum in many parts of the world. My assumption was quite wrong. The banda was basic, very basic. Two plastic chairs, one of which was in need of extensive repair and unusable, a table and two beds. No electricity, nothing much else. Our most recent accommodation of a similar nature was in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park where the hostel charged us sixteen dollars each for bed and breakfast, and we did have electricity. Your fee was five times as much for half the quality.

As we prepared our meal the inevitable troop of baboons appeared, and it was soon evident that they were going to be a pest. We could not prepare our food unless one of us was on permanent duty with stones to throw, and even then the most forward of the monkeys was never more than twenty metres away. In the 1960s, when the self-help bandas were at Leopard Rock, a staff member armed with a slingshot of the type that David used to slay Goliath kept both vervets and baboons firmly at bay. All he had to do was twirl the thing a couple of times and the monkeys took off.

The second rip-off also occurred at the bandas, but was of quite a different nature. While we were out on an evening drive the baboons contrived to rip off part of the banda’s door frame, tear open the heavy-duty insect-proof netting and get into the room. There is no weld-mesh barriers behind the netting, so access was then easy. I will leave the state of the place to your imagination, but suffice it to say that the place smelt like what it had become, a lavatory. Almost all of our food was gone, and we dined on a tin of baked beans and two slices of bread that neighbouring visitors were kind enough to give us.

The park staff were extremely helpful as they appeared with brooms and mops and did their best to tidy up the mess, but as their own food stores had also been raided – in this case by a vervet monkey, they were in no position to help with food.

I paid my first visit to Meru Park in 1966 and have been there many times since, especially in the period 1967-1975 when I carried out veterinary duties on sick and injured rhino. Our visit there this year was precisely because we have such fond memories of the area. Our memories of 2009 are vivid, but not exactly fond.

KWS needs to deal with two things. They should not rip off visitors with over-inflated prices for very basic amenities, and they should deal with the baboons by either employing a “David” or taking more drastic action such as occurs in many other African parks.

I have sent a copy of this letter to the chief warden at Meru NP and to The Daily Nation, as I believe that the situation needs to be more widely known. I look forward to hearing about the action that you will take.

Yours sincerely,

Here are two pictures of baboons. The first taken with an 80 mm zoom lens at about 20 metres near the Meru bandas, the second in Kibale National park where these monkeys are as much a pest as anywhere else in Africa.

Meru National Park

Meru National Park in Kenya has long been one of our very favourite places. It was here that I treated my first two rhino cases, which almost certainly led to a 40-odd year career in wildlife medicine. The chapter titled The Four-Gallon Enema in Wrestling With Rhinos describes one of those cases.

Since then the park had had its ups and downs, as I described in The Trouble With Lions, but it still a beautiful place to visit. This year we were not disappointed and saw more of the graceful, shy, lesser kudu than we have ever seen before. They are a miniature version of the greater kudu that is the emblem of the South African National Parks system, and also occurs in Kenya. The first of these two photos shows a greater kudu bull at Borana, a private ranch with a beautiful up-market lodge. We saw the bull in the second photo in Meru just a couple of days ago and this is a female just about to disappear into some bushes.
We also saw a lesser kudu calf alongside a reticulated giraffe as they watched us from across the Bwatherongi river.

Meru NP also has a wide variety of bird species, among the most spectacular of which are rollers, both European (this one twisting his neck to look up) and lilac-breasted. Yellow-necked spur-fowl are abundant, but one does not see them much after 8.00 am or before 6.00 pm when they emerge from the grass to gather gravel on the roads. I tried to get a pic on this blog,but my connection had a brain fart, so I'm using a friend's computer. I'll get one up later.

Rhino Conservation and the probable disappearance of one race

It looks as if the planet’s last four wild Northern White Rhinos, which lived in the Garamba National park in the DRC have gone. As reported by Reuters in an article of June 16th Martin Brooks, head of the African Rhino Specialist Group, has stated that recent fieldwork has failed to find the animals. A new, and intensive, survey is planned under the direction of the African Parks Foundation, but it would seem to me that they have little chance of finding anything.

Northern White Rhinos do not look any different than their cousins of the Southern race, and it is now these that have been translocated to Uganda, to the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary, where I have taken students,and in 1966 were taken to Meru National Park, in Kenya, where I later had to do some medical interventions.

which I have documented in Wrestling With Rhinos and in The Trouble With Lions.

If the colours and picture quality of the animal with the big sore on its side look a bit dodgy, you may be interested to know that the photo comes from an old Super8 movie taken in the early 1970s. Super8 is incredibly small (8mm) and only technical wizardry has allowed us to use this picture.

As those who follow rhino issues closely know only too well, the pressure on them is unrelenting. If their horns are not being sold into Yemen to make dagger handles, they go to the Far East for use in traditional medicine.

It hardly matters who did the killing. In a country where war has been the norm for years and years it could be remnant armed militias like the ones who killed hundreds of hippo and have now started to take out elephants, (the war is supposed to be over) or even heavily-armed guerrillas from northern Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony , he of the bestial child abduction and slavery group who operate in the region. Either type of group would be hungry for the money that they could raise through the sales of rhino horn.

When I was in Kenya in 2006 there was a strong feeling that those four rhinos might find a home at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where they would have been relatively safe, as the place is heavily guarded. As there are no white rhino of the southern race inside the fence there would have been no risk of cross-breeding. The scheme seemed to be well ahead, and some of the logistics were being worked out. Then it all came to a halt. I am not sure why, but one reason given us was that locals in the DRC had objected. A sad end.