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.

Two truths about the Masai Mara

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My first trip to the Serengeti / Mara region of East Africa was in 1966. I have been back a few times and of course enjoyed every minute of it while being sadly aware of what is happening there. My wife still dines out on the story of waking in the middle of the night to the sounds of something large and noisy just outside our tent. When I peeked out (there was no way she was going to) and told her we had been joined by a large herd of cape buffalo she was not impressed. She was even less impressed with having to navigate the dozens of fresh patties in the morning.

There has been an interesting contrast in two recent reports about the fabled Masai Mara region. There can surely be nobody reading this blog who has not heard of the Mara and especially the migration of the wildbeest. I’ll further bet that all readers have seen at least five nature program on TV about the area, the crocs on the Mara river, their ambush of wildebeest and zebra and so on and so on.

The article in the Toronto Globe and mail of June 8th written by Robin Esrock of the OLN/CITY-TV series World Travels is yet another in the long string that perpetuates the beauty and wonder of a trip to this fabled spot. His piece, which you can read here is titled Catch Africa’s Great Migration – in great luxury.

I imagine that Esrock had a wonderful time but one must note that as a travel writer he probably has a vested interest. He, like so many of the TV producers who make those magic films, has somehow avoided the flip side of the coin. Perhaps nobody told him it even exists. Perhaps this was his first trip to the Mara.

For a much more discouraging, but entirely accurate perspective it is worth looking at Matt Walker’s report of June 2nd that appeared on the BBC website.

This one it titled Wildlife Crash in the Mara region of Kenya, Africa. Walker cites recent work that appeared in the prestigious Journal of Zoology. The key message is that wildlife populations have crashed in the past three decades. He quotes Dr. Jospeh Ogutu who has led research into the situation and the most worrying statement is that

“The status of Masai Mara as a prime conservation area and premier tourist draw card in Kenya may soon be in jeopardy.”

Ogutu’s team concluded that the Mara has lost two-thirds of its wildlife since 1977. Even the wildebeest migration now only has 64% of the numbers that existed in the early 1980s. As if that is not bad enough, the non-migrating wildebeest numbers have dropped by 97%.

There are two main reasons and both are related to human activity and particularly the growth of the human population. The cattle density has increased three-fold while the density of sheep and goats, which are usually herded together, has increased seven-fold. Both of these domestic species compete for grazing with the wild animals and of course also displace them.
In this picture, taken twenty years ago, a herd of cattle in the background grazes near a Masai manyatta while wildebeest dot the foreground.

That’s bad enough, but Ogutu also stated that

“over 1500 poachers have been arrested within the Mara conservancy between 2001 and 2010, with more than 17,300 snares collected by rangers in the same period.”

Walker reports that “the African buffalo are all but gone.”

Despite these worrying numbers I will be back in November, when my granddaughters will join us and their parents on a Kenya trip.

We may be lucky and see topi bulls sparring like this but the teeming herds of a hundred years ago, or the huge numbers I first saw 45 years ago will mean little to them.

We can at least be fairly sure that my wife and the next two generations will not have to worry about buffalo patties near the tent. Of course cow patties look pretty much the same.

Rinderpest in Victorian Britain

Been researching a new book on a topic that fascinates me. Know today as Rinderpest, it was the scourge of cattle owners for centuries. Former names included The Steppe Murrain, The Asian Murrain, Cattle Plague, and Cattle Typhus. If susceptible cattle became infected by this highly contagious disease then almost 100% of them would die. It swept across Asia in wave after wave of pandemics, wiping out millions of cattle every time. It got into Africa when traders brought cattle across through the Horn of Africa and then swept down and across the continent over a few years, leaving utter devastation in its wake, killing not only cattle but a host of other cloven-hoofed animals like buffalo and many antelopes.

My working title is The Virus and the Vaccine: How Cattle Plague Changed World History.

I could not have come to a better place for my research of the history of the disease in UK because the entire collection of James Beart Simonds writings, and all the material he collected. This portrait is the frontispiece of his very brief and modest autobiography. The staff at the College library have been brilliant, and I have had access to then entire collection of material that Simonds gathered during his very distinguished career. He led the charge on Rinderpest control in the mid-1800s, speaking to veterinary, agricultural and government groups all over Britain.

I was allowed to scan all of this collection – which ran to over 90 volumes of material – and it will take a long time to digest. Here is just one example of the many of the sort of thing I found. As the saying goes “watch this space”

Storytelling about Africa.

It’s been an interesting 36 hours.

I’ll go backwards.
Right now I am in Toronto Aiport, waiting for a flight to London as we head to Africa.

Last evening I was telling stories to the Western Canadian Association of Bovine Practitioners. The title of the session was Rhinos Cattle and Sex. The cattle part is what is new to these ages, and the pieces I cited came from both of my Africa books. I think that what created the most buzz was the footage of Ankole cattle entering a plunge dip.

Here it is. Old Africa hands know that this is for tick control, but folks who have not had to think much about tropical diseases, including most of the students we have taken to Uganda over the lat 8 years are amazed at the sight. Of course our hosts are just as amazed to think that we have no cattle dips in Canada, anywhere. I suppose that winter, snow, and severe cold have some advantages!

On Wednesday evening I told stores to the Calgary Academy of Veterinary Medicine in the Africa pavilion at the Calgary Zoo. My title for this group was The Trouble With Lions and other Animals in Africa. Footage was again a big hit, and I ran the edited piece that I have already got on You Tube that shows me capturing rhinos in the early 1970s with the team led by Tony Parkinson, my old tennis partner. There is no sound track - this footage was shot with a Super8 camera in the late 60s and early 70s.

I’m waiting for pictures on the 3rd gig, which was to the children in grades K thought 4 at the Chaparral school in Calgary.

‘nuff for now. I’ll be back with the story of the school soon.