Simon Thomsett

Category: Poisoning | Date: Nov 03 2007 | By: admin

For some reason this entry never got through. So here it is again.

Day spent at home on Game Ranching near Athi River. All the birds are well and Mwanzia and Jonathan are keen to take the weekend off to catch up on their various public holidays, of which I have completely forgotten. The only matter of interest on the farm during the week is that there are lions back on the place. This is good news to some of us, but not good for others. The lions of course stand no chance of surviving long. They will be shot or poisoned on neighbouring properties that are being sub-divided into small scale “shamba’ systems. A few have been caught and now reside in captivity waiting the formation of a fenced in conservancy before they can be let loose. They usually come from Nairobi National Park only a few kilometres to our north west, passing like ghosts through industrial areas, and high density housing estates, that some cynics would say was an attempt to block off the park from the “wildlife dispersal areas”. A succession of lion killing tragedies, the dominion of other parties with passionate agendas ends up with thousands of animals with no where to go sitting on my back door, lions included, of which I am delighted but see no future. Part of my interest right now is helping secure a conservancy encompassing three ranches totalling some 45,000 acres that currently holds one of the largest resident concentrations of wild ungulates in Kenya.

Although I do not own a single acre I am exceptionally fortunate by being able to step out of my back door and cast off an eagle or falcon into the skies and walk, for hours over uninterrupted open savanna under the gaze of giraffe, a myriad wildebeest and constantly nervous Thomson’s Gazelles. While it sounds ideal my house made of modest mud and wattle with thatched roof and is fast falling to pieces. It always has been, because I never was very good at building houses. But the recent tremors a few months ago have put large cracks in the wall.

The large sheds for breeding eagles and Lammergeyers are now vacant. I still have Rosy and Girl, incubating an egg, a lone Lammergeyer with no hope of getting a mate, one male Lanner Falcon called ‘Tiny Tim’ who fell from a building in Nairobi, a lunatic male Black Sparrowhawk that was rescued from a gum tree in the middle of a rural farm, a 13 year old female Verreaux’s Eagle (a Cain an Abel rescue that went wrong), and finally a single female Augur Buzzard with a bad wing. I have got rid of 7 others recently in a slow sequential move to close down operations. It is a sad thing to see what once was an up-and-running facility loose heart. Where there had once been energy, enthusiastic people, happy dogs, lots of eagles and hawks and government backing there is now an empty shell. But to dwell on it is not productive.

Today I took Vero’s out for a spin. She flies beautifully. She is a little too tame, the reasons of which I may explain later. But she is huge and unlike the Crowned Eagle will circle and weave about the sky. Sometime she goes far too high and far too out of sight and I fret and run around in panic. Then the plains go quite, a distant rush, a ripping of sky and she is falling thousands of feet back to me from the top of some thermal that bore her aloft. If no one has experience this, no one has lived. Equally she vanishes unseen and unforgivably to an unknown destination that requires days of desultory searching and self examination. However, so far, she has miraculously reappeared and despite the anger and spitting rage I exhibit I dearly forgive her. Despite my shameless emotion she sits aloof and disinterested as I carry her back home.

After a week confinement she was happy to get out and go out, but she did not do too much. I took Tiny Tim for a buzz. He is actually quite a large lanneret (an old term for a male lanner), and should he be shown around an assembled group of admiring people most would say “My what big talons and vicious beak he has!” and if he should flap his wings, folks would throw themselves aside just in case they were savaged. But when paraded in front of eagles 10 times his size, he is wee in comparison and visitors usually warm to him immediately with endearing oohs and aahs. He is devastatingly cute and knows it. He will turn his head upside-down to solicit affection. Lest anyone think he is too tame or an irreversible imprint incapable of release I urge them to see him in a usual mood, high overhead and looking for something to kill. He is then all falcon, dismissive of people, and in a world all his own. He’d take a week to be totally wild, and one day he shall be. But meanwhile he’ll be exercised hard, hunted hard, and made to exceed the physical fitness of his wild brethren before he goes wild. So far he knows only to fly prettily to the swung lure and can keep hard flying for a good 20 mins without stopping. But he hasn’t caught anything in his life except for a very easy pigeon which he didn’t even know what to do with. To release him back into the wild now, as would so many others, would be a death sentence. Meanwhile I shall fly him and get him to chase things until he gets the idea.

Lanner. An old female I had for 18 years comes in vertical toward camera.

On returning around 8am I put the birds out, checked all the others in the sheds, checked on Rosy and Girl on their egg.

Then the weekend past with work, and the afternoon is when we go out and play. At 4.30pm I fly Vero, and Tim as usual. I had some tourists turn up on Sunday from the nearby Acacia Camp, and Tim put on a great show by the dam, pretending he could take Egyptian Geese! Which he can’t.

22^nd Oct 2007.

I had to go into Nairobi to do work. Over lunch I got a phone call from Oudhay Bali an old friend who said that Tim Nickolin’s son Robert had an injured hawk. There is an excitement, best known I suppose to vets and children at Christmas morning when they are presented with a box, in which the contents are unknown. That the box contains an animal in distress adds an additional urgency. I rushed over, and their in a traditional cardboard box lay a male Black Sparrowhawk. I smiled inwardly. I have forever been fighting not to be a hawk nanny. Yet no matter how hard I try I cannot resist a foundling or an animal in need of care. In opening the box I knew the course of the next few days or even weeks would have to change to suit it.

We gave him glucose with a long tube down the throat on the spot. I then put him back in the box and headed for home, now nearly a 2 hour drive thanks to the rebuilding of roads, which now do not exist. The trauma on the hawk could kill it, but persevere we did and he now sits dangling from a cradle. There is little doubt that he had impacted a window. The right side of his head is swollen and he is paralysis on all limbs. However there is partial use, and he can see, feel pain, and swallow food. There is nothing for it but to nurse him over the next few days.

But this is a set back in Duchess’s release. Joe has however sent me an email saying she is ok. They have got a goat and Amos has been able to feed her.

In the evening I got an SMS from Dr Meredith Wagner a carnivore scientist working very close to the site where Duchess was released. They just picked up a dead sub-adult Ruppell’s Griffon Vulture that Laila and I had tagged in the Mara on the 3^rd Sept 2007. The tag is a rather nasty looking red flag we attach to the wing. (see picture below). It is not a process I fully endorse. No falconer or rehabber in their right mind would do the usually accepted methods of marking or radio/ing raptors as do biologists. But to give them their due we have had a lot of re-sightings. Hardly surprising as the tag looks like a shopping bag held over the shoulder of a vulture. It does not interfere with its flight. My colleague in the Peregrine Fund Dr Munir Virani and I have been busy in the Maasai Mara and at Athi River tagging vultures for a few years. We have found not surprisingly that they move rapidly throughout the entire country. We know they are being poisoned at a rate able to make the species extinct. Poisons, usually agro-poisons such as Furudan are liberally laced on dead livestock and wildlife in an almost routine manner these days. Supposedly to kill harmful predators of livestock such as Hyena, lion, leopard but also to kill animals that can be easily frightened away such as cheetah, jackal, eagles and vultures. The more evidence we get, the more we see a trend that defies the acceptable. For example, others and I have noted that the massive die-offs of vultures and eagles at a carcass is not unwelcome, and is not seen as a terrible mistake. To say that vultures and eagles are non-target animals may be assuming too much. But Meredith insists that poisoning is not occurring in the Shombole sanctuary. I do hope she is right. But it doesn’t make much difference if poisoning is occurring 150 miles away. Vultures will still die in sanctuaries no matter how well protected they are. What is more the dead vulture could easily be consumed 150 miles from where it was poisoned and kill hyenas and even lions, who in turn would poison whatever eat them. Like the “old woman who swallowed a fly” it can go on and on.

In April 2004 a few kilometres from my house on a conservancy, transient pastoral cattle herders killed 187 vultures in one poisoning attempt, aimed at killing hyena apparently. It was the largest recorded single case of vulture poisoning anywhere in the world. Although reported immediately to the authorities no prosecution was made, despite the ease in identifying the people concerned. Poisoning carries with it a lack of culpability, whereas someone shooting a problem animal is prosecuted. It is an odd thing to justify poisoning over other more direct and discriminate methods. That the cow they put the poison on had died from being crushed in a truck, not by hyena, was illustrative. So too was the assumed right of the people concerned to go ahead with no authority to poison anything that should eat the carcass. No attempt was made by them to discriminate and target hyenas, and no attempt was made by them to boma their livestock at night to stop and possibility of livestock mortality. No mortality had occurred. It was a shameful matter, but is was repeated on the same farm by the same people. That this rate of poisoning occurs throughout East Africa is now alarming the conservation world. But until such a time as someone is prosecuted there seems nothing to stop anyone doing it again.

1060. Tagged sept in Maasai Mara, died Shombole, one month later. Sample now in lab’ and results as yet unknown.

So we tag vultures, see where they go, and today to get one back dead is bad news.

[1]The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals. Jonathan Kingdon. Natural World. Academic Press.

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Nov 02 2007 | By: admin

While Simon is away for a while climbing trees to install cameras for a research project in the Aberdares, I will fill you in on some goings on at the ranch.
A frog found in one of the dry water tanks, a southern foam-nest frog (Chiromantis xerampelina).

This is the frog in Simon’s hand looking rather content.

This extraordinary frog is quite large and it lives in various parts of Kenya – mainly along the coast – but is found in a small area around Nairobi where we found it. It is the only type of frog that has opposable thumbs! That’s supposed to be a trait of primates! It needs the thumbs for climbing,. The frog was chalk white when we found it all dehydrated in the concrete tank, but turned brown when we put it in water … which probably wasn’t the right thing to do but we thought it was suffering out there in the hot sun. These frogs are unique in that they can withstand temperatures of up to 40 degrees centigrade internally. This is why ti doesn’t really mind sitting in a dry water tank totally exposed to the sun Their skin is designed to minimize water loss.

As it’s name suggests this frog constructs massive foam nets on branches overhanging water, into which it lays its eggs. The nests are made by the female churning her back legs as the males attempt to copulate. The nest hardens overnight and the eggs hatch inside the nest. After about a week the nest starts to decompose and the tadpoles drop into the water below where they complete their life cycle.

This is one of the troughs.

Simon was explaining how dangerous these typical water troughs are for birds of prey which go into them to drink but can’t get back out due to the vertical concrete sides. He believes that about 200 birds die in each of these troughs per year. We found a dead bat in one.

This is one of Simon’s Verreaux Eagles

It looks deceivingly tame in the photo especially when he is with Simon but as Paula (WildlifeDirect Conservation Director), the eagle known to Simon as the ‘Mad Killer Verreaux’, in a most affectionate manner off-course, attacked her when she got within his territory range. People beware! The eagle does not feel threatened by Simon and sees him as more of an equal, which is fair enough as Simon probably knows as much about eagles as they themselves do.

Simon and ‘Mad Killer Verreaux’ , not looking anything like the name suggests.

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