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Sidebar: Partners in Africa
Go Deeper |
One place where that tradition is beginning to take hold is the Samburu Heartland, 15,600 square miles in the rain shadow north of Mount Kenya. Samburu is made up of a hodgepodge of government, community and private lands—some of them protected—that provide a network of wildlife corridors that move some of the most endangered big mammals in the world, including the black rhino, cheetah and Grevy’s zebra.
The heartland is anchored by Samburu National Reserve, a 64-square-mile game park that receives its budget from the local government. Situated about 2 miles north of Nairobi, the reserve hosts a number of rare species, including the Grevy’s zebra, whose distinctive thin-pinstripe coat looks as though it were hand-made in Italy. But the park is swamped with visitors. It’s not uncommon to see a dozen safari vehicles queued up, each waiting to get a close-up view of a pride of lions. “This was being run with no management plan,” says Assistant Warden Joy Letooyia.
In the past few years, AWF has worked with the financially strapped Samburu County Council to develop and implement an administrative blueprint for the reserve. Some improvements qualify as easy fixes: installing road signs, constructing a small ranger station equipped with a shower, designing protocols for dealing with emergencies like last year’s anthrax outbreak that threatened the Grevy’s zebra population. A menu of small fines was adopted for tribesmen who allow livestock to wander into the reserve: about 75 cents for a goat, $1.50 for cattle.
Those incremental improvements are designed to keep the park’s ecotourism business healthy. It’s a matter of some local concern: The tribal council that represents the neighboring villages gets 85 percent of its revenue from a shared-profit agreement with the Samburu reserve.
But, as usual, there’s more at stake.
One morning, Fiesta Warinwa, AWF’s Samburu Heartland director, commandeers a tabletop at a tourist tent camp in the reserve and unrolls a brightly colored topographical map. What’s the biggest threat to Samburu in her opinion?
“It’s more of an outside problem than inside,” says Warinwa.
She sounds a familiar alarm: Loss of grassland habitat, coupled with the proximity of growing villages, is stressing the environment. The master plan for AWF’s Samburu heartland calls for establishing a wildlife corridor that will snake hundreds of miles along Kenya’s north-south axis. The intent is to someday link vast stretches of East Africa into a kind of migration-route superhighway.
It’s a complicated process. In the Samburu Heartland alone, scores of tribal councils (each with its own language, habits and suspicions) must be persuaded to cooperate. Alternative sources of income have to be found for families that surrender land to the corridor. Private ranchers have to sign on to the idea. Buffer zones need to be created, antipoaching measures enacted.
But despite those hurdles, only five gaps in the corridor remain to be filled. Warinwa thinks there’s a role for the Conservancy to play in nailing down rights to those final, missing pieces.
“It’s like putting together a puzzle,” she says.
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Frans Lanting/Minden Pictures (Black rhino); Henner Frankenfeld/Redux (Park Officials)
