Meet the People #2
Ingela showing camera-trap images to local Maasai
Photo: KopeLion
In my last blog I mentioned Ingela Jansson and the KopeLion project and promised to tell you more.
Ingela spent three years working for the Serengeti Lion project as a research assistant monitoring lions in the Serengeti National Park as well as the Ngorongoro Crater. Although working in the park was an amazing experience it was the work she did in the crater area that was to prove a more urgent calling. The very real conflict she saw between humans and lions persuaded her that if someone didn’t do something the Ngorongoro lions were headed towards extinction. And so KopeLion project was born in 2011.
The Ngorongoro conservation area was gazetted in 1959 and designated a multi use landscape. The pastoralist population were permitted to continue living there alongside the wildlife. Since this time the population has risen 10 fold and the once harmonious coexistence with lions has collapsed. Lions have disappeared from much of the area and the connection to the Serengeti lions is all but extinguished.
Enter KopeLion. The project aims to foster human – lion coexistence through community engagement, science and mentorship. One of the most successful outcomes so far is the recruitment of former lion hunters as lion protectors, we heard Roimen’s story last week.
But just how do you ‘engage with the community’ to try and change their minds about living with a dangerous predator. Well KopeLion do this in many ways. Firstly most of the employees are local which means they already have the community’s ear. To the Maasai their live stock are sacred so KopeLion spend a lot of time trying to reduce lion conflicts. They follow the model developed by Lion Guardians Ltd ( http://lionguardians.org )by helping local herders to build sturdy bomas, searching for missing livestock, treating injured livestock and warning herders when lion are nearby. The lion guardians or Ilchokutis are assigned an area of between 60 and 200km2 where they monitor lions or signs of lions scientifically. They also try to prevent young warriors or Morani from carrying out lion hunts. Part of their role is as mentors to the younger generation.
The Maasai still hold strong traditional beliefs and have strong community ties, recognising and embracing this is one of the reasons for KopeLion’s success so far on its mission to help humans and lions live in peace. The strong local ties mean KopeLion have won trust amongst the local herders and in 2016 they were able to stop more than 20 lion hunts from going ahead and have seen the evidence that their efforts are working in the fact that two of the monitored lion prides now show complete survival.
Ingela and her team at KopeLion are doing such valuable work that I urge you to head over to their incredibly informative website to read more about it.
The KopeLion team immobilizing a lion
Photo: KopeLion
Meet the People
Over the next few months I would like to bring you a few blogs about the many people that work to make Snapshot Serengeti possible. Without them there would be no data for us to pour over but what exactly do they do and who are they?
Dr Michael Anderson is currently in the Serengeti collecting data and checking up on how the various projects that make up Snapshot Serengeti are getting along. As part of the projects commitment to engaging with the local community Michael has begun a National Geographic funded intern program. Its aim is to give young locals valuable training and research experience in the fields of ecology and conservation.
The first student to be taken up on the program is Roimen Lelya Olekisay. He is a Maasai from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. His story highlights why the intern program is a vital part of both the scientific and conservation work we do. Many local people see wild animals as a threat to their own domestic stock as well as themselves and retaliatory killings are common. Living alongside wildlife is not easy. Without the good will of the local people it is very hard to change their attitudes to the work we do and the animals themselves.
Roimen grew up on the Western slope of the Ngorongoro crater, his family, like many Maasai are herders. As a young boy he roamed all over the Ngorongoro protected area (NPA) with the family livestock. The Maasai are permitted to live in the NPA where they can graze livestock but are not allowed to cultivate the land. Roimen spent two years away at secondary school before returning to the family to continue herding. This is a familiar story for many Maasai. The importance of livestock is paramount and many boys do not complete schooling.
As a young warrior, like many his age, Roimen speared and killed at least three lion. Tradition dictates that young Maasai warriors must kill a lion to become a man. He would have maybe carried on killing lions whenever he perceived a threat to his family’s livestock but he met up with Ingela Jannsen’s group Kope Lion Project in 2013 who work in the area trying to mitigate lion/human conflict. He helped fit a radio collar to a lion and this interaction with the king of beasts up close transformed him from a lion hunter to a lion protector. He became one of Ingela’s lion scouts (more about Ingela and the Kope Lion Project in next week’s blog) recording predator-livestock attacks in the conservation area and working to prevent lion conflicts and hunts. His enormous enthusiasm for lions and their research makes him a perfect candidate to further his scientific skills. This is someone with a natural ease and interest in the wildlife around him and its preservation.
In his new role as the first intern for the National Geographic-Serengeti National park program Roimen will be tracking lions and setting up a camera-trap network that hopes to dissuade human-lion conflicts and generally learning all the scientific skills associated with this work. He has just started and will be with us for six months, hopefully we can catch up with his progress in a few months.
Photo’s curtsey of Ingela Jannsen and KopeLion project
Black and White
Grants Gazell
This past week I have been trudging up and down boggy slopes with armfuls of tree protection tubes, posts, tools and finally trees as part of a reforestation project in the Lake District National park, UK. With storm Doris fast approaching it has been a miserable week and my mind has often wandered over to snapshot Serengeti for some light relief.
The job I am doing, trying to help mitigate the over grazing of sheep and deer made me think of Michael Andersons work that has provided us with the images for season 9.5. He has written here about the project to study how herbivores affect vegetation patterns and you will have seen the enclosures around his experimental plots.
Some people have found that the images from this season are not quite as good as in previous seasons, they seem to be a bit fuzzy in places and there are a few less lions. On reflection though it does seem to be producing a lot of my favourite images, those taken during dusk and dawn when the camera is not quite sure if it is day or night and ends up taking a black and white daytime shot. These pictures can be quite exquisite and have the feel of being completely composed by a top photographer rather than just a random event.
Here are some of my favourites.
Zebra/Wildebeest
Impala
Wildebeest
It is a good reminder to us all that although we are all waiting to discover that one truly great animal capture and it is gratifying to classify the more unusual beasts the aim of the whole project is science. Back in the old days of Serengetilive the classifying was done one camera roll at a time. Sometimes I would sit and classify 2000 capture events of….. grass. Seriously, you would be luck to maybe get a passing bird but it had to be gone through just in case the last couple of shots were of lion. At least with Snapshot Serengeti the pictures are randomised so you get shots from a mixture of cameras rather than being stuck on a tedious one.
Snapshot Serengeti 