AWF Blog

• Taking School Children to See Wildlife Up Close

  Posted: February 27, 2009, 5:12 pm by Muoria

  Public awareness (particularly among the local communities of the Grevy’s zebra habitat) on the plight of the Grevy’s zebra and other wildlife conservation issues is a key activity of AWF’s Grevy’s zebra conservation/research project. In addition, Kenya’s National Grevy’s Zebra Conservation Strategy, which launched in June 2008, recognizes the importance of local community participation in Grevy’s zebra conservation. This is in recognition that nearly all the wild Grevy’s zebras are found on community-owned land.  This implies that Grevy’s zebra conservation efforts can only bear fruits if members of the local community become the species’ guardians.

  It was against this background that we have initiated a vigorous public awareness campaign on Grevy’s zebra conservation in Isiolo community areas within Samburu Heartland.

  Towards the end of last year, we were approached by the Head Teacher of Kula Mawe Primary School to help finance a trip of the School’s Environmental/Wildlife club to Buffalo Springs and Samburu national reserves. We saw a good opportunity to initiate our Grevy’s zebra awareness campaign.

  Unfortunately, the roads in the area are in a terrible state and hiring a bus to transport the students and their teachers would have been too expensive for our project. However, we promised to help the school, so we continued toying with the idea. Luckily, AWF recently acquired a new bus which could be used for such purposes.

  We took primary school kids into the reserves to get a first-hand encounter with wildlife.

  The school is some 80 kilometers east of Buffalo Springs National Reserve. “Kula Mawe” literally means “eat the stones” – a name which it must have acquired from its abundant stones. On 18th February 2009, Felix (AWF’s field assistant/bus driver), Geoffrey (AWF’s Grevy’s zebra Research Assistant, and myself left the Nanyuki office for Kula Mawe Primary School so that we could start off our trip to the reserves very early on 19th Feb.

  We arrived at Isiolo town at 4:00 in the afternoon. I remained at Isiolo planning the next day’s logistics (packed lunch, water etc.) while my colleagues left for Kula Mawe. They called me to say they got to Kula Mawe around 6:00pm. They were treated to a heavy dinner organized by the local leaders.

  I understand that most of the students did not sleep that night due to excitement. At 5:30am on 19th February, the drivers were ready to start the historic trip but the students had apparently been ready long before them.

  At around 7:30 am, they found me at Isiolo finalizing procurement of supplies for the trip. There were a total of 28 students (14 girls and 14 boys), two teachers, two parents and a photographer to capture the day’s activities. They were also accompanied by Kula Mawe’s ward Representative (popularly referred to as “Councilor”) to County Council of Isiolo which manages Buffalo Springs National Reserve. This councilor happens to be the chairman of the Game Committee of the council.

  After a hurried breakfast at Isiolo we started for Buffalo Springs National Reserve. We had a brief discussion on conservation, the wild animals we expected to see, and the expected behavior in the reserves. We started our game drive at Buffalo Springs Ngaremara Gate had a brief discussion at Buffalo Springs (after which the reserve is named) before proceeding to Samburu National Reserve via a small rural town called Archers Post.

  The students saw elephants, reticulated giraffes, buffalos, warthogs antelopes (including impala, gerenuk, Grants gazelles, dik diks, and beisa oryx).They also saw baboons, vervet monkeys, and many bird species (including secretary birds, Somali Ostriches, Helmeted and Vulturine Guinea Fowls among others).

  I’ll post more photos next.

• Dr. Philip Muruthi Visits the Leopard Project

  Posted: February 27, 2009, 4:08 pm by Nakedi

  Dr. Philip Muruthi, AWF’s Senior Director of Conservation Science, recently came from Nairobi to visit the leopard project. During his stay he managed to hold very important and fruitful meetings with Dr. Sam Ferreira from SANParks, Mr. Thomas Ramabulana also from SANParks as well as Mr. Jason Trollip, the General Manager at Singita KNP. Through the meetings Dr. Muruthi got an opportunity to see the project from different viewpoints and in the process share his own insights with the above mentioned gentlemen.

  After all the meetings were done, we went to the field where I showed him some of the cage traps. I was hoping to take him on a long walk to check some of the cameras that I left out in the field to help me answer, though not statistically relevant, some of the outstanding questions.

  Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out as we were hoping: we met some people who told us that there was a lioness covered in porcupine quills somewhere in the west, 30 kilometres away. The lioness was also apparently in a bad shape.

  Compared to other animals, porcupines appear as easy prey to most carnivores because their movements are rather sluggish. This makes them come across as easy prey; however, a slight misjudgement by would-be attacker may result in some nasty injuries, which may be fatal as was seen with Paddy a few weeks ago.

  We went in that direction, but were unsuccessful in locating the cat. We then headed back to the concession.

  It was time for the next part: locating the recently collared leopard. That took us a while and when we finally got the signal, the leopard was too far in to the block to follow up. No off-road driving is allowed in Kruger National Park. We then headed back to the lodge to discuss some of the methodology surrounding the project.

  Dr. Philip Muruthi checks out my radio antennae.

  On Sunday Dr. Muruthi had to go back to the airport, so on our way there we stopped at Satara, where we met with Rob and Tionette Gedes who are both very dedicated Friends of the Kruger National Park. They are currently involved in the Bird Census. I met them while following the previous leopard.

  It turns out they had a lot of leopard pictures that they have taken over time in the Kruger Park and were willing to share so that I can add those to the current leopard database. On that day they were very excited because they had just seen the fattest leopard they had ever seen. I didn’t believe them at first, but when I saw the cat on their video, it was the fattest leopard I have ever seen. They gave me all the pictures they had together with GPS position of each animal.

  Thank you very much Tionette and Rob!

  After that we were on our way and we managed to drive through some of the villages surrounding the Park. I would like to thank Dr. Muruthi for making time to come and visit the leopard project.

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Fish cakes

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Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes