Amboseli, home to more than a thousand elephants, was one of Kenya’s most visited parks in 1994-95. The park is located within traditional Maasai rangelands bordering Tanzania, with Mount Kilimanjaro standing guard.
Amboseli’s arid landscape and dusty appearance are deceptive: Thousands of underground streams fed by runoff from the slopes of the great mountain bisect and feed the park’s marshlands, providing year-round water and lush grazing for the elephant and other wild browsers and grazers. In contrast, many of the Maasai group ranches outside the park have no natural surface-water sources. When water and grazing are scarce, herding livestock within the park boundaries is increasingly necessary for the Maasai.
The rise of poaching in the 1970s decimated Amboseli’s elephant herds and halted their traditional migratory patterns. As the threatened animals learned to sty within the safety of the park, they created severe pressures on the ecosystem. On average, elephant consume four hundred pound of mixed fodder each day. The concentration of elephant and successful breeding means that Amboseli is now threatened by the species it has protected for so long.
With very few natural woodland areas remaining in Amboseli and the park in a critical state, the Kenya Wildlife Service scheduled three workshops to discuss contemporary issues in conservation and management of wildlife and other natural resources, focusing on Amboseli’s biodiversity. The workshops brought together a wide variety of interested parties-researchers, wildlife managers, NGOs, donors, local hoteliers, tour operators and landowners-to focus on the various changes in Amboseli and the need for a comprehensive action plan.
The first workshop, held in Nakuru, addressed the use of research findings in the conservation of biodiversity. The second, held in Amboseli in April 1995, aimed to consolidate the vast amount of data on the dynamics of the Amboseli ecosystem and the views of all involved. The final workshop to clarify and balance scientific and social necessity was held in the Aberdares.
The main workshop recommendations were to ease elephant congestion in the Amboseli basin by creating space outside the park, providing water outside the park for livestock and minimizing crop destruction in surrounding settlements; to support local landowners in establishing wildlife-related enterprises; and to rehabilitate Amboseli using the exclusion method tested in the park (experiments preventing elephant and giraffe access to certain areas showed complete woodland regeneration in twelve years).
During the last year, KWS also has addressed many of the community issues highlighted during the Amboseli biodiversity workshops. Denying the Maasai communities access to their traditional rangelands when the park was gazetted created an immense potential for resentment and harassment of wildlife that has not been fully recognized until recently. Water, grazing, education and revenue generation were identified as key areas in which collaboration and support from KWS and selected donors could enhance Maasai-wildlife relations.
With the initiation of an education bursary programme for secondary school and university study, KWS provided Kshs 3.8 million toward the further education of students selected by local Maasai leaders.
During the year, KWS rehabilitated three boreholes outside the park at Ilmarba, kitendeu and Naiperra. It also provided equipment and manpower to build several two-tired tanks, supplied from Amboseli’s underground streams, to provide humans, livestock and wildlife with water year round.
In a bid to encourage greater tolerance and understanding of wildlife, KWS recruited more than a hundred game scouts from the local communities. The scouts were trained to gather and classify information about wildlife (in particular, how to monitor the movements and behavioural trends of elephant outside the park) and educated on KWS’s goals and plans for Amboseli.
