Giraffes, buffaloes, zebras or antelopes are suffering from lack of water and food after more than a year of below-average rainfall in the north of the country.
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| In Kenya, wildlife conservation is challenged by drought |
A male reticulated giraffe in central Kenya, near Isiolo, in July 2021. TONY KARUMBA / AFP
Kenya is renowned for its expanses of savannah where the "Big Five" cohabit, symbols of the African safari where we find the lion, the leopard, the elephant, the rhinoceros and the buffalo. Today, four of these species are classified as vulnerable or threatened with extinction. The fifth, the buffalo, is not there yet, but the animal is now one of the hardest hit by the drought in the north of the country.
“He is a large ruminant, so he is very weak when there is no grass. Sometimes it also gets stuck in the mud of the waterholes almost dry to the point of dying on the spot,” says Sharmake Yussuf, chairman of Sabuli Nature and Community Reserve in Wajir County.
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After three disappointing rainy seasons in the north of the country, wildlife and herbivores in particular are suffering from the lack of resources and the resulting exacerbated insecurity, falling prey to hunters. “We lost between ten and fifteen Grévy zebras. For any other species it is not important, but when there are only 3,000 of these animals left alive in the world, every loss counts”, laments David Kimiti about this endangered species which lives in Kenya and in Ethiopia.
The Grevy Zebra trust (GZT), of which he is deputy director for research, distributed additional fodder to wild herds daily from August to December 2021, monitoring their physical condition and the evolution of vegetation. Staff from the Sabuli reserve organized water distributions by truck in November and December.
Dying of hunger, thirst, disease
The last wet period, the most important of the two annual seasons in this part of the country, traditionally occurs from October to December but was late and sparse this year in the counties of Garissa, Wajir, Mandera, Isiolo, Marsabit, Samburu and Turkana. As the country now enters the dry season, “where we operate in Marsabit, Samburu and Isiolo, some areas have had very little rainfall for the past two years, to the point where people say there is no rain. It didn't rain at all,” says Antony Wandera, animal watcher for the North Rangelands Trust (NRT), an organization bringing together the forty-three community reserves in the north and coast.
In this context, wild animals perish from hunger and thirst, but also from disease, malnutrition making them vulnerable. "When the weather is really dry and there is a concentration of animals that feed directly on the ground, it's really dangerous", analyzes Antony Wandera, referring in particular to anthrax, a staph infection. which can be transmitted to humans.
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The Sabuli conservatory counted the losses within the reserve between August and January: thirty-five giraffes, thirty-eight oryx, thirteen Waller's gazelles (long-tailed antelope), eight lesser kudu (spiral-horned antelope ), fifty-two warthogs and four ostriches. Throughout the northeast region, more than two hundred giraffes, including the endangered reticulates, died between October and December 2021.
But it is above all the hirolas, nicknamed "the four-eyed antelope", which worries Sharmake Yussuf, also president of the Northeast Conservatories Association (NECA): "There are only five hundred left in the world, all in northern Kenya. We lost about thirty in 2021, that's 6% of their population. »
Drought fuels tensions
Could this situation have been avoided? "Drought cannot be completely managed because seasons change and weather forecasts sometimes turn out to be wrong," said Edwin Wanyonyi, director of strategy for the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS, the government's conservation agency). wildlife). Otherwise, a special effort is made to improve the cohabitation between humans and wild animals.
Conservation specialists involve local communities in nature protection to increase their level of tolerance towards animals. This national movement is bearing fruit with a reduction in poaching of elephants and rhinos by 90% between 2012 and 2019 according to a KWS survey. But Covid-19 and drought are reversing the trend.
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