Waiting for the Rains: Ol Donyo Wuas, October 2015

The Green Hills of Africa are no longer green. The land is parched, aching for the rains to come. A few showers came in April or May, but it’s been almost 10 months since any substantial rains have come to ol Donyo. The pressures are mounting, as both wildlife and man struggle to survive out here.

This was the scene that greeted us as we reached Ol Donyo Lodge at the base of the Chyulu Hills. We came in search of the renowned large bull elephants – “Tuskers” – of the Tsavo-Amboseli Ecosystem. What we learned in our three nights there, amidst a backdrop of drought really put into perspective the challenges faced by all – wildlife, livestock & humans – when the rains fail to fall.

The road from Nairobi to Mombasa is not a pleasant drive. It is the main artery for getting goods into and out of the country, and to neighboring land-locked countries. Yet it remains a narrow two-lane country road. It’s slow going, looking for oncoming traffic, overtaking one massive container truck after another. And it’s dangerous too. Luckily, we’re not going very far at all – Emali is only 125 kilometers from Nairobi. From there we turn off onto the much quieter road towards the Oloitokitok border with Tanzania. The final 30 kilometers to camp is not tarmacked. We can see the Chyulu Hills rising ahead of us, and then the road dissipates into loose dirt and sand. It’s an infinite dustbowl – completely impassable during the rains. But for now it’s dry and really dusty.

The lodge seems to be the only source of water in the area right now. All the lodge’s greywater is passed through a lava rock filtration system before ending up down at the lodge waterhole. Here’s where most of the game is right now. The elephants seem to stick around most of the day and well into the night. They’ve learned to stick their trunks right into the feed pipe and pull as much water as they can directly into their trunks. As a result, they’ve commandeered the waterhole, and everyone else – the oryx, warthogs, elands and giraffes – just has to patiently wait around, sneaking in for a quick drink when the tuskers get distracted. It’s great viewing for us, as we while away the afternoon down at the log-pile hide with some wine watching this interesting drama unfold.

Everywhere we go, the seasonal waterholes are dried and cracking. Mind you, there’s still wildlife around. Zebras and wildebeest dot the plains, whilst oryx and giraffe forage in the acacia woodlands around the lodge. So there probably is water around somewhere – we just can’t see it!

One afternoon we decide to go horse-riding on the plains. It’s great for my wife, who used to ride as a child, but I’ve got a big Clydesdale – he’s hungry and strong, and the harness burns through my hand as his head goes towards the ground. The gin and tonic was definitely appreciated after that!

In the morning, we take a walk through some lava tubes. The Chyulu’s were formed out of a string of volcanoes, and have some interesting caves, craters and lava tubes to hike through. Walking through one such tube, we enter a cave, and see the skull of a warthog. Further up more scattered bones – this seems to be a den or resting place for a leopard.

There are other signs of activity elsewhere – day-old leopard prints at our sundowner kopje, last night’s cheetah prints at our breakfast stop. On one track, our spectacular guide, Seki, found cheetah, leopard and hyena tracks from the night before, criss-crossing each other along the way. What may have happened is left to the imagination.

Lions prove even more elusive – no signs have been seen for a week or two. Some of the collared lions here have been tracked as far south as Amboseli and West Kilimanjaro, and east towards Tsavo, so these guys have huge ranges. They may well have headed off in search of better pastures until the rains come.

At the base of the Chyulu Hills, and roughly mid-way between Amboseli and Tsavo East is the 275,000 acre Mbirikani Group Ranch. The land is owned by around 4,000 Maasai families, who have leased it out to Great Plains Conservation, owners of Ol Donyo Lodge. The lodge pays out $116 from each bed night, the funds of which get divided as follows:

• $35 for Ranch Executive committee for the management of the 275,000-acre Ranch
• $30 for Predator Compensation Fund
• $10 for Teachers
• $15 for anti-poaching/wildlife security
• $10 for Big Life Administration
• $16 for Government of Kenya VAT tax

Here, around 25 years ago, Richard Bonham established the Maasailand Preservation Trust, which has recently merged with Nick Brandt’s [Big Life Foundation]. The goal of Big Life is to work with the communities in the greater Tsavo-Amboseli ecosystem and devise innovative conservation strategies that will hopefully protect and preserve this area for future generations.

As an integral component in conservation in the area, a number of Big Life initiatives really stood out to me. We managed to talk to one of the donors, Tatjana of Capricorn Foundation, and with Nikki, a conservation scientist with Big Life, and from this we got the sense that the work being done by Big Life is quite impressive. They are the major anti-poaching operation in the greater area, patrolling over 1.4 million kilometres of wild space. Since 2011, they’ve made over 2,000 arrests and seized over 3,000 poaching tools. This has played a huge role in helping to secure the elephant population in this region.

Another initiative, one we witnessed first-hand, was the Predator Compensation Fund. The idea being that this is community land, and the Maasai pastoralists use the same land as wildlife for their livestock. If a predator – lion, cheetah, hyena etc. – attacks and kills their livestock, they can retaliate in kind. The PCF aims to pay-out the cost of the livestock in order to save the predator. This has reduced the number of predator killings in Mbirikani to almost zero. The community is compensated for their loss and the predators are saved. This was especially an issue in the dry time we went, as scarcity of prey meant livestock were under pressure. One Maasai we met lost his goat the night before to two cheetahs and was awaiting the compensation team to come and do their survey.

So this was not going to be a safari of big game and huge densities. The experience here is subtler. With the drought, the immense pressure on wildlife and the community was visible. Herders and their cattle were in search of water and grazing. Cheetahs in search of prey came across easy livestock pickings. Elephants cluster around easily accessible water sources making them easy targets for poachers. The whole situation is a powder-keg waiting to erupt. Keeping a lid on the situation, however, is the Big Life team, running anti-poaching efforts, compensating farmers for their losses and protecting the land for future generations. The tension will definitely subside when the rains come, and with Big Life and Great Plains at the helm, this area is fast becoming a great refuge for our dwindling wildlife numbers, and a model to follow in regards to community conservation and human-wildlife conflict.