Simon Thomsett

Category: Raptor Expedition | Date: Sep 07 2009 | By: simonthomsett

by Simon Thomsett (Photos by Laila)

We were invited to spend three nights at a beautiful lodge called Kichwa Tembo in exchange for giving the guides a presentation about birds of prey. We were met by the manager, Niall Anderson, who asked if two tents at Bateleur Camp was fine for us. I assumed this to be the driver’s accommodation, somewhere removed from the main lodge and was pleased with that. But no! We were ushered into perhaps the most luxurious tents and exclusive lodge imaginable in the whole Masai Mara! Crumbs I thought, I had better have a wash, shave and give a good presentation!

With bellies full of delicious food, we spent some of our time searching the forest around Kichwa looking for goshawks. This small patch of forest has survived the damaging effect of millions of wild and domestic ungulates and the ravages of elephants, and as a result is amazingly rich in bird life and monkeys. It has both the Blue and Copper-tailed monkeys for example. At Niall’s advice, we took two trips to the escarpment behind the lodge. We sat by Olkurruk Lodge which has unquestionably the finest view of the Mara but burned-down some years ago and since been abandoned. Perched high on a medium sized cliff, we waited for soaring raptors.

View from the escarpment of a Bateleur soaring

We went to Dupoto, a 500 km2 forest currently run by a small and struggling Maasai community. If conservation were done properly, some of the focus on the Mara would be diverted to this neglected forest. True, it does not have the abundance of wildlife and vistas, but it surely holds more species and it is highly threatened. We met our guide, William Naliki, who explained the need for immediate action to conserve this forest. We entered the forest and within a few hundred meters we saw a Crowned Eagle’s nest with an incubating female. I left to explore with the guides, leaving Laila with one scout to take pictures of the eagle.

Crowned Eagle at nest

In the short time we spent there talking quietly in the cool forest with the community guides and chairman, I was struck by the repeated call made by local communities to conserve their land and the near impossibility of bringing those organisations devoted to conservation together. There are enormous organisations with resources dedicated to environmental conservation, forest protection, improving livelihoods and wildlife conservation. There are so many places that must be helped now, before it is too late. But the process required to marry those who can help and those in need is agonizingly long. Here is one relatively easy location that would add so much to the nation’s conservation assets and also benefit its people.

Laila put together a presentation using many of her photographs. I was to give the talk and she made me promise to keep the talk to 45 minutes. But incapable of being brief, I gave a 2-hour long monologue to the guides on our last night at the lodge. No one went to sleep and there was half an hour of questions! We left Bateleur Camp to return to our camping lifestyle.

Tags: conserving smaller forests, kichwa tembo, presentation on raptors

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Category: Raptor Expedition | Date: Sep 02 2009 | By: Laila Bahaa-el-din

by Laila Bahaa-el-din

We joined the Peregrine Fund’s Munir Virani and University of Swaziland’s Ara Monadjem at Lake Naivasha to see how the Fish Eagles are doing with the receding of the lake. We spent a lovely morning on the lake throwing fish out for the eagles and watching them swoop in. From there, we went to the Mara to get back to the vultures. Simon climbed up into the nest of that Lappet-faced vulture chick we had put the GSM tag on a couple of weeks previously to check on it. It seemed to be doing well and was just about to fledge. We also spent some time with Corinne again, catching a few more vultures for GSM tags.

Lappet-faced Vulture chick in the nest

Ara, Munir and Simon putting a satellite tag on a Ruppell’s Vulture

We spent one enjoyable early morning with a lioness and her three small cubs before the day got warmer and she took them into cover. We were on our way to join the vulture capture team when we stopped to watch the interaction between a big male lion and a lioness. She seemed very nervous as the male approached and lashed out at him when he got near. Then we saw three more big males poke their heads up over the long grass and as we watched, the four of them started to chase the terrified female from the area. They looked like they had murder on their minds so we were relieved when the female finally managed to lose them a few kilometers on. We wondered what reason these males might have to chase off this one female and the guides told us she was not a female from that pride.

Lioness defending herself

Often called the seventh wonder of the world, the great wildebeest migration from the Serengeti into the Mara happens around this time every year. Tourists flock to the Mara to watched hundreds of thousands of animals make the treacherous crossings of the Mara River. Panic-stricken animals usually make a mad dash across rivers, hoping to avoid land predators waiting in ambush on the banks and the hungry crocodiles waiting in the waters. Luckily for the wildebeest, but not so lucky for the crocodiles, the Mara River is very low this year, making it easier for the animals to get across safely.

Zebras and Wildebeest safely crossing the shallow Mara River

Corinne and Munir managed to see from the satellite information that one of the tagged Ruppell’s Vultures hadn’t moved in four days. Concerned, Corinne went to check the area to find that the vulture was on the ground, unable to fly very well. After four days of being on the ground like that without food, it must have been near starving. We joined them and, knowing that it wouldn’t survive, caught the bird. It was kept overnight in a shed at Intrepid’s Lodge and then Corinne drove it to Naivasha the next day where it is now being taken very good care of by Sarah Higgins in a shed next to Rosy and Girl.

Tags: lake naivasha, mara river crossing, peregrine fund, sick vulture

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Category: Eagle | Date: Aug 28 2009 | By: sheryl bottner

by Sarah Higgins of The Little Owl Sanctuary

The Fish Eagle with the broken right wing that was brought in in July is recovering well. We have decided that she is probably a girl and have christened her ‘Batelle,’ because of her brave fight for survival. I have yet to hear her call - which would tell us for sure what gender she is (a male has a higher voice than the female) - but at least ‘Batelle’ or ‘Battle’ is a name that fits all! Of course, as so often happens, Batelle will no doubt shorten to Batty before too long!

Batelle is proving to be a gentle bird and is prepared to tolerate humans waiting on her hand and foot. Her wing stump, which had to be de-feathered for the operation to remove the damaged part of the wing, is beginning to sprout some nice new feathers, so her nights of a chilly wing stump are almost over. Her legs and feet, which were deeply lacerated when she arrived, have healed well and one of her two broken talons is beginning to grow back. Once she has gown back sufficient feathers to protect her wing stump we will think about introducing her to Bogoria (our other mono-winged Fish Eagle) and see if they would like to have the companionship of another bird, albeit of the same gender. I do hope that they’ll get on.

Batelle the Fish Eagle

Waddlesworth (the Pelican) spends quite a lot of his time beside Batelle’s cage and will often leave his last fish of the day by her cage door, so I oblige by popping it inside for her to enjoy - always a popular move.

Tags: batelle the fish eagle, little owl sanctuary

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Category: Raptor Expedition | Date: Aug 27 2009 | By: simonthomsett

Simon Thomsett (Photos by Laila)

After a few grey days spent in Thika trying to take pictures of a pair of Black Sparrowhawks and an African Hawk-eagle, we returned to Solio Ranch where we had spent a few days last year. We were sad to leave the Thika house, which is a grand old Kenya farm house sturdily built in a magnificent garden set in acres of coffee. Raine Samuels looks after this house, keeping a feel of those better days when wildlife and people’s livelihoods were not so much at odds. Not far from it, the urban sprawl and dusty mess of fast-growing development is threatening the area.

Odd that one should worry about threats facing large coffee and mixed-farming estates. Virgin bush ‘destroyed’ by settler farmers in the 1920s until the 1950s converted rhino thicket into coffee. Why bother ‘conserving’ this farmland? Because it has a surprising amount of eagles, hawks, birds and small mammals on it. This differs from the general ideas regarding African wildlife conservation. Perhaps we should accept that these old established farms (with their adapted wild animals) have a role to play in wildlife conservation? Maybe there will come a time when conservation of wildlife in these human environments is considered as important as the more usual approach of conservation focused only within protected areas. It is widely accepted in the developed world but this approach has yet to be seriously considered here. Farmers protecting wildlife … an old idea elsewhere but relatively unexplored in Kenya.

Solio Ranch, on the other hand, is a fenced, protected area geared toward Rhino conservation. As a direct result, the raptors found within its boundaries are more sensitive to human encroachment. It is less than 20,000 acres and alone it cannot support a very diverse population of raptors. Fortunately it still lies within a greater area of indigenous woodland that buffers the effect of man and so preserves these eagles. By ’sensitive’ raptors, I mean the Martial Eagle and Crowned Eagle. The African Hawk Eagle, previously a fairly common eagle outside protected areas has now taken membership to this aloof group of eagles. So too has the once very common Tawny Eagle joined the club. Solio supports these eagles but as settlement and rural development devour its edges, it is debatable just how long these eagles can remain. The rhinos will remain after the eagles have gone.

We stayed with Annie Olivecrona who kindly arranged with the owner Edward Parfet for us to photograph eagles within the sanctuary. The moment we entered the protected area, there were vultures dripping from the trees. We had not seen one on the entire trip up from the Mara. Interestingly, Ruppell’s Vultures were present in large numbers. One had to wonder where these birds came from as the nearest cliff colonies are a very long way away. There were White-backed and Lappet-faced Vultures also with them. We did note a young Lappet with feathers going all the way up the back of the neck to the back of his head. I had always assumed feathered heads to be a sign of youth, and that with age the feathers retreated. Just a week previously I had climbed a Lappet’s nest in the Mara to see the chick was completely bald. So what of these feathered heads and what does it mean?

Feather-headed Lappet faced Vulture

We found a Martial Eagle pair with a nest overhanging the swamp. The male is a sub-adult. The presence of immature birds in a pair implies a lack of adults in the ‘floater’ population. It infers a population in decline. This is not surprising, for Martial Eagles are certainly a species of concern in modern Africa.

Young male Martial Eagle of the Solio pair

Very close to this pair we rounded a corner and were so fixed on finding raptors that our eyes entirely missed a lioness spread across a broken tree before us. She looked a little amused at our surprise as we scrambled for the cameras. She viewed from this vantage some warthogs and zebras and jumped off to hunt them out of our view. We met her again on this same tree the next day. Not far from there, we had earlier seen a male lion on a zebra kill. We returned to find a pair of Augur Buzzards feeding on the kill alongside a Sacred Ibis. It is not that unusual for Augur Buzzards to feed on carrion but we were still grateful for the opportunity to record it.

Lioness lounging on tree

We did of course see both Black and White rhinos aplenty. Solio has played an enormous role in the conservation of rhinos in the region and has demonstrated that you do not need that much land, or much infrastructure, to secure a large population of endangered rhinos. There is much that they could teach our neighbouring countries (e.g. Ethiopia) as well as the rest of the world (e.g. India) in the management of rhinos . and raptors.

Tags: private land owners and conservation, rhino conservation

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