Simon Thomsett

Category: Rehabilitation | Date: Jan 27 2008 | By: admin

I could not think what to name this “blog” entry. It summaries the difficulty in being in the field without the usual amenities of a town. Running a rehab centre needs seclusion, but in trying to keep up with the information highway, the run-away field of expertise of my more research orientated colleagues I feel left out. The two cannot be combined although the gap is getting shorter thanks to new “wireless” internet connections such as the set-up I am using right now. Nevertheless a recent experience and a phone call made me write this…which has nothing to do with raptors, but everything to do with the problems of trying to be effective.

I often have poor cell phone coverage here, but if I push the back of the phone against the metal structure of my outside water-tank the signal strength increases and I can email. I was standing there doing my email on my tiny cell-phone keyboard when the phone rang It was nearly ten o’clock at night and the full moon was out. It was my sister phoning from England. She asked what I was doing. I told her and she laughed and said I should add this in my blog. Hyena howled very close by and I told her to shut up and listen. I held the microphone piece toward the hyena. That sound managed to bounce across the planet to her ear. She faintly heard it, midwinter in a cold grey flat, a small piece of Africa got through. She felt home-sick.

I have hyena around my house every night, howling, gurgling and whooping it up. They devoured a full grown wildebeest about a week ago during a rainy night about 60 metres away from the bedroom window. When it rains the hyena pack together and go for large stuff that find it difficult to run in mud. I curse at them, sometimes I charge out of the house in my kikoi and shout. My old dogs used to go mad and roar off barking insanely, which annoyed me even more. But that particular night it was wet and I crammed the pillow over my head and hummed for 20 minutes till the pitiful bellowing of the wildebeest had subsided. After my sister phoned off I stood under the dripping tower trying to retrieve my interrupted email and I was aware of just how very lucky I am.

I built this house in 1992, after I joined the Peregrine Fund. I asked Dr David Hopcraft if I could set up a modest “Raptor Holding Facility” at the far corner of his game ranch on the vast Athi Kapiti plains. He kindly agreed and ever since I have slowly added huge eagle sheds and allowed the ranch’s small tourist concern to visit the collection whenever they wished. The main bulk of the house and the sheds had to go up quickly and for the cost of $3,500. That wasn’t much back then either, but that was all we had. The collection of eagles and hawks numbered about 20 in those days. It is always necessary for me that I live away from other people so that I can fly large eagles without the danger of them getting used to living around people, or killing cats and dogs or even attacking small children. An eagle can leave the fist, fly out a few kilometres in less than a minute and get into trouble very quickly. In addition I needed a place that I could release raptors into the wild. And it goes without saying that this necessitates a fair amount of seclusion. But I am also fond of being alone and in the bush surrounded by wildlife. It isn’t that it goes with the territory so much as I like it.

So I settled in a fairly bleak spot devoid of anything other than one small Acacia seyal tree. All it had going for it was an old water pipe from a windmill up the hill. It was 12km from the nearest ranch dwelling. That suited me fine. It was an interesting spot as it had Portland Cement property of 15,000 acres to the west and Machakos Ranching 15,000acres to its south. These ranches have rocky river-beds and temporary streams shrouded in thick riparian forests, deep water cut valleys and swamps and plains. It is by far the most “bio-diverse” location in the region. It is also hardly visited. I grew to think of this place as my own, for I was certainly the person who most often visited it.

Unfortunately if you are supposed to run a conservation project you have to be “connected”. When I started this work I had not heard of email and had never possessed a phone. Land lines were out of the question. Both electricity and phone lines are hideous and lethal to hawks and eagles. I got a cell-phone in 1997 but soon had the satisfaction of hurling it at the back of my car one night after some inflamed argument with a girlfriend and saw it fly into tiny bright pieces. I had relied on my Post Box near the old railway station at Athi River, but no-one other than my bank writes to me any more…it is all email. Then came cell-phones with email connections. I bought one at vast price 2 years ago. But as you can imagine I had lost out and fallen behind in the high speed world of modern conservation and research.

Electricity is always a problem. Originally I used to use a 1924 Lister engine than ran on Kerosene or even cooking oil that gave some 1.VA. Enough to run the TV and 3 lights for a couple of hours but useless for working on a computer for 6 hrs of the day or using a kettle. I still have it and it still works but it isn’t very economical. It is also a beast to start. You have to prime it with petrol and hand crank the huge fly wheel and continue until you are exhausted and totally beaten, and only then would it give an encouraging cough. By this time the sun has long since set and you can’t see a thing. But if a machine ever had a soul it is this 85 year old engine. When working it thumps away in a small shed made of chicken wire, long grass and cement-wash to deaden the sound. As a child the steady beat of a distant generator was part of family life and I was only aware of it when it was finally turned off when we were all in bed. It has the same effect on me now and most obligingly if I fall asleep with it on it knows and runs out of fuel.

I had a total of 5 generators of the more modern handy sort. They put out 1-5kVA and are very popular. So popular that all 5 were stolen. I chained them into concrete and they would not be there in the morning. One very painful episode happened after about 1 year of being without power. I finally decided to build a metal cage in a concrete foundation. Into this I put the brand new generator. It worked for one night. It hadn’t even cooled down before 3 people came silently and took it away. Solar panels are very expensive. You can buy a brand new generator for much less than one useless solar panel. The supposed eco-friendly side I have never understood when one looks at the staggeringly expensive array of lead batteries soaking in hydrochloric acid. More lead oxides there than I could ever put into the atmosphere with a life time of generators. But I did finally give in. As it happened I had a bright young builder working here at the time thatching the roof. He told me of new solar panels he knew of being sold at subsidy price by a goodly NGO near Kibwesi. I trusted him with a lot of money and sure enough I had two new solar panels (and receipts) and I was able to run the house on a few low Watt bulbs for a few hours. But a week after he left one of the panels was missing. I had no idea who it could have been. But the next day the police turned up with the young builder in the back of a police Land cruiser, and the solar panel. I was surprised but happy to see my panel was back. “Oh no”, they said “this and that other panel on your roof belong to a railway station on the Mombasa /Nairobi line, we will take them both now sir!”

I do use solar most of the time these days and when the days are dark and gloomy I drive my car up to the back door and boost the system with jump leads. Munir my colleague in the Peregrine Fund suggested I get a printer to save the whole day chore of driving into Nairobi to print out one page. I bought at his suggestion a fantastic but reasonably priced laser printer. It remains in its box because it uses as much power as an electric cooker! With all the solar in the world and the car going at full revs the inverter cannot push out enough to fire up the printer. I am a TV addict (a newish thing for me and helpful in keeping my language skills). If there is a good movie I flatten the car battery in an hour. Good for keeping my TV viewing to less than average, but bad for leaping into the car in the morning.

So I built a wind turbine. To some friends surprise I “surfed” the internet when in Nairobi and found a design for a 10ft three blade wooden windmill. It had a lot of plans regarding using large magnets that are impossible to import into this country. (Magnets are restricted on plane flights!). Earlier I had borrowed a small but fiercely expensive wind generator meant for sailing boats. I stuck it on a pole. It had a nasty look about it and when it ran it seemed to wind me up too. It spun with a vengeance and scared all my birds. It put out next to nothing, cost a fortune and one day as I stood looking at it, it killed three Hildebrand’s Starlings who flew right into the blades. I sent it away. But a huge blade generator may rotate at a leisurely pace and have a soothing effect. I had images of a Dutch mill and a pleasant rural scene in which I was able to catch up with the modern world.

I spent weeks carving out the blades, weighing, calibrating and balancing them. They had to be perfect and it wasn’t easy to do with hand tools. The final day came when Mwanzia and Jonathan and I hoisted it up on a crude 8 ft pole. The tips of the blades, 5ft in radius were only two feet off the ground. That’s as high up as I wanted to go because it had to be hidden from the hawks and eagles. I had the presence of mind to put a tail on it and tether it to an old eagle perch so it would not swing around. We sat back and it started to turn. It picked up speed. It became a blur and we all sort cover to reconsider the situation. Who was going to stop the thing? We drew straws and I lost. I snuck up to it and jammed a pole into the bearings and ran away. Ha! I thought, no thief is going to come and pinch this thing. I would finally have electricity.

I put an old converser belt motor with a permanent magnet on it. If this spun it would put out 12-15v DC at some 3-5 Amps, enough to charge a good number of batteries. The good thing about it was that I could also use it as a lathe by attaching it to a car battery. I lathed out 2 pulleys at a 1/3 ratio. (see photo). The end result was a fine wind turbine that could knock out enough power to run the house and even get that wretched laser printer working. I would be set! I could sit at home and operate an office, use the computer, watch my TV in the evening and turn on a few lights. It worked too!

But the thing spun like a lunatic. It hummed outside and drove my staff and I into a heightened sense of foreboding. The eagles and hawks stood rigid on their perches and the movement of plains game around the house vanished. What the heck! Finally after 15 years I was connected! Yes sir, I had electricity and I can print out a piece of paper! My TV drummed on till 11PM! Who cares if it plasters a few silly starlings!

All this was finally completed in good working order for the first time only last week. Folks in Nairobi city often sit in the dark with their power cuts…but not I. Huh, damned city folks. Nothing better than making your own electricity.

Today we had an accident. I was in my garage, an old tin roofed thing with no walls and breeding Red-billed Tick Birds in the supporting uprights. In it is a wrecked ultralight plane, a sad memory of better times, a car, a 75cc motorbike and carton loads of bones of dead vultures and eagles. I was busy working on the bench-vice which has just shredded its main screw and talking politics to Mwanzia and Jonathan. They stood to my left. Only 50 ft away the wind generator was busy whizzing around. We had all talked ourselves silly about how amazing it was, and how we should all make them for the improvement of rural economy of our country. The wind on the plains gusts terribly. A steady 10 knot can suddenly hit 40 knots when a whirl-wind rushes past. We all stand still, close our eyes, let it rearrange out hair styles and continue talking after it has past. But with this whirling monster dangerously close we had other things to worry about. We abandoned our job and wandered over to stare at the turbine.

Another gust came while I was in the process of understanding the danger of our situation. A five foot radius has a ten foot circumference. That’s larger than most propellers on a 20 seater turbine powered aeroplane. The revolutions per minute hit a standard 500-800 on this turbine. But it can peak at 2000rpm in strong winds. That’s a few hundred RPM less than a full throttle turbine engine but much more than a helicopter. I had earlier weighed each blade at just under 4kg. That’s heavier than an aeroplane propeller blade. Right now, while we stood with our arms hanging by our sides with our mouths open in awe, this turbine had the same kind of energy and inertia of a large aeroplane engine.

Mwanzia inspecting the damage.

We were 15ft behind it. Mwanzia and Jonathan were looking at it in amazement as the gust hit us. I had had a few too many cups of coffee that morning and I am survivor of a few too many plane crashes to not have a survival switch flick earlier than most. The wind lifted the roof of the garage, we all closed our eyes and the blades screamed and clicked! The next half second passed my brain at the same speed as the experimental car crash dummy “accidents”. I turned and saw Mwanzia and Jonathan unmoved, there wasn’t much I could do, each man for himself. I turned the other way and started to run. Sadly I missed the slow motion lifting off of the turbine into the sky as it main bearing broke, and its slow motion shattering of limbs as it hit the ground and sent pieces flying, as in the movies. Fragmented bits and pieces blew past my head and something hit me in the back of the leg. I lept forward dramatically onto a pile of old corrugated iron roofing sheets that appeared in my way.

All was quite. Mwanzia and Jonathan, completely unscathed looked at each other. I had just received a quart of adrenalin and was very jumpy. The caffeine didn’t help. I was annoyed that they had seen the whole thing, frame by frame unscathed and I had a sharp splinter in my leg and had fallen uncomfortably. I couldn’t believe my eyes at the destruction. The machine lay dormant and quite. We spread out silently and wandered about picking up pieces of blades. Some large pieces had flown on the top of my roof some 70 meters away.

I got to use that fancy laser jet printer just once.