Field Reflections of Kenya
priv·i·lege /ˈpriv(ə)lij/ noun
Privilege is a word heard a lot back home lately. "White privilege", "male privilege". While things back home in the States leave much to be desired as of late, and things seem to be crazy and headed backwards towards the middle ages, one thing stuck with me the day I was privileged to talk to some of the girls during the Community Day. What I learned from these girls, is just how privileged I was being raised where education is available to all. I was privileged to live my own life. Privileged to have a mom, that accepted me for who I am since I was a child, and put the only one expectation upon me: "that what ever you choose to do in your life, that you are HAPPY!"
I think about how these young girls were amazed that Sandra and I are only children and weren't married. In their culture, they are expected to be married by 18 and begin bearing children. Diana in the middle, was the youngest of eleven. I laugh thinking back to how the girls' eyes' almost fell out of their heads when I told them my age, about to turn 50 this year. They told me that people in their community at my age walk with a stick. This also reminds me how privileged I am again, as I'm sure they all work much harder than I do, as tired as I may feel at the end of my work day. People of this community, don't have a work day like me, theirs is 24 hours long.
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When I returned home from Kenya, I experienced a feeling I never felt before. Somehow, I felt an emptiness inside, like a piece of my heart and soul was left behind. I had lost something I never knew I had inside. I felt different, it was in my blood now. To see the Great Migration is still on my bucket list. When Sandra and I visited Masai Mara National Reserve for 3 days, the full migration was not occurring. Due to the heavy rainfall and floods earlier in the season, there was an abundance of grass in the Serengeti, so animals were not about to leave there and travel north yet. The rains were a blessing for the animals that made it through previous years of drought, but perhaps for me too. It gives me reason to return... and hopefully feel whole again. Prior to my in-field experience, I chose to write my synthesis paper on lion-human conflict, coexistence and the importance of conservancies in Southern Kenya. This became more than just the topic of my synthesis paper, it became the theme of my in-country experiences in the South Rift of Kenya, where I witnessed humans and wildlife sharing a landscape together. Humans and lions have shared landscapes for thousands of years (Hunter, 2005), but lions are currently declining in population, and human-lion conflict is believed to be their most critical threat (Bauer, Packer, Funston, Henschel & Nowell, 2016). When faced with anthropogenic pressures and disturbance, lions have been found to alter their behavior, temporally and spatially (Mogensen, Ogutu, & Dabelsteen, 2011). Research supports that the availability of not only protected areas, but surrounding conservancy areas, with sufficient prey densities are crucial for the conservation of lions (Blackburn, Hopcraft, Ogutu, Matthiopoulos & Frank, 2016). A ‘conservancy’ is land that is set aside for wildlife conservation. Lions require the space to retreat from anthropogenic pressures. When offered the space and prey required, coexistence has been proven to be possible even among pastoralists with livestock (Schuette, Creel, & Christianson, 2013a; Schuette, Wagner, Wagner, & Creel, 2013b). I was able to observe a model for coexistence at Olkiramatian and Shampole community ranches in the South Rift, where they employ mixed land-use management, with a portion set aside as a conservation area. Conservancies can not only behave as “buffer zones” to diminish anthropogenic pressures, but they can also improve connectivity between protected areas. Wildlife conservation can then be viewed on a landscape level, such as the Tsavo-Amboseli or Mara-Serengeti ecosystems. It all sounds great, so where’s the 'but'? Even with conservation areas set aside, there still remains conflict between lions and humans. There have been experiments with compensation schemes to pay owners of livestock taken by lions and other predators. Many of these programs are not successful, upset owners are paid a small fraction of the market value of their animal lost, while program managers accuse livestock owners of abusing the programs to get money for old animals or those in poor condition. When our class first arrived at our camp site near Amboseli, on July 1, 2018, we listened to a group of Amboseli-Tsavo community rangers and representatives from Amboseli Ecosystem Trust (AET). They shared about their cat ‘consolation’ fund, revealing the semantics of choosing to call it a ‘consolation’ fund, that is to say “sorry that a lion took your livestock”. They discussed what they believe to be the best way to manage human-wildlife, human-lion conflict, and how AET manages all of the components of the Amboseli Ecosystem Management Plan. The plan’s themes include ecology, security, community and partnership programs, as well as tourism. They created a human-wildlife conflict committee and were working on a response protocol for situations of death, injury, retaliation, crop-raiding, etc. I think the most important part they shared was that their protocol would give a maximum response time of 30 minutes to an incident. This is most impressive and ambitious for such a large area for rangers to cover, this is less time that my take-out orders arrive by delivery back home in New York City!! The shorter the response time they shared, the less likelihood of retaliatory killing, because it gives less time for victims to become angrier and crowds to form. This is also important as it does not allow the perception that an animal’s life is valued more than a human. This point came up again later during my in-country experience. On July 7, 2018 while our class was at Lale'enok Resource Centre in Olkiramatian community ranch, John Kamanga, director of SORALO spoke to us. From his experiences he shared that when people come first, wildlife can still remain, in co-existence; that if wildlife is thought of first, there is a shift and it creates conflict and retaliation, as it changes ownership. Shortly after returning to my home, I received a Facebook message from Joel Meja, the Ecological Monitoring Resource Assessor at Lale’enok. He shared a photo of a cow with a life threatening injury sustained by a lion, the event occurred during daytime, outside of the conservation area near Shampole hill. The cow later died. This was the reality. I thought about how important that cow was. I also wondered about the fate of the lion. Mirriam-Webster’s (MW) dictionary defines coexist as: “to exist together or at the same time”;”to live in peace with each other especially as a matter of policy”. Looking back at my time in Kenya, perhaps the better term to describe the relationship between the Maasai and wildlife, is tolerance. Defined by MW as the “capacity to endure pain or hardship. Endurance, fortitude, stamina” or “the act of allowing something: Toleration”. I don’t think it is enough to describe the relationship the Maasai have with lions as coexistence, but that there is more importantly a level of tolerance. A tolerance I feel is absent from much of North America when addressing conflict with predators. My take away lesson from Kenya was that humans and wildlife must tolerate one another, that humans must choose to increase our tolerance for wildlife, and that for coexistence to occur one cannot be viewed to be more valuable than the other. We must make the active choice to coexist if we want to keep wild animals on our planet. I also gained an admiration for the men and women that are on the front lines, daily mitigating conflict, and caught in the middle of a battle for humans and wildlife to exist together. References
Bauer, H., Packer, C., Funston, P.F., Henschel, P. & Nowell, K. (2016). Panthera leo (errata version published in 2017). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T15951A115130419. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T15951A107265605.en. Downloaded on 17 June 2018. Blackburn, S., Hopcraft, J.G.C., Ogutu, J.O., Matthiopoulos, J., & Frank, L. (2016). Human-wildlife conflict, benefit sharing and the survival of lions in pastoralist community-based conservancies. Journal of Applied Ecology, 53, 1195-1205. Hunter, L. (2005). Chapter 5: Competition, conflict and coexistence: relationships among cats and other carnivores. (pp. 129-149) and Chapter 6: Cats and humans: threats, status and conservation (pp. 151-170). In Cats of Africa: behavior, ecology, and conservation. United Kingdom: New Holland Publishers. Mogensen, N., Ogutu, J.O. & Dabelsteen, T. (2011). The effects of pastoralism and protection on lion behaviour, demography and space use in the Mara Region of Kenya. African Zoology, 46(1), 78-87. Schuette, P., Creel, S., & Christianson, D. (2013a). Coexistence of African lions, livestock, and people in a landscape with variable human land use and seasonal movements. Biological Conservation, 157, 148-154. Schuette, P., Wagner, A.P., Wagner, M. E., & Creel, C. (2013b). Occupancy patterns and niche partitioning within a diverse carnivore community exposed to anthropogenic pressures. Biological Conservation, 158, 301-312. It has been only 3 months, but Kenya feels so far away from my daily life in New York City. Going over my hundreds of photographs, and reading my field journal brings me back. I found myself laughing thinking of my two Mongolia Earth Expedition besties and I choosing to sleep together in a 2-person tent, and how we had to coordinate moving about, while it was uncomfortable at times, we laughed all night and stayed warm on the very cold nights. I appreciate what I wrote and regret not writing more at the time. Looking back, I experienced so much every day that I feel like one day during the Kenya Earth Expedition was worth a week, or more, back home.
One of my first entries in my journal pertains to my first night, at the Wildebeest Ecocamp. I arrived late at night, and with help found my tent where I met up with Sandra, my bestie from the 2017 EE to Mongolia. After our initial excitement, we went to sleep to rest up for our first full day in Kenya. That night, perhaps just a half-hour or so into sleep...I woke up... I heard my first lion calling.. it was low, I knew the sound from hearing them from the other side of the zoo where I work...but I wasn't at the zoo back home... I'm in Africa! July 3, 2018 We arrived at Olkiramatian to the Lale'enok Resource Center, where we would stay for the next several days. We notice these bat cuties are hanging out under the roof. It's late afternoon and unbeknownst to the EE students that arrived, it's Samantha's (the research coordinator and our host) birthday. People come into the center surprising her with a birthday cake and singing. While this is occurring one of the people threw water, or something, in the air as part of the celebration. I look up and see what looked like lights flashing around the celebration, my immediate thought is, "they have disco lights here??? CRAZY!!".... DUH! It was the yellowish and light-colored bats flying around above the people. They're DISCO BATS!!!!
One of the highlights of my Earth Expedition in Kenya, was flying from Amboseli across the South Rift area to the community ranch of Olkiramatian. I read about how conservancies, and community ranches help increase connectivity between protected areas. But flying above these areas however, gave me a completely different perspective. I could make out a few giraffe from the air, and while one plane chose to take the 'low road' and watch wildlife, the pilot of my plane chose to go high... through the clouds to give us a view of the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. What I came to find out after returning home, was while I was excited each time I saw even a glimpse of Mt. Kilimanjaro, my community learning leader from 2017 EE Mongolia, Fia, was climbing it! It was extra special to see her post on Facebook photos of her at the summit shortly after my return to home. From the air I can easily make out bomas, and manyattas |
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