Tumaren

Category: Issues | Date: Apr 13 2008 | By: tumaren

Wim,
Many Sante Sanas for your contribution to our conservation work. I will need now to get that aardwolf pic as a sufficient thank you. In the meantime the Hyena Appreciation Society has some more members and with an Aardwolf picture well surely get some more. Hope your well, James

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Category: Issues | Date: Mar 19 2008 | By: tumaren

…but there is thunder tonight all around us and we are all eager for it to pour. All the dams in the area are dry and each afternoon the winds blow sand and dust into mini tornadoes. Depsite that our elephants are back and they usually only arrive back with us with the rains. Many of the Acacia mellifera bushes are just about to flower and this too often happens before the rains arrive. We are all very hopeful.
Just back from Nairobi and setting the camera trap with a bit of smelly meat. Fingers crossed.

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Category: Issues | Date: Feb 02 2008 | By: tumaren

We at Tumaren would like to take this opportunity to present Theresa S with an emerald,, An emerald with legs that is.. We are very grateful for your donation Theresa and your help will go a long way toward conservation on the adjacent community land to Tumaren - We specifically want to do some snare patrolling. many thanks, jamie and kerry.
PS look at his underside!

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Category: Issues | Date: Jan 29 2008 | By: tumaren

I eat meat and probably too much of it. I found this article in the New York Times rather alarming. I have always known about these issues but the implications for just slowing down our meat consumption (rather than quitting outright) are incredible with regard to greenhouse gas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?ref=science

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Category: Issues | Date: Dec 05 2007 | By: tumaren

In our area clearing woodland for charcoal is a rather new phenomena. The charcoal that is cut and prepared here is made for sale in the south near cities like nanyuki or meru. There, a bag of charcoal can sell for about 350 shillings equivalent to 5 or 6 US $. This can be a rather good business and so more and more Meru (a tribe that lives on the east side of Mt. Kenya around Meru town) have been coming to eastern Laikipia to cut charcoal. Typically they make a deal with the land owners who may want to clear a certain area to open it up (so kids can go to school along a road and not be bothered by elephants, or to clear a boundary etc.). We have entered into such a deal in order to open up a small area that is dangerous to pass when our elephants around. The area is not extensive and after the selective cutting the area remains vegetated with the broken elephant damaged bushes gone and the more pretty specimens left. The trees that are cut are predominantly Acacia mellifera, also known as the wait-a-bit-thorn. Mellifera is a short lived bush and so when cut returns rather quickly. Having watched this bush return vigorously i began to think about the sustainability of charcoal cutting in this kind of habitat, wondering if there should not be more conversation with the local communities about how to properly practice charcoal cutting. Like all natural resource extraction, the practice of charcoal cutting can be abused leaving too little woodland to repopulate or as wildlife habitat or as firewood for the local masai.
Charcoal is a bad word in nearly all conservation circles and this is typically because of abuse and over exploitation yet most africans are left with no other way of cooking their food. The conservation community have made efforts to introduce such technologies as solar ovens but these have led to limited success because of their physical limits (difficult to fry or boil on demand) as well as cultural barriers. I think that charcoal, till we come up with a better idea, is a reality and that the conservation community could serve itself well by beginning to address sustainability with regards to charcoal collecting in kenya. If we just sit back and say “thats bad” from the confines of our gas/electric fed lives we are being hypocrites and nobody will bother to listen anyway. just some thoughts for today. cheers, jamie

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Category: Issues | Date: Sep 26 2007 | By: tumaren

This is a distressing BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7011593.stm

The British Army continues to deny any wrongdoing when it comes to their excercises in northern Kenya and the impact on wildlife. A qoute from a spokeperson for the British High Commission:

“Helicopters follow routine flight paths which avoid game reserves and national parks. They have not flown beneath minimum height restrictions and have not been illegally viewing game.”

What this response does not touch on is the fact that British Army Helicopters continue to harass Elephants while practicing on private game reserves, namely Mpala Ranch. In order to practice their exercises on Mpala and despite promises to curtail Helicopter harassment, helicopters continue to push Elephant herds away from their practice areas (these are the same Elephants that live in Samburu National Reserve - they move between). Only one week ago our rangers saw the helicopters dispersing the Elephants in huge clouds of sand. The Elephant herds ran toward Tumaren but most did not cross because the river was high and they were with small young. This only aggravated their stress.
Jamie

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Category: Issues | Date: Jul 08 2007 | By: tumaren

Today it was reported that 7 elephants were poached on Koija Group Ranch not far north of us. This morning it was also reported that KWS officers were flying the area and were in pursuit of the poachers. This is very abnormal for this area and i imagine that KWS and the police will find the culprits quickly. More reports as we get them. Jamie

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Category: Issues | Date: May 17 2007 | By: tumaren

This is a total disgrace. While this article is poorly written and absurdly suggests that the Douglas Hamiltons had a business conflict of interest with a new tourism development (they operate a 10 bed camp and would never be competing with the clientelle that would be coming to a new 400 bed hotel), It is the only article i can see on the net on this recent development. The Douglas Hamiltons have made such an enormous contribution to conservation in Kenya it is just so disturbing to see the Kenyan government behave so arrogantly. Please read the article below:

From Jamie

http://allafrica.com/stories/200705150695.html

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Category: Issues | Date: Apr 13 2007 | By: tumaren

For New York Times

April 11, 2007
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Upsetting the Balance

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Masai Mara, Kenya

Surely of all God’s creations, none is more beautiful than the sunrise on the Masai Mara grassland, Kenya’s spectacular nature reserve and a backdrop for the movie “Out of Africa.” The sun’s ascent here is like a curtain going up on one of Mother Nature’s richest ecosystems. Through the day you can be greeted by a bull elephant in hot pursuit of a cow, serenaded by tropical boubou birds, intimidated by two lionesses devouring a warthog, amused by the cattle egrets riding on the backs of African buffalos and impressed by how each small cluster of topi antelope “assigns” one topi to stand on a small hill and keep watch for predators while the others graze. Everything seems in perfect balance.

Except … behind the curtain, deforestation, the poaching of wildlife and now climate change present a trio of threats to the Mara, which have Kenyans, and all those concerned about biodiversity, worried.

Over the last 10 years, “the weather has changed,” explained our Masai naturalist, Daniel Memusi. “All of a sudden it is becoming unpredictable. …April has always been a rainy month — every afternoon and all night. You expect rain, but no rain.” If the few scattered rains this April don’t become more intense, he added, the farmers who just planted their crops will have serious problems. “This should be a very wet month for anyone who knows the Mara, but instead the rains came in January and February,” he said.

One should never extrapolate about climate change from any single ecosystem or brief period. But as The Times’s environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin recently noted, scientists say it’s increasingly clear “that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles.”

“Rainfall has changed dramatically in the last 30 years — it is less predictable now,” said Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, which manages Kenya’s Noah’s ark of endangered species. If climate changes bring more severe droughts and floods, and the animal migrations are disrupted, “the brand of the Mara dies,” added Mr. Kipng’etich, referring to Kenya’s “Lion King” grassland. That would really hurt Kenya’s economy. “When every Kenyan meets a wild animal, they should bow and say thank you.”

Kenya also has to worry about deforestation and poaching, although poaching is now under better control. Kenya’s forests have been reduced from 10 percent of the country’s landmass at the time of its independence in 1963 to 2 percent today, while in the same period its elephant population went from 170,000 to 30,000 and its rhino population from 20,000 to around 500. “When you see a rhino today, you are very lucky,” said Mr. Kipng’etich. “Your children or grandchildren may never see one.”

Climate change could worsen this. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just concluded that two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has come — in roughly equal parts — from the U.S. and Western Europe. These countries have the resources to deal with climate change, and may even benefit from some warming. Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of global CO2 emissions since 1900, the report noted, yet its 840 million people could suffer enormously from global-warming-induced droughts and floods and have the fewest resources to deal with them.

“We have a message here to tell these countries, that you are causing aggression to us by causing global warming,” President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda told an African Union summit in Ethiopia last February. “Alaska will probably become good for agriculture, Siberia will probably become good for agriculture, but where does that leave Africa?”

A study by Oxfam, entitled “Africa — Up in Smoke,” noted that in line with climate models, droughts in northwest Kenya appear to becoming more frequent. It profiled the impact on the nomadic pastoralists of Kenya’s northwest Turkana region, who graze cattle, camels and goats. They’ve always known droughts, but because they are now more frequent, families and animals have less chance to recover.

The Turkana people, said Oxfam, call this more persistent drought “ ‘Atiaktiak ng’awiyei’ or ‘the one that divided homes’ because so many families split up to survive, migrating in all directions.”

It really is wrong that those least responsible for climate change should pay the most. “My recommendation is that the biggest polluter pays,” said Mr. Kipng’etich. “We are one planet, one system.” He has a point. He deserves an answer.

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Category: Issues | Date: Mar 27 2007 | By: tumaren

David Mech, the American Wolf Biologist once suggested that allowing ranchers to shoot and kill the occasional wolf predating their livestock would allow ranchers recourse to fix their own problems without resorting to poisoning, the more deadly and indiscriminate killer of predators as well as scavengers. I wonder if the same theory could apply to Lions. As social predators Lions might behave in some of the same ways as a wolf pack. Mr Mech has suggested that you can typically kill a couple wolves from a pack but quite quickly the remainder become very shy and refrain from the activities that brought on the trouble in the first place. I would imagine that Lions would behave in the same way.

I bring up this point simply as something to think about and discuss. We live in a part of the world where a large number of pastoral people must coexist with predators that routinely eat their livelyhood. Poisoning, a far more terrifying solution has been widely used in Kenya to Kill predators in the past. Through poisoning alone the American government was able to nearly eliminate the wolf population from the lower 48 and Mr. Mech has suggested that this would never have been possible if those predator control agents were only given guns. Have authors made similar suggestions when it comes to large predator control in Africa?

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