The package arrived coiled into a tight ball, the harmless creature’s natural defense against wild predators like lions and hyenas. While this doesn’t protect the animal against its human enemies, luckily this one was being delivered by friends, not foes.

Pangolins are nocturnal and highly elusive creatures, very rarely seen. So Big Life rangers were very surprised recently when a group of community members arrived at their outpost carrying one. The pangolin had wandered close to their village and been brought to the rangers out of concern for its safety from poachers or opportunists.

Measured by number of individuals, they are the most trafficked animal species in the world. While their meat is considered a delicacy in some countries, the real financial value is in their scales, which are wrongly used in Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as a supposed cure for a number of ills. The demand is so great that the four Asian pangolin species have been overhunted to the point that traders have turned to the African species.

A recent report paints a grisly picture of the trade. 2019 was the worst on record, with seizures of pangolin scales (by weight) rising 400% from 2015 to 2019, despite a complete ban on international trade in pangolins that went into effect in 2017.

In 2019, China took the laudable step of removing pangolin scales from the list of raw ingredients endorsed for use in TCM. However, the scales are still included as an ingredient in a number of approved traditional “medicines,” meaning that they can still be legally traded.

Pangolins are extremely sensitive and difficult to translocate, but this one was found close to a wilderness area, so the rangers carefully released it back in the wild near where it had been found. After a time, it slowly unrolled itself and moved off. The rangers stayed with it until nightfall to ensure that it didn’t attract further attention, and then left it be.

We’re grateful for the concerned community members for helping this pangolin. It is the people who live in and alongside wild spaces that will protect nature best. We are here to help them do that.

In the fight against wildlife poaching, there is no weapon as effective as a human being. And Big Life’s female rangers are proving that they can do the job just as well as their male counterparts, as one bushmeat poacher recently discovered the hard way.

Each Big Life ranger has their own intelligence network including families, friends, and neighbors, all of whom are eyes and ears on the look-out for threats to wildlife. And women’s social networks are different than men’s.

In this case, information about a bushmeat poacher reached Big Life’s female ranger unit operating in the Kimana Conservancies. Following the tip, the team tracked the suspect to his farm where they worked with the Kenya Wildlife Service to arrest him. Three snares were recovered, along with meat from a dead Thompson’s Gazelle.

Conservation and anti-poaching work has traditionally been dominated by men but these women, alongside the many others working as rangers in Africa, are showing their own communities (and the world) that protecting wildlife is everyone’s business.

Photo: James Suter / Black Bean Productions

2020 threw a curveball at the entire world, including Big Life’s education programs.

Late last year, Big Life’s conservation education program – which helps develop the next generation of environmental stewards by incorporating conservation education into classroom curriculum – was overhauled and improved to include ranger activities. To help students better understand the critical work rangers do, activities both inside and outside the classroom were developed including a tree planting exercise with rangers, visiting a ranger outpost, and a junior ranger program, among others. Big Life’s conservation education officer, Michael Tipaai, was able to reach 1,406 students and 18 teachers in delivering the first two lessons of the year.

Then the pandemic hit. Schools closed on March 15 and the country came to a standstill for six months while Kenya raced to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Big Life’s offices reopened September 1st, and Michael quickly got to work adapting the education curriculum to engage students in their home villages. In five village visits, 193 students in grades 7 and 8 were reached.

Kenya’s government had previously announced that schools would remain closed until 2021, but shifted their decision in October for grades 4 and 8 only, due to critical preparations needed for national exams next Spring. In order to focus our resources and maximize the benefit of our curriculum, Big Life will focus on grade 8 students currently in school through the end of the year, and will resume the broader program as soon as students are fully back to school in the New Year. 

All of our programs have had to adapt in one way or another this year, and we’re so grateful for the support of our partners through this process including Chester Zoo on curriculum, The Thin Green Line Foundation on the Junior Ranger program, and to LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics for their long-standing support of our conservation education program.

If you conducted a quick survey of your friends to ask what their favorite animal is, at least one of those is probably going to say “cheetah.” Cheetah are popular for good reason. In addition to being aesthetically stunning creatures, they’re Earth’s fastest land animals.

Unsurprisingly, this species faces a number of challenges. Habitat loss is a huge threat to all wildlife species in East Africa but particularly for cheetah who require larger hunting territories than other species. Shrinking habitat also means they come into conflict with people. Particularly in the Amboseli ecosystem, where pastoralism is a key way of life, cheetah are notorious for capturing livestock as easy prey.

In the third quarter of 2020, Big Life compensated local livestock owners US $26,569 for the loss of 51 cows, 666 sheep/goats, and 3 donkeys, and cheetah were responsible for 64 of those kills.

Our Predator Compensation Fund (PCF) works by compensating livestock owners a portion of the value of their livestock lost to predators on the condition that no predators are killed in retaliation. We usually talk about it in context of lion, which are one of the key species the PCF helps to protect. But it’s also working to protect cheetah.

Just last week, one of Big Life’s co-founders and Board Director Tom Hill spotted four new cheetah cubs near his residence in the Chyulu Hills. And anecdotally they’ve been seen with increasing frequency across the ecosystem, including in Kimana Sanctuary.

Cheetah need all the help we can give them to keep them thriving. There are estimated to be only about 1,000 individuals spread across Kenya and Tanzania, and their population numbers are declining. They are listed as “vulnerable” and extinct in 30+ countries within their original geographic range.

Please consider making a donation to Big Life today in honor of International Cheetah Day and help us keep these iconic cats alive.

Photo: Jeremy Goss