Two years into a global pandemic and nature has thrown us another curveball here in East Africa:  severe drought. As conditions worsen, Big Life’s rangers are staying busy mitigating conflict and supporting the local community.

 So far in 2022, Big Life’s 352 rangers have patrolled 318,832km (198,113 mi) by foot and vehicle and confiscated over 281 kg of ivory, removing it from the illegal wildlife trade. Big Life rangers also made 171 arrests in 76 incidents for crimes that include bushmeat poaching, wildlife trafficking, trophy possession, and habitat destruction.

More good news: we have not had a single elephant or rhino poached this year, a trend we are doing our best to continue. Nor have we lost any lions to retaliation from herders, despite hundreds of livestock being killed. Our Predator Compensation Fund continues to be a success, and will become more critical as conflict increases with the dry conditions.

Conflict always increases when it’s dry as resources become scarce. In Q1, Big Life rangers prevented 42 crop-raids by hungry elephants, a number which jumped to 77 in Q2. There were also 11 incidents of elephant related damage to water pipes and boma destruction, but even so, zero retaliatory elephant hunts have been attempted.

Although it will be several months before we have any chance at rain, our rangers will remain vigilant and we will do our best to support the community through this challenging time, both people and wildlife alike. But it will be a tough road ahead as both animals and people find themselves in desperate situations.

Thank you to our wonderful partners and supporters for making our work protecting the wildlife and wild lands of East Africa possible.

This month, we are highlighting the fantastic work done by our rangers, and today we want to celebrate two of our furriest and friendliest rangers: Bonnie and Clyde.

Big Life first began using dogs for anti-poaching efforts in 2011. Since then, our small unit of capable canines have helped apprehend poachers, tracked injured wildlife, resolved disputes over theft, and reunited lost children with their families.

Together, our dogs and their handlers make a disproportionately large contribution to our anti-poaching and conservation goals. In addition to directly intervening in incidents, the mere presence of the Dog Unit acts as an invaluable deterrent to potential poachers. It is hard to know the number of animals that are alive because a potential poacher decided not to kill for fear of being tracked by the dogs and their famously powerful noses. But through our intelligence network, we have reliable information that the dogs’ presence absolutely factors into poachers’ decision-making processes, and that the dogs have increased the threat of arrest to the point where the risk is too high for many.

The Dog Unit is led by Sergeant Mutinda Ndivo, who has overseen the unit since 2012. He’s passed much of his knowledge along to the other four human members of the Dog Unit: Jonathan Mopia, Joel Kuyan, Peter Mulinke, and Raphael Merin.

Photo: Josh Clay

It must have been a terrible decision for the elephant family to make, leaving their baby behind.

The calf had fallen into a well while trying to drink and we can only assume that the rest of the herd tried through the night to rescue it, but the sides of the hole were just too steep and slippery. Eventually, the herd moved off, perhaps as humans and their livestock started to move around in the morning.

The lonely calf was found by representatives of Royal African Safaris while on a game drive in the Enduimet Wildlife Management Area, an area of northern Tanzania that forms part of the Greater Amboseli ecosystem.

They managed to get a message out and one of the Big Life-funded rapid-response ranger units was quickly on the scene. Everyone worked together to get a cable looped around the poor young elephant, which was pulled out of the muddy pit by a vehicle winch.

But by that point, no one knew where the elephant’s family had moved on to. Luckily, the calf picked up the scent of its family and set off in hot pursuit. To everyone’s delight, the family had only gone a few kilometers and the calf was able to track them down for a happy reunion between mother and baby.

As the drought gets worse, animals will be forced to look for water from risky sources, including man-made livestock watering wells such as in this case. We know that this won’t be the last elephant that gets into trouble in the coming months, but thanks to our friends at RAS and the Enduimet Wildlife Management Area rangers, we’re relieved that this particular story has a happy ending.

They say that talk is cheap, but it's certainly a start.

This past week thousands of delegates from across Africa were in the Rwandan capital of Kigali for the first IUCN Africa Protected Area Congress, which aimed to come up with strategies to halt the rapid decline of wildlife species and habitats in Africa’s protected areas.

While many are (rightly) calling for greater investment in Africa’s neglected formal protected areas, the reality is that many of these national parks and reserves will not survive as islands. Amboseli National Park is one of these; a small part of a much larger ecosystem that lives or dies as one.

Conservation success in these large-scale systems depends on the actions of the human communities who live within them, often sharing space with wildlife, so we welcome the increased focus on community participation at big international events such as this.

We are even happier to have had three Big Life staff members at the conference, (from left in the photo) Big Life’s CEO Benson Leyian, Ranger section commander Daniel Popote (who won an IUCN International Ranger Award on Wednesday), and Predator Protection Program coordinator Daniel Sambu.

These staff members represented not just Big Life but their Maasai communities, as well as our partners, World Land Trust, IUCN, and the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association, who supported their attendance.

We are rushing towards an extremely uncomfortable and uncertain future as a species, and we really only have one lifeboat. That lifeboat is called NATURE, and Africa has an opportunity to lead the way in keeping her afloat. We’re working to do just that here in Amboseli, and hope that this conference will galvanize similar action across the continent.

Photo thanks to our partners at Conservation Alliance of Kenya, represented at the conference by Dr. Winnie Kiiru who is also pictured here.