In September, you helped us name our new Malinois tracker dog puppies: Holmes and Watson.

Two weeks ago, they hit the paws button and travelled to the prestigious Kuru Dog School in Arusha, Tanzania. There they will be trained under the watchful eye of master dog trainer Will Powell. Will has a long and decorated career training land-mine detection dogs in conflict zones across the world, including Rwanda, Cuba, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. He has also trained conservation dogs in six countries across Africa. If there is anyone capable of transforming our pups into crime-fighting canines, it’s Will and his team.

It is still too early to tell when Holmes and Watson will be ready to return to Big Life, but we are pleased to report that they are already growing both in size and ability.

In the meantime, Clyde is holding down the Tracker Dog Unit at our headquarters in Mbirikani, supporting our rangers as needed with operations.  Image: Joshua Clay

It is counterintuitive to have negative consequences following good rains. But what was a blessing at the beginning of 2024 became a ticking time bomb by mid-September. Because good rains result in long grass, and long grass becomes bonfire material by the peak of the dry season.

Fires are part of the natural cycle of the Chyulu Hills. If managed properly, they can be beneficial, and many of the plant and tree species that thrive here are fire-resistant.

However, fires that are too frequent and too strong can be harmful to this landscape. When our teams received word of an enormous line of flames rising from the farms to the east of the hills, it required rapid attention.

In this remote region, rangers are the first and only defense against such fires. More than 60 Big Life rangers and 3 aircraft, along with teams from the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, the Kenya Wildlife Service, and The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, worked day and night to stop the blaze.

Funds from the Chyulu Hills REDD+ Project were used to secure an Air Tractor in the past year, a plane capable of dropping more than 1,000 gallons of water at a time, which made a huge difference in controlling the fire.

This one fire burned an estimated 12,000 acres. If it wasn’t for the dedicated combined efforts of our rangers, the teams from our conservation partners, and the new aircraft, the damage would have been a lot worse.

Two weeks later, and green shoots have already started to appear across the blackened hillsides, highlighting the resilience of this ecosystem, and offering a sense of hope as we look once more to the beginning of the cycle and the start of the rains.

🎥: Joshua Clay

As the peak of the dry season grips the Greater Amboseli ecosystem, it’s not just the heat that’s intensifying—so too are the threats to wildlife.

As often happens at this time of year, we’ve seen a surge in bushmeat poaching, putting our rangers on heightened alert. In the first six months of the year, Big Life’s teams arrested 8 suspects in 5 incidents, for killing 13 large mammals for bushmeat. But in just the last 2 months the rates have increased significantly: 12 arrests in 6 cases, and 14 animals poached.

Giraffes, with their immense size, are a favored target. Poachers set snares, or use powerful torches to stun them at night, while a second individual slashes the tendons in their legs with a machete—a brutally painful way for any animal to die.

Rangers are doing everything they can to control the situation, leveraging their community informer networks, and setting night-time ambushes in poaching hotspot areas. Every arrest sends a clear message: poaching in Amboseli is a risky business.

Despite this seasonal increase, bushmeat poaching in Amboseli is still relatively low, thanks in large part to the vigilance and hard work of Big Life’s rangers. We hate to think how many animals would be dying without them.

📸: Joshua Clay

They know the best routes across a landscape, and their repeated journeys carve well-worn paths through any terrain. These ‘elephant highways’ are used by all animals, humans included, and it is said that many of the original roads constructed in Africa followed these ancient paths.

Thanks to the USAID-funded ‘Sustainable Management of Amboseli and Tsavo Landscapes Project’, a new road will soon allow visitors to follow in the footsteps of elephants, through the ALOCA community conservancies that protect the Kimana Corridor.

The road connects to Kimana Sanctuary and will provide a much more direct (and scenic) route to Amboseli National Park for guests staying at Angama Amboseli, one of Big Life’s tourism partners located there.

Conservancy access fees paid by users of the route will support conservation projects in ALOCA and provide income for landowners. This also incentivizes people to keep land natural and open for wildlife. There are almost too many wins to count.

It’s an exciting time as Big Life and others support the development of community conservancies in Amboseli, including through construction of roads and other foundational infrastructure. This is being done in a controlled way, to avoid the ‘over-tourism’ plaguing some of Kenya’s other famous destinations, to ensure that tourism continues to provide the maximum benefit for wildlife conservation AND local communities.

It’s just one way we can make sure that hundreds of years from now, there will still be elephants to follow through the bush.

Images: Jeremy Goss & Joshua Clay