Category: An Urgent Appeal, Poachers | Date: Mar 25 2008 | By: William

I’ve just got back from a morning patrol with some of the rangers here at Serena Station.

Ranger Jackson Semeiyoi

It’s a very tiring four hours of walking across the blazing plains from thicket to thicket in search of signs left by poachers, which then hopefully leads to the poachers themselves.

We came across this camp which rangers had found near the beginning of the month, and was when Kimojino sent this rather unusual sms to twitter.

Rangers were actually in the same thicket the day before but had to quickly leave the area because a very large herd of elephant were acting in a strange manner, and they were worried that they might charge.

Going back the next day they found the above poachers’ camp with food stuffs, cooking utensils, torches and blankets. It’s very unusual for poachers to leave behind their belongings, and so rangers believe that they must have been forced to flee by the elephants.

Ranger John Ntoika and Sargent Alfonse Saris, with elephants in the background.

Although a funny story, it can also be quite frustrating. The rangers are passionate about protecting the wildlife in the Mara, and they are only happy if they have actually stopped the poachers by catching them. Every day, rangers from each station go out and patrol the Mara, but with so much land to cover and many thickets to search poachers are not always so easy to find.

It is incredible however the signs that they spot. For example, they were able to tell from looking at this grass that someone had passed through it in the last couple of days.

And a few metres away their suspicions were confirmed when they found this.

Don’t see it? Take a closer look.

It’s a toothpick. And from the colour of the wood they could tell that it had been made just two days ago. The rangers are good, very good, but unfortunately so are the poachers. Camps are normally very well hidden, not like the one pictured above, and for a poacher to leave a toothpick lying around, rangers were certain that they had already made their kill and were on their way home - a poacher would not have left such a sign for rangers to pick up on if he was on his way into the park.

Luckily we probably have the best rangers in Kenya. And since June 2001, rangers have managed to arrest 1,013 poachers. I won’t publicly compare this figure with the rest of Kenya, as we want to stay on good terms with other wildlife services, but you should know that this is an extremely good result.

And so back to the title of this post. As followers of this blog know, we now only have one week of funding left for the Mara Conservancy. We do have an incredible long list of things that now need to be paid for, but one of our top priorities is to keep these rangers paid; they all have responsibilities they need to keep, school fees to pay and mouths to feed.

You will see that at the top of this blog we now have a Sponsor a Ranger campaign, and thanks to one kind person who wishes to remain anonymous, we already have ranger Daniel Tunai sponsored for the next two months. For full details of the campaign, please visit this page, however I know it’s quite a lot of money to ask from just one individual so what I’m actually looking for now is your ideas.

Rangers this morning.

Now I have only 10 minutes of electricity, but once the power comes back on this evening I’m going to look for as many email contacts as possible for lodges and hotels in Kenya, and see if they are interested in sponsoring a ranger for the next two months.

In return they will get publicity and a banner on this blog, and with traffic to this blog increasing daily, as it has done for the whole of the WildlifeDirect website - I think they are up to about 60,000 hits a month - the sponsorship campaign could work very well for both sides. We also have 3 major international broadcasters who have all in the last week expressed interest in covering our story, so now would be a great time for people/organisations to be involved.

So that’s the plan so far, but who else do you think I should contact? And more importantly, do you have any contact details - especially for those involved in the Kenyan tourist industry?

Let me know: wdeed at wildlifedirect dot org