Widely Wild Wrongly Written Wildebeest Writings

Widely Wild Wrongly Written Wildebeest Writings

I'm no photographer.
But I took this, this year, with my Cannon SureShot.
Widely circulated reports about a crash in Kenya’s Maasai Mara wildlife are (1) premature, (2) likely false and (3) infuriating. PS (4) I’m fed up with western news sources about Africa. Unless it’s another apocalypse, it isn’t published.

Many of you truly concerned wildlife enthusiasts have sent me the link to the bad BBC story claiming that Kenya’s best game reserve is in a tailspin. Thank you, but take a powder and lie-down.

The purported “study” by Joseph Ogutu at the University of Hohenheim is the second study by Ogutu on the Mara. His first purported up to 95% of certain animals had disappeared and was uniformly dismissed by scientists worldwide.

I found it interesting this morning that the branch of the university that Ogutu is supposedly registered with, has an “internet problem.” Linking to the Bioinfomatics Unit of the University of Hohenheim cited in the BBC report generates this message [poorly translated from the German]: “Because of maintenance work the Intranet and some other homepages are not available.”

Hmm.

Mara wildlife has declined, and local wildlife censuses have confirmed this, but nowhere near as catastrophic as suggested in Ogutu’s report. Ogutu told the BBC that Mara wildlife had declined by “two-thirds.”

Nonsense.

Here’s the truth. No one knows in any good scientific way. The Kenya Wildlife Service conducts wildlife censuses that are excellent, but KWS has limited jurisdiction in the Mara which is technically controlled by local county counsels. In fact as I’ve decried loudly before, the Mara’s catastrophic problem is management not an apocalyptic reduction in game.

At one point three separate entities were controlling what we call “the Mara” and they didn’t like one another. So it’s literally impossible to conduct uniform studies over the area. And to make matters worse, historically the data is equally terrible.

Ogutu did the worst possible research as a result. He picked and chose segmented area studies over 15 years, none of which were comprehensive of the area as a whole. Moreover, I’m certain in the weeks ahead real scientists will challenge much of his root data.

Ogutu had decided the Mara was in a tailspin even before he did this study. Last year when the area was just recovering from a three-year drought, he claimed half the animals in the Mara were gone by incorrectly citing a continent-wide study
from the United Nations Environment Programme and London Zoological Society which addressed the whole continent, not just the Mara.

There are good studies, particularly from the Frankfurt Zoological Society, on the biomass of the Serengeti and larger Serengeti/Mara ecosystems. There are also good studies on individual species, like lion and elephant and so forth. And unfortunately, we can only surmise by broad intersections of these individual studies what the situation is, in the Mara.

It’s OK.

It’s very threatened, perhaps more so than at any time before. This is mostly because of (1) weather, also closely because of (2) Kenya’s rapidly developing economy leading to human/wild animal conflicts, and interminably (3) the untenable way the poor reserve is managed.

But don’t write it off, yet. Kenyans are remarkably creative these days.

Ogutu is correct that there has been a significant decline in Mara herbivores, particularly with regards to the wildebeest migration. But this is not directly due to cattle grazing encroachment as he claims. It is because of weather. Two dynamics are at play.

First, the Serengeti just below the Mara has been much wetter than normal (as has the Mara) but while areas just immediately to the north and east have been much drier. Global warming at its best on the equator creates these weird and frighteningly small and distinct weather regions.

So while there were floods in the Mara, in adjacent cattle grazing Koiyaki and Lemuk private reserves, it was bone dry. In times of drought cattle tended by cattle owners over compete with wild game.

Second, because the Serengeti has been wetter than normal, the wildebeest have not needed to move into the Mara (the furthest northern part of their migration) with the same regularity as in the past. Historically the Mara was the wettest part of the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem. That definitely is changing. There will be less and less of the migration traveling into the Mara, now, with global warming.

The wildebeest population has remained constant at around 1.5 million animals for more than ten years. Ditto for the third of a million zebra.

So without intending to minimize the real threats existing in the Mara, let’s not exaggerate them, either. I wish Vanity Fair or the New York Review of Books would do a story. There is no new crisis in the Mara. Visitors today will notice little difference from ten years ago, except maybe with regards to the migration.

Rather there is a continuing decade’s long crisis we definitely need to do something about, which cannot exclude global warming. And there is an ever deepening crisis in the way we learn things.

4 thoughts on “Widely Wild Wrongly Written Wildebeest Writings

  1. Jim:

    Thanks. I confess that I hoped it wasn’t right. I hadn’t realized how complicated reality is with 3 different Masai groups in control.

    I have passed your information on to … who was concerned enough to send it to me. Hopefully he will pass “the other side” of the story on to this original email list.

    Mary

  2. I assume you have read the articles on the two “studies” and that you are truly interested in the future of the Mara as I am. I therefore assume that you know that the first “study” involved 174 months of counting animals in the Mara from July 1989 to December 2003 and that at the time the Mara was one entity located in the former Narok District of Kenya and under one administration controlled by the Narok County Council. The creation of the Trans Mara District and the Mara Conservancy came towards the very end of this study and had no effect whatsoever on counting wildlife throughout the Mara nor does it affect the ongoing aerial counts. You can see the location of the transects in a map in the article: Journal of Animal Ecology 77: 814–829.

    The independent study conducted by the London Zoological Society and United Nations Environment Programme that you mentioned confirmed our findings. It covered the whole of Africa, including the Masai Mara. I have not authored anything last year (2010) that mentioned this work at all as you claim unless you are referring to some one else. Could you please post here where I incorrectly referred to this work as you claim to set the record straight?
    I apologize if you could not access the website but I do not maintain this website myself. So, I can not be of much help here. But you can visit the ILRI website where you will find more background material on the recent study.

    When you say local wildlife censuses have confirmed the declines, which local censuses are you referring to? I am 100% certain that such counts do not exist. I have all the historical counts of wildlife in the Mara from the pioneering counts of Fraser Darling in 1958 to those of Lee Talbot and Stewart in 1962 to the latest counts by the Department of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing of Kenya of 2010 and they all show the same pattern. You also claim that the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) conducts wildlife counts that are excellent but you do not say for which area, certain not for the Mara. DRSRS is the preeminent authority on wildlife monitoring in Kenya, with experience going back to 1977 and covers all rangelands of Kenya. KWS only count in a few of its Parks and only through volunteers. But DRSRS exists specifically to count wildlife and livestock in Kenya and we cannot run away from what their data is showing. There is extreme reduction in wildlife numbers in the Mara based on our publications using two data sets collected by two independent organizations (WWF and DRSRS) and a third data set collected initially by WWF and later by KWS, that is not yet published. It would also help if you could clarify which data set we used is terrible. Do you mean the one collected by WWF (1989-2003), DRSRS (1977-2010) or KWS (1984-2010), all of which show the same trends and covered the whole Mara?

    Obviously the claim that we “picked and chose segmented area studies over 15 years, none of which were comprehensive of the area as a whole” is wild at best. Our recent study is based on 49 different aerial surveys covering the entire Mara region (about 6000 km2) from 1977-2009. I wish the “real scientists” you refer to well but science is based on data and since there are only three time series of data on the Mara, I can bet my last penny that such a challenge as you predict will never come to pass from any scientist.

    The Frankfurt Zoological Society may have done good studies but unfortunately none in the Mara, and so whatever they may have found is irrelevant to wildlife trends in the Mara. But you should know that the DRSRS counts are some of the longest and best available counts on wildlife and livestock available anywhere in Africa.

    I agree with you that the Mara is threatened, “more so than at any time before”. But the culprit is not the weather. Across the border in Tanzania, the declines are not as extreme. Why? Cattle grazing in the Mara, especially at night, is a serious problem but by all means not the only one. If the weather were the problem, as you hypothesize, and we have extensively investigated this hypothesis and found no support for it, wildlife numbers would decline during droughts and increase during periods of plenty but this is not happening in the Mara. Why? Because of competition with livestock. For example, buffalo numbers are recovering from the effects of the 1993 drought in the Serengeti (40% decline) but are not doing so in the Mara (76% decline in 1993).

    We do not wish “to write the Mara off” but to see something done to save it.

    We have not exaggerated the threats facing the Mara either. We even published the raw data on wildlife numbers in the Mara during 1977-2009 that we used in our study in the supplementary materials section of our paper. We invite you or “the real scientists” you have in mind to do an analysis. I can assure you they will confirm our findings.

    The task may be hard so I wish them well. Our two reports were not the first to raise alarm over wildlife declines in the Mara, or more generally in Kenya. There have been several previous reports pointing to extreme wildlife declines in the Mara one in 1995, one in 2000 and two in 2001 and, more generally in Kenya by several wildlife biologists. Anyone who cares to check will find them easily. Some needs to stand up and speak for Kenyan wildlife. Perhaps you could be this person.

    Thanks for showing interest in the Mara

  3. Joseph is right. There is a huge loss of wildlife in the Mara from overgrazing in the reserve day and night, and of course the dramatic loss of habitat outside the Reserve not he group ranches which are being subdivided up and fragmentized.

    As the wildlife policy doesn’t allow the Maasai to won their wildlife and use it for their own gain, then the onus is on us interested in wildlife of the Mara to get our acts together and find ways to lease land for conservancies, with tourism money or donations..anything just to stop the decline.

    So less talk everyone, it’s happening now, and it’s up to you – if the government policies don’t promote wildlife as a sustainable resource for the Maasai to live by in the future, it has to be block leasing for wildlife or nothing at all will be there in as little as 20 years.

    By the way, the wildebeest is not remaining constant at 1.5 m, it hovers around 1.2 m as per latest FZS figures, and most of the herd are just not getting into the Mara. The real loss is in the non migratory browsing species, at the mercy of the year round onslaught of the cattle, poison and mismanagement of the Mara, including the opening up of new lodges and roads inside the reserve despite many attempts by environmental and tourism associations to get some semblance of order and a management plan in place…to no avail so far…and we shall rue this loss one day soon. I can only hope the new constitution and devolution of powers can localize the responsibilities, make real data translate into policies that help the maasai to want wildlife on their land, and to get the mara to function properly

    As a 4th generation white Kenyan with a long history in the area and in the safari business, I am seeing the truth unfold before my eyes, and it’s the truth.

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