a simple place

Land use change in the Transmara, from "Wildlife and People: Conflict and Conservation in Masai Mara, Kenya" by Noah Sitati

Here’s a quickie to follow up on my post about elephant conflicts in Masai land.  Quite a few people have written me back to express the thought that the elephants were there first, and that people are probably taking away their habitat.  Without a doubt this is true.  In the past twenty five years the amount of farmland in the Transmara has increased by 1000%, and forested land has likewise decreased.  An elephant population that used to be contiguous with the Masai Mara National Reserve now is increasingly only sustainable within the reserve itself.

“Your elephants”

Before coming to Kenya I’d heard that people in villages with elephant problems often refer to the elephants as “your elephants” when they talk with the Kenya Wildlife Service.  I definitely came across this attitude.  In fact, the prevailing attitude was that the Masai Mara Reserve was created to protect wildlife, and the rest of this land should be for the Masai – not wildlife.  The Masai Mara is actually a fairly small reserve, but it is part of the huge Serengeti – Masai Mara ecosystem and there are elephants that move back and forth between the two.  But what is the answer?

elephant skull from poaching

In Kenya, elephant poaching is still a large problem.  Elephants that live outside of parks are at risk from both poaching and from being shot by farmers who want to take things into their own hands after losing all their food.  When I was in Transmara we were looking for elephants in the areas around peoples farms.  There is still a good amount of forest in Transmara, but the elephants are increasingly wary of people. In one patch of forest near a dwelling and school we came across a recently poached carcass that was maybe two weeks old.  The elephant’s tusks had been removed, making it clear that it had been poached and not just shot when it was raiding a farm. So there are multiple problems here.

Elephants are not threatened throughout their range.  In fact, in South Africa conservation has been so successful that there has been serious talk about the need to cull elephant herds again at some point in the future (here’s a NG article about elephant management).  Culling is unlikely to ever be a need here in Kenya, but the conflicts between elephants and people are likely to continue unabated unless some solutions can be found to this problem. I think that it is easy for us as Americans to sit back and talk about the idea that people are the problem here.  When someone’s grain storage is raided, they can lose six months worth of food that they were depending on to keep themselves and their kids fed.  Most of the people here have no jobs to rely on beyond their farming, and there are virtually no jobs even if they did want to do something other than subsistence farming.

Dr. Noah Sitati of WWF has been looking at this problem for years now.  He believes that it is possible to equip farms that are in known elephant paths with electric fence (here is the report on wildlife / people conflict in the Masai Mara), but he thinks the long term solution is to pass zoning laws that would limit farming, and create economic development so that so many people were not dependent on farming.  Noah also writes that the Kenya Wildlife Service could do more to help the people who have ongoing conflicts with elephants.  Most of the people I talked with said that KWS does nothing when they receive a report about an elephant conflict.  If someone is killed they offer apologies only.  The man that was injured was given some money by KWS, but it was not enough to cover hospital costs.  In the US our government does not compensate people for either personal or property damage caused by wildlife.  Here is seems to be an expectation, because the wildlife is considered to be around for tourists only.  The locals don’t see any benefit.  In reality, I would say that many people benefit to some degree, because tourism is the largest source of income for Kenya, but subsistence farmers cannot see this in their own lives.

Here is a short interview with a woman whose house was broken into by an elephant.  She and her husband are both educated.  They are both nurses.  There house is quite nice for the area.  The elephant pushed a wall completely into the house, but they were both gone when it happened.  The elephant ate most of their grain, which they generally distribute to family members who have no jobs.

Are the elephants in these areas doomed?  Noah thinks it could go either way for the population in Transmara and those other areas close to the Masai Mara.  For the elephants around Narok, those populations probably have no future.

………………………………………………..

Parting shots:

adorable elephant orphan in Nairobi…

Orphaned elephant at the David Sheldrick Trust in Nairobi

Masai school girls having fun with my sunglasses

Masai girls having fun with my sunglasses

Acrobats from Dandora, one of the most dangerous slums in Nairobi (next post)

Dandora acrobats

This is about a trip to a Samburu village that has decided to settle and abandon the nomadic lifestyle. Ingelai village is home to two ambassadors from the Grevy’s Zebra Trust.

Visiting this village was a good thing for me. As I wrote earlier, I found it difficult to be in the area of Samburu around Baragoi. Baragoi is where the Samburu and Turkana tribes intersect, and these two tribes have been in conflict for generations. Perhaps it is partially this conflict that makes the town feel tense and uncomfortable, but on top of  that there seems to be a strong culture of expectation in northern Kenya. I found that the people in the north expect anyone from the west to give them a great deal. Many, many people ask for things from you, and it is often in an aggressive manner. On top of this, there is a strong negative feeling from many people simply when you walk by them.  I like to think that this is a lesson for me in letting other people’s negativity slide off me. The poverty up there *is* intense, however some of the “poor” villagers might also own $20,000 to $50,000 worth of cattle their tradition won’t let them ever sell them for anything: to finance their children’s secondary education, to go to the hospital or even if a drought is obviously going to kill them. Within the town there is clearly great poverty and the hospital for the region has no doctors and only two under-qualified nurses.

The people of Ingelai village were completely different in their reactions to us, and it was wonderful. To me it shows that the work the Grevy’s Trust is doing up there is doing something. It was definitely one of the highlights of my trip so far.

If you can’t see the video below, you can watch it here on youtube.

My visit to the Samburu village Ingelai with the Grevy's Zebra Trust

Aspen in Northern New Mexico

October , 2007, 4:36 am

The sun won’t rise for another hour or more, and it is pitch black beneath the trees. My headlamp illuminates only a small circle of steeply rising trail. The world is reduced, constricted by my limited senses. I hear mostly the crunch of my feet as they slide ever so slightly with each step on the small stones that litter the steep path. Above the sound of my footsteps a small stream comes and goes as the path approaches then veers away from the edge of a ravine that I cannot see. The birds have yet to wake in the forest. When I stop, all is still silent except for the sound of my breath and the hushed rustling whispers of the Aspen trees.

An hour later the sky is beginning to talk to the mountains at the head of the larger valley, and the forest is filling itself with the hesitant gloom of dawn. It is a barely lit world still hiding in the early morning shadow of the mountains to the east. I turn off my headlamp when I realize that I can see better without it, and then I watch as the ghostly forms of trees make their way towards me out of the dark. They whisper to the wind and the birds. As I orient myself a strong wind blows and it sounds like a thousand paper birds lifting themselves into the air on a thousand wings of parchment.

I make my way off trail for a place that looks directly down and out the gorge I have been hiking along. It is a tiny ridge that juts out into the gorge. The stream is now hundreds of feet below, it’s mutterings hidden by the morning whispers of the Aspen. The ridge is narrow, rocky and covered in trees barely taller than I can reach – their trunks just large enough to wrap my hands around.

Still hidden behind the 12,000 foot horizon at the end of the valley, the sun is trying to burn its way through the last shreds of low clouds to reach the muted forests around me haloing the clouds in the bright yellows and pinks of a welding flame.

A knife-edge of sunlight cuts across a stand of aspen on the ridge behind me – a thin blade of light thrown out of a sliver of space between the clouds that are rushing by above throwing shards of sunlight into the shadowed dawn on the mountainside. They flash over the trees like the backs of golden fish; brilliant at the surface of a murky river for just a moment, and then gone.

Now I have hiked to the meadow the head of the gorge. The clouds have closed over entirely and the meadow floats above a sea of gold parchment aspen, their rustling butterfly wings muted against the grey sky. There is just myself and the valley, and the aspen are speaking. Closing my eyes I am sitting in a storm of paper butterflies.

When I open my eyes, the clouds break once more and the trees burn a screaming amber against the running dark clouds. A smell of fresh dirt, melting snow and panicky earthworms hits the meadow. Clouds descend below the ridgeline above the meadow and curtains of rain are closing out the distant mountaintops.

Perhaps I should run.
Or not.

**
A silent monochrome.

Over the last five years vast stretches of aspen forest have turned into ghosts. The leaves fall, but they never grow back. The suckers that normally sprout into new trees from aspen roots don’t appear. They speckle pine and spruce hillsides like the patches of grey hair that remind us of our mortality. When the spring returns they become forests of everlasting winter, empty trunks stark against the clear mountain skies.

Researchers have named this condition SAD, or Sudden Aspen Decline Syndrome. Mass aspen deaths have been documented throughout the Rocky Mountains with increasing frequency since 2003, and on the drive from New Mexico into southwestern Colorado dozens of patches of bare forest dot the landscape. If you didn’t know about SAD, you might not guess the scope of the problem. When I drove through the southern Colorado’s Animas valley, where the famous Durango-Silverton Railroad runs, the waves of color sweeping back and forth across the valley were astonishing. It didn’t seem like a scene that would make you worry about the future of aspen. On every other bend, campers full of happy tourists were stopping to take pictures of the scenery – holding their cameras out in front of them like they were trying to read the small print on the back of their cameras.

The San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado where the Animas Valley lies has actually been hit hard by SAD. By 2007 these mountains had already lost more than ten percent of their aspen forests. Even the Animas Valley, where everyone was taking pictures, had patches of forest silenced by SAD. In the big picture ten percent is not an insurmountable loss, and it may not be surprising that people don’t notice when this much forest dies off. If one out of every ten of our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues suddenly failed to wake up one day it would shake our world. But the forest is not most people’s world, and so it is easy to drive through the mountains and be completely unaware that ten percent of the forest has not woken from the previous winter.

July 6, 2006, Pioneer Mountains, Idaho

It isn’t yet dawn. The birds are starting to make their declarations, and the wind is gently flapping the sides of my tent. My breaths cloud the air in front of me, and I can see nothing outside the screen yet. The last two days have been mostly filled with rain, and my back is sore from driving. When I finally hiked into this valley yesterday afternoon the sky was gloriously welcoming. I am wondering if the welcome will be rescinded today.

Something walks by my tent, gently disturbing the gravel. It is the slightest of sounds, like the barest wisp of cloud passing low to the ground on an overcast day. I hold my breath listening for something more but hear nothing. A moment later there is a splashing in the stream. Then it is gone.

I wait for more footsteps, another splash, a sniff or snort, but the only thing I hear is the flapping of the tent and the arguing of birds. Whatever it was it has moved along in silence without telling me or anyone else where it was going.

Imperceptibly, the sky is beginning take on color.

**
I chose to hike into Surprise Valley, because I liked the name and wondered what the surprise was – not a bad reason. Unlike most of the roadless areas I visited, it wasn’t too difficult to find good trail information about the Pioneer Mountains of south-central Idaho. The Pioneers, the White Clouds, the Boulders and the Smoky Mountains are part of a large stretch of mostly unprotected mountains that surround the Sawtooth Wilderness east of Boise.

The Pioneer Mountains form the end of a twenty-five mile wide peninsula of mountains that juts out into the vast potato growing plains of southern Idaho. Within this stretch of mountains are places that would rival Yellowstone National Park if they had fewer cattle. Surprise Valley sits in one of these areas. It is a secluded patch of mountain that is just over a sky-rending ridge from Copper Basin, an eight-mile long, four-mile wide valley reminiscent of Yellowstone’s Lamar valley. Copper Basin is one of the places in the menagerie of mountains around the Sawtooths where re-introduced wolf populations recently made a comeback. Just as Lamar Valley was the perfect place to reintroduce wolves into Yellowstone, when the wolves wandered into Copper Basin they must have realized that this was an ideal hunting ground – a place where elk herds would naturally come down out of the mountains and congregate in the open. Wolves are also known to only persist for a long period of time in areas with low road densities, basically less than one mile of road per square mile.  The majority of the mountainous regions in central Idaho have road densities of less than one. To put that number in perspective, urban areas can have road densities of over six miles of road per square mile. Even compared to other forest areas, central Idaho has relatively few roads – with the exception of the border area near Canada, most of the Cascades Mountains in Washington state have more than two miles of road per square mile.

So when the Copper Basin wolf pack migrated in from another reintroduction area in 2003, they probably thought they had found a good thing. The pack beat the odds and established itself within a couple years, but the biggest battle they had to face was not the battle to find prey, but the battle for acceptance by the ranchers of their right to exist in that high mountainous country. In 2005 the Copper Basin pack lost that fight when a rancher found a dead calf and attributed its death to the wolves. Soon afterwards Wildlife Services shot five of the six adult wolves in the pack from an airplane. That left the pack with one adult and six pups. In 2007, the pack was down to three adults. In 2008, there was one more confirmed cattle kill by the wolves and the last three adults were shot.

The Forest Service currently allows over six thousand head of cattle to be grazed in Copper Basin. The grazing allotments here go all the way to the rockline, and the Forest Service hasn’t re-evaluated these cattle leases in over forty years. Between 2005 and 2008 the forest service reported seventeen “confirmed/probable” cattle kills by wolves in Copper Basin. Supporters of wolf protection rightly note that cattle frequently die on the range and are scavenged by wolves, which can make it difficult to assess actual wolf kills. In this case, the forest service had collared several individuals in order to confirm that the wolves were in fact preying on cattle. In response to the seventeen cattle deaths, twenty-two adult wolves were shot by Wildlife Services. It is a sad math – a math that reflects the way we normally account for differences between our needs and the needs of wildlife.

Much of this was on my mind as I hiked the trail to Surprise Valley. The trail starts out as a steep switchback that climbs out of Fall Creek valley and into a narrow canyon that rapidly closes in around a low Aspen forest. I hadn’t studied any topographical maps too closely, because I wanted to find out what the surprise was by experience rather than by reading. Just when it seemed to me as though the little canyon should be about to end in a shut out or box canyon, I came over a short ridge and found myself on the edge of a huge meadow buzzing with insects and hanging precipitously over a drop down to the larger valley below. The meadow is surrounded by ragged, sawtooth-shaped peaks, and a broad valley winds its way from there up the high ridge to the south that ends in a blue alpine lake just a few hundred yards short of the divide.

Standing on the edge of that lake I thought about how difficult it is for our country to make public decisions about wilderness issues.  As I looked down the valley in front of me, I tried to imagine what it was like to travel through these mountains in the days of Lewis and Clark when there were wolves and grizzly bears everywhere. The pioneers that followed hunted the wolves and bears relentlessly until both species faced extinction in the lower 48 states. Today many people, including some people who live in those areas, favor the idea of returning these predators to the wild. Yet the basic conflicts between the predators and people remain the same.

When I was standing there, the wolves on the other side of the ridge had already been shot, though I didn’t know it at the time. Unlike the animal that passed my tent before dawn, the Copper Basin wolf pack’s coming and going had been well-documented and professionally orchestrated.

Copper Basin aside, the wolf population in Idaho as a whole still appears to be increasing every year. Between 2001 and 2006 the estimated number of wolves in the state had increased from 261 to 663. By 2008 another 140 wolves have been added to the estimate. From a biologist’s perspective I know that the recovery numbers are good. Yet even knowing this, as I recall looking out over a valley that the Copper Basin wolves may have peeked into, I can’t help but compare this with so many other similar outcomes where the needs of people outweigh the needs of wildlife. Surprise Valley and the larger Fall Creek Valley below it are the only valleys in the Pioneers where cattle are excluded, and so the wolves that wandered into Copper Basin found themselves in an area where they were forced to compete directly with the needs of people. It is a losing proposition for the wolves, and the fate of the Copper Basin pack still saddens me.