Category Archives: Conservation

Leopard Spotted!

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Guest blogger Alan Turner, volunteer on Soysambu, recounts a brilliant night game drive earlier this week.

We weren’t expecting to see very much when we left for our night game drive yesterday. We’d heard that a leopard had been spotted the previous night by the Lake, but we still weren’t getting our hopes up too high. But as seems to happen a lot in Kenya, the coolest things happen when you’re not expecting them. About 15 minutes into the drive, we stopped suddenly and Duncan, our guide for the night, shone his light onto a figure in the distance and whispered excitedly “Do you see that?”. In the spotlight was a huge male leopard staring straight at us and hanging from his mouth was a full-grown male impala, still kicking. The leopard was very wary of us, as well as a spotted hyena which was hanging around in the distance. After several minutes, the leopard began dragging the impala towards the thicket. It took about 30 minutes for him to reach the bush, as he stopped, panting, every 10 meters to rest and look for any danger. Finally he made it to the thicket and we watched as he struggled to drag the impala up a rocky hill, and finally disappeared into the bush. Hopefully he enjoyed his meal.

A leopard on Soysambu Conservancy

The Great Wall of Soysambu

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The construction of a boundary dry stone wall as begun on the eastern boundary of Soysambu Conservancy. The initial section of the fence will stretch from the base of ‘The Nose’ on the Sleeping Warrior crater and extend down to Lake Elmenteita. This area of the Conservancy constantly being entered and illegally grazed by herdsmen and their stock, often herds of over 1,000 cattle.

Initial stages of construction

The dry stone wall is being made using the volcanic rocks that cover the property, particularly southern area of the lake. Six-foot wooden posts are being built into the stone wall and will carry solar powered electrified wires to deter trespassers from simply climbing over the wall. The estimated cost of building the fence is 300,000ksh (~US$4,000) per 5km.

Initial stages of construction 2

This method of fencing, although labour intensive has had proven success on other properties in keeping unwanted trespassers out as well as keeping wildlife in, and is much more durable than a standard electric fence, and a lot cheaper too.

If you would like to make a donation towards the construction of the wall please follow the links on our home page- your contribution will be greatly received.

Three Cultures, One Dance

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This guest post is written by Josephine Walker a Princeton University undergraduate who spent five days studying community conservation at
Soysambu with Paula Kahumbu and Dino Martins.

Enjoy and feel free to leave a comment.

Over the course of our stay at Soysambu, we had the opportunity to meet and talk to people from many different neighboring villages, including groups of Maasai and Turkana women.  We had arranged to meet with both groups at the same place and time, but when we got there the Turkana women had not yet arrived.  When they showed up, they stood apart from the Maasai, and the two groups eyed each other warily.  Both groups were decked out in traditional ceremonial garb.  The Maasai women were adorned with wide beaded necklaces and draped in red patterned cloths.  The Turkana were dressed in more Western looking skirts and button down shirts, but covered them up with stacks of necklaces and beads strung across their chests.  They wore headdresses of yarn and beads, although one woman’s was made of zippers.
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A Maasai woman, Agnes with her daughter Sarah

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Turkana Women
After we finished asking the Maasai about how they felt about the Conservancy, they moved away and the Turkana women stood in their place to answer the same questions.  Despite differences in the languages they speak and the clothes they wear, both groups are facing the same problems: lack of access to water, employment, and education for their children.  The two groups live near to each other just outside the border of Soysambu.  The Turkana and Maasai women walk between 10 and 20 km to the same water source to fetch water, and carry it home in 20 liter jugs on their backs, a trip that takes the whole day.  Their children go to the same school, a one-room schoolhouse which serves 70 children.  As a result of overcrowding, the children must take turns studying, in two hour shifts.  Since the start of the community outreach program at Soysambu just a few months ago, the women have been allowed into the Conservancy to cut firewood, which they may use themselves or sell.  Some of the men have been hired as casual workers for construction or haymaking.  This is an excellent change from the past, when community members trespassed in order to graze their cattle or poach, and were often arrested for it.  Soysambu is in the process of building a better relationship with their neighbors, but there is still much to be done to help these communities help themselves improve their quality of life.

Despite the hardships they face, the women were energetic and wanted to dance for us after we finished our discussions.  The Maasai women went first, the whole group moving their bodies in synch and singing in a call and response style.  The Turkana songs were rhythmic because the women stomped their feet as they danced.  At first, the two groups went back and forth in a sort of dance-off, but the music was infectious and the women were soon dancing along to each other’s songs in a big crowd.  The women grabbed our hands and pulled us in, and we could no longer stand as observers of the merriment.  Dancing together, I felt a connection to these women that was much more personal than that between interviewer and interviewees.  The women welcomed us to their celebration and the two groups welcomed each other.  The heat of the early afternoon beat down on us, but we all celebrated our different lives in one dance, together.

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The Maasai women on the left are joining in with the Turkana’s dance and I am dancing too, which made filming difficult…

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Josephine with Turkana Women

Maji

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Sarah Chamblis of Princeton University spent five days studying community conservation at Soysambu.  Apart from mothering a rescued baby ostrich she also wrote a couple of guest posts for us.

Enjoy and please encourage her with your comments.

Maji

During our stay at Soysambu, we left the ranch to interview some of the surrounding communities about their feelings about the newly developed conservancy.  They all seemed positive, although they listed many problems they were currently facing, hoping the conservancy would somehow help them with.  One topic came up with nearly every group we talked to: water.

Kenya is well into the dry season, and the landscape in the Rift Valley certainly looks like it is running low on water.  In conserved areas, the grass is dry and yellow, as is the somewhat sparse vegetation in the overgrazed areas outside of the protected lands.  The dirt is bone dry– you can tell a car is driving 30 km away by the plume of dust billowing up and rising behind it.  Parks are affected as well.  At Lake Nakuru National Park, our planned lunch by Makalia waterfall turned out to be a lunch by Makalia cliffs; all that was left of the water flow was a small muddy puddle at the base of the rocks.

Drought here is a huge problem, and it is not easy to see what the answers could be.  When I grew up in California we had droughts, but the sacrifices that entailed for me were using the same bathwater as my sibling* and my family not watering the lawn. Those solutions seem ludicrous here, where some women walk 20 km or more each day to gather 20 or 40 liters of (dirty) water for their whole family, less than a quarter of the water my sister and I used for a bath.  Apart from the climatic differences between central California and the Rift Valley, there is a huge difference in infrastructure: there, we have dams and reservoirs, and just about everyone has easy access to clean water.  California’s Central Valley is currently facing a serious drought, but I’m sure conditions there are not nearly as bad as those in Kenya now.

The question is, what are workable solutions?  We were told that the groundwater in the area has dangerously high levels of fluorine, so simply drilling a borehole for a well would not provide safe drinking water.  At one of the tourist lodges being built in Soysambu, they were constructing a large rainwater catchment.

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Catchment Area

Basically, they covered a slope about half the size of a soccer field with cement, and dug a ditch below it leading to a large reservoir.  During the heavy rains of spring and fall, the reservoir will fill with enough water to serve the lodge’s guests all year. I don’t know what the cost of construction and maintenance of a similar catchment would be for the villages outside of Soysambu, but if they could find the funds and organize a cooperative effort to keep it operating, I think it would make a significant difference in their day-to-day lives.  I do wonder, however, what the long-term environmental impacts of these rainwater catchments would be.  What do you think?

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Sarah with the baby ostrich

*so you know, now, with low-flow shower heads, taking a short shower (less than 5 minutes) is much more water efficient than bathing.

Eco-Tourism and Poverty

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This is a guest post from Sam Borchard of Princeton University who has been studying community conservation at Soysambu for 5 days as part of an undergraduate conservation course taught by Paula Kahumbu

Enjoy and please feel free to comment.

Eco-Tourism and Poverty

On our first day at the Soysambu Ranch we were given a tour of a brand new ecotourism resort being built on one of the hills of the conservancy.  A series of thatched roof private cottages already dot the hillside, and more are currently under construction.

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Huts

Although this resort is still a ways away from completion, some idea of what the final product may look like can be seen in a similar ecotourism area just down the road.  Here the same thatched huts are filled with stunningly beautiful furniture, and are surrounded by luxury facilities including a pool, restaurant, and bar.

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Eco-Hut

Ecotourism is often touted as a way to bring money in to an area and improve the lives of local people.  Visitors to these resorts pay 11,000 shillings ($140) per night, money which ideally would trickle down to those in the lowest depths of poverty.  Later that afternoon we had a chance to visit and speak with just such a community – a group of Maasai women and children living on a small patch of land outside the conservancy.  The men in the group had left to find better grazing land for their cattle, and would likely be gone for a month or more, leaving the women with no animals and no source of income while they were gone.

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Maasai Kids

The bare degraded landscape and uneven, ramshackle homes stood in stark contrast to the beautiful cottages on the hillside we saw earlier that morning.  None of the Maasai women spoke English, and only one spoke Swahili.  Of the thirty children we saw only three were enrolled in school, the others having been forbidden by their fathers.  One of the women said to us, through a translator, that without education they would be nothing.

I began to wonder how on earth these people could be helped by the creation of the lodge – breaking from their pastoralist culture to work at the lodge would be difficult, and the chance of them getting a job there without knowing English or Swahili is almost zero.  Capitalizing on tourism opportunities by selling beadwork and other goods is also impractical – although they live only a few kilometers from the resort their settlement isn’t easily accessible by car, and most tourists don’t enjoy going out of their way to look poverty in the face.

The unfortunate truth is that the problems facing these communities are far too complex to have easy solutions, and the hope that ecotourism alone can lift them out of poverty is fanciful.  However there is some good news – with a mindful focus on community improvement, outfits like the future ecotourism resort can be a piece of the solution.  One of the last things to come up during our discussion with the Maasai women was the fact that the resort, even though it has yet to generate any income, is paying for six of their children – four girls and two boys –  to attend a boarding school.  It may be a small start but at least it’s a move in the right direction.