Last Year's Lions | The Wildlife Society News

By Alexandra E. Sutton

A young boy herdsman (laiyoni) stands at his father?s ?boma,? a livestock enclosure. (Credit: Alexandra E. Suttton)

Jambo!

My first field notes blog introduced the goal of my project here in Kenya: to study the effectiveness of predator-proof fences in reducing human-carnivore conflict in the Western Mara. Now, I?ll write a bit about how I plan to conduct my research.

Unfortunately, there?s no perfect way (short of a time machine) to collect information about past predation rates. So I?m gathering data from a number of different sources to put together a clear picture of past predation. These include historical records of compensation paid to herders for loss of livestock, more recent yet patchy data on predation events, and retrospective interviews with herders.

By drawing on all of these data sources, I believe that we can uncover information that will help us reach our ultimate goal: to inform and improve conservation work here in the western Mara.

Historical Records
Although there are some historical records in the western Mara, they are spotty and imperfect. Some handwritten accounts of predation rest in the Mara North Conservancy?s headquarters and in the main office at Oloololo Gate, but these records cover only a small number of historical predation events, and are often secondhand accounts. Nonetheless, historical records (even imperfect ones) can provide an important buttress to the information that we gain now about current and recent predation.

These historical records also fall prey to a reporting bias problem: the Mara Conservancy compensated cattle owners until 2005 for ?huge losses? of livestock to predators. As a result, only predation that might have met the ?huge loss? criteria was reported. Although the ?huge loss? incidents might have a significant emotional impact on a cattle owner (one can just imagine the horror of waking up to find 89 goats and sheep killed out of 100), and might even be financially devastating, they often do not represent the bulk of predation.

I?m hoping to get a more complete picture of the ongoing nature of predation ? not just the incidents where a hyena or leopard killed a large number of animals in one sitting. In other words, a sudden break in a water pipe may be painfully costly to a homeowner, but a years-long slow leak might ultimately be a greater loss.

Sutton and her research team reach out to herding communities in the Maasai Mara to help build better livestock enclosures. This enclosure (above) is a traditional ?boma,? built with sticks and acacia thorns. Stronger enclosures (below) are often reinforced with chain link fence,? which reduces predation and, consequently, retaliatory attacks on wildlife. (Credit: Alexandra E. Sutton)

Recent Data
Other conservation groups working in the Mara, such as Friends of Conservation,? are sharing their recent predation data with us. But small staff size limits the ability of these groups to record all predation incidents, so patchiness and bias are inevitable in these data as well.

Interviews & Questionnaires
Interviews and questionnaires can yield incredibly rich information about human experiences; unfortunately, they?re incredibly challenging to perform well, and improper interpretation can produce data that is rife with errors. We?ve adapted survey methods originally developed by Amy Dickman during her work on the same types of human-wildlife conflict in Tanzania.

Working as a team, we?re able to provide simultaneous translation to our interview participants while providing depth and context to any answers we receive. We arrive at each boma (livestock enclosure) owner?s home, usually after giving advance notice to him or to the most senior of his wives. We introduce ourselves and our project and I offer a standard disclaimer that there will be no financial compensation for participating in the survey, or any cost to participate, and that we plan to use the data to help bolster the Anne K. Taylor Fund?s community efforts.

Elias Kamande, Kimoro Sakui, and myself ? all with the Anne K. Taylor Fund ? each play a different linguistic role during the interviews. Kimoro, a field team member, is a native Maa speaker (the Maasai language), and a well-respected member of the local Maasai community. This makes him an excellent community liaison, but he only speaks a small amount of Swahili and very little English. Kimoro can explain (in Swahili) when an interviewee has referenced a local event or has used a Maa aphorism that escapes direct translation. When Kimoro is called away by other duties, Sakat Jackson, a staff member at the Mara North Conservancy and also a native Maa speaker, helps us out.

Elias, our field team leader and a brilliant birder who knows the area?s ecology like the back of his hand, speaks Kikuyu ? the language of the largest ethnic group in Kenya. Elias also speaks Swahili and English quite well, but knows very little Maa. He?s able, however, to translate so that Kimoro and I can communicate with each other.

I am the native English speaker of the group, able to interpret our survey and research goals to Elias and Kimoro in Swahili (and, very rarely, a tiny bit of Maa) using my three years of training in Swahili and two months of immersion in the culture.

Even with these linguistic barriers conquered, the challenge of imperfect recall remains. People rarely remember distant events accurately. For this reason, we are only asking about predation events that occurred during the past year (May 2012 through June 2013).

In order to identify and compensate for outsize estimates of past predation, we ask our questions more than once and in different ways. Early in the interviews (which take about two hours each), we ask boma owners to estimate their total annual predation loss for cattle and smallstock (sheep and goats, also collectively referred to as ?shoats?). Later in the interview, we sit down for an accounting session during which we ask people to describe each predation event by the type of predator, starting with the largest ? lions and working down to the smallest ? honey badgers.

A teenaged herdsman (morani) holds a young goat that was injured by a hyena. Local herdsman are not as concerned with attacks on young livestock as they are with attacks on adults because the young are less valuable. (Credit: Alexandra E. Sutton)

Using the accounting method, the number of predated cattle typically turns out to be about half as many as the owner originally estimated, while the number of predated shoats is actually double the original estimate. This phenomenon might reflect the outsize emotional importance that owners place on cattle in Maasai culture.

The Maasai tend to overlook or ?forgive? predation of juvenile sheep and goats, taking stock only when adult animals are lost. As one Maasai put it, ?You cannot protect every animal. Some things are just lost, but that is okay. The small ones, there are many.? When we press interviewees for full counts of all animals during the accounting process, we often uncover large numbers of lost juvenile smallstock that the owner did not mention initially. So it appears that in this area, there?s a general forgiveness for juvenile smallstock predation, particularly when it occurs outside of the boma. During our interviews, we make every attempt not to call extra attention to the juvenile smallstock losses, hoping to prevent further degradation of the perspective on predators.

These observations give us valuable insight into the types of livestock loss that are more likely to trigger retaliation against local predators. Lions are often the target of retaliatory attacks because they are more likely to prey on cattle, while less concern for smallstock losses may account for the lack of retaliation against smaller predators like jackals and baboons.

Next Steps
I?ll be delving more deeply into my data this week, as I take a week?s break to visit another research group up north, in Laikipia ? a Kenyan district north of the Mara. I look forward to sharing some early insights with you all!

Tutaonana baadaye! (See you later!)

Source: http://news.wildlife.org/featured/last-years-lions/

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