Lions sleep easier tonight
Maasai warriors swap their spears for GPS equipment to join a conservation project, changing them from killers of the jungle kings to protectors
SELENKAY RESERVE // In the Maasai heartland of southern Kenya, some young men have swapped their ancestral role as lion hunters to protect the big cats under a conservation scheme that also helps their community.
Today, the Maasai guardians head off into the bush on foot in search of three lionesses that sneaked into their camp at Selenkay the evening before.
Tracks are hard to find in the dry, potholed savannah brush although the men establish that the cats have separated – gone in three directions to hunt for food. Two hours later, one of the four warriors silently calls a halt – the three lionesses are less than 92 metres away.
In a previous life, the men would have killed the animals as part of a Maasai rite known as “olamayio” – seen as the highest act of courage, winning prestige and praise for the hunter.
But for Leiyio Lengete and the other young morans, or warriors, those days are over.
The lionesses’ GPS location is sent to camp and soon after a vehicle arrives carrying Stephanie Dolrenry, the scientific head and co-founder of the Lion Guardians conservation scheme. Coupling age- old Maasai know-how with contemporary science, she inventories, photographs and studies the behaviour of the lions, which are now returning to the 3,684 square kilometres under surveillance by the project. “The programme is not just based on lions,” says the 37-year-old American.
“Everything we do is about the community. The guardians spend a lot of their time finding livestock – even herders or children – lost in the bush.”
About US$1 million (Dh3.6m) worth of lost livestock was returned by the guardians to their owners last year, Ms Dolrenry says. When a cow is killed by the lions, the morans step in to dissuade cattle- owners from punitive raids against the lions, arguing that their jobs recovering lost cattle are at stake as well as those of the Maasai community, who make up almost all of the staff of the two lodges in the wildlife reserve.
The project has been beneficial for lion numbers, which have increased four-fold since 2007 to about 150, Ms Dolrenry says.
Other wildlife also benefited, with buffalo recently reappearing in the reserve after years of absence, elephants moving in herds and the presence of animals hard to find elsewhere in Kenya – such as the Cape eland or the giraffe gazelle.
Lion Guardians, which also has programmes in Tanzania, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, works with private funding, most of it from the United States.
The Selenkay Reserve project, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, in neighbouring Tanzania, runs on less than $300,000 a year.
It kicked off with a mere five guardians but now employs more than 40, each of them paid the minimum monthly Kenyan wage of $120.
One of the most recent recruits is Mitiaki Kitasho, who asked for a job as a guardian a year ago after twice serving a month behind bars for illegally killing an elephant, then a lion.
“There’s not a single species I haven’t killed to protect the community and to gain popularity and respect,” he says. But courage no longer puts food on the table and after being released from jail penniless, he went to Lion Guardians looking for a job.
Now, like the Maasai warriors, he can continue to do what he loves and does best – track the big cats.