Nyakweri Forest
Lessons to learn from the loss of this vital habitat
Aherd of elephants, many of them cows with calves, use their trunks to tear branches off trees in the Nyakweri Forest, on the western edge of the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.
It should be bucolic, but the air is acrid from the smoke of burning charcoal kilns, while the elephants eat within metres of enormous stacks of illegally chopped trees that will be sold as timber or turned into charcoal. It is a stark reminder of the harsh competition for land between elephants and humans in Kenya.
The Nyakweri Forest, a carbon sink as well as an important watershed feeding Lake Victoria, is being degraded at breakneck speed. Here, 70 elephants are hemmed in by the rapid fragmentation of land for crops and cattle pastures, while miles of fencing cuts off their corridor into the Maasai Mara. Unlike the Maasai Mara, which has 14 conservancies where animals roam unfettered by human habitation, the Nyakweri Forest is community owned and individuals have their own plots of land.
“In the past 20 years, we’ve lost 50 per cent of that forest,” says Marc Goss, CEO of the Mara Elephant Project. The elephants, wary of humans, stay deep in the forest during the day, venturing out at night to feed. Inevitably, they end up roaming onto farms, where they raid crops, and gardens too.
There are two solutions. Pay farmers to turn their land into wildlife habitat, or move the elephants. The latter is the only likely solution – there is not enough habitat to sustain elephants long term. Moving the elephants will entail catching and tranquilizing them and trucking them into the Maasai Mara, where the Maasai are paid to keep the savannah open.
“One lesson learned is catch it while it’s still early,” Goss says. In future, it will be key to deliver “early childhood education about ecosystem services” to Kenyans and have government planning to ensure new settlements are compatible with key wildlife habitat, he says.
Kilns for making charcoal (pictured) are scattered throughout the Nyakweri Forest