Back in June 2008 when I first posted about the Endangered Sharpe’s Longclaw – which is endemic to the grasslands of the Kinangop Plateau near Nairobi – I had no idea at all just what the year would bring in terms of my developing relationship with the local community and especially with a local conservation and education NGO, the Friends of Kinangop Plateau (FoKP). What has happened since June has been incredibly rewarding to me personally, and hopefully has been of interest to blog readers. What I’ve been doing has, I can definitely say, been fantastically well-received by FoKP, who on my last three visits have welcomed me like a ‘brother’ and who bestowed the extraordinary honour of making me a Kikuyu Tribal Elder in October last year.
I’m just home after my fourth trip out to the Kinangop Plateau, and once again it has been an almost overwhelming experience. I’ve been thinking how best to blog about the day I spent in Kenya, and rather than just re-hash the facts I’ve covered before and throw in a few new photos, I thought I’d try something different and write a looser ‘stream of consciousness’ rather than a straightforward post. I hope readers will forgive some self-indulgence here, but I really do want to try to get across just how surprised I am to find myself in the position I am, what it’s like to be in Kenya for just 24 hours and try to achieve so much, how I’ve learnt that blogs can make a real difference in global conservation issues, and how certain I am that if I can do something like this then so can everyone else…
New readers who haven’t a clue who I am might perhaps find it useful to know that I live in the UK, I’ve worked for an airline (as cabin crew) for nearly twenty years, I’m 48 years old, I’ve been birding since I was a child (and joined the airline to go birding round the world), I’m moving house in three weeks, and I’m cursed with self-doubt and uncertainty. It’s also useful to know that Dominic (Kimani) is a young and – I think – brilliant conservationist who receives funding via the Small African Fellowship for Conservation which I helped set up…
June 13th 2009
After a very long day which started for me at 04:50 I get to the hotel in Nairobi at close to 23:00 local time [two hours ahead of UK time], and I finally get my hands on a room-key around 23:30. I’m due to meet Dominic in the lobby at 09:00, and I’m already over-tired from fretting about possible redundancy and moving house as well as working a full flight from London. The flight home tomorrow night is almost full again apparently and I’m planning to be out for most of the day…I need to sleep as soon as I can, now, but I’ve brought some labels to give to the Njabini woolshop and some posters to give to Dominic that I’ve designed and that he knows nothing about, and heck I’m in Kenya thousands of miles from home (again) and there are giraffes, and zebras, and Sharpe’s Longclaws out there – I can’t switch off straight away…
June 14th 2009
It took an hour to relax enough to sleep last night, but I’m awake again before the alarm goes off at 07:00 (05:00 back home) – worried I might oversleep.
It’s overcast outside, fat grey clouds hanging over Uhuru Park. I can see Little Swifts, Pied Crows, and Black Kites skimming the city and can hear a pair of White-browed Sparrow-weavers chirruping from an acacia in the car-park.
I have a bath in water that’s tinged pale-brown and emerge smelling of chlorine and soil, shave, then head downstairs for some breakfast. I’m trying to keep my weight in check so I go heavy on fresh fruit and stay away from the full fat cheese I love – but I figure I can burn off a chocolate doughnut during a long day in the field birding and add nothing to my waistline. If I’d stopped at one I’d probably have been right…
When I walk out of the hotel into the car-park at 08:55 Dominic is already there. He greets me like a long-lost friend and we shake hands and clap each other on the back.
He has a kind face. I’ve only met him a couple of times, he’s half my age, I’m British he’s Kenyan, but there’s a strong bond between us based on (I hope anyway) mutual trust and respect. We’re friends. I feel genuinely privileged to be able to say that. I’ve been coming to Kenya for eighteen years and hardly spoken to anyone local except taxi-drivers and the staff in the hotel restaurant before now…
In the back of the scuffed 4×4 Dominic has borrowed are two people I don’t know. One is Mary Mwendwa, a journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker who’d emailed me a week ago about Kinangop and conservation and who’d I suggested come with us. She is self-assured, young and smiling broadly. The other is a friend of Dominic’s, Willy Kememiah who’s studying business at Egerton University. He’s looks about twenty, is quieter, looks more reflective. I notice later he has very clean shoes.
It’s Saturday and I wonder what they’d both normally be doing if they weren’t going up to Kinangop with a middle-aged Englishman who wished he’d shown a bit more self-restraint when facing the pastry basket….
I ask Dominic what the day’s schedule is. He’s says we’ll be visiting two farms in South Kinangop so I can see for myself what FoKP are trying to put into action on the ground, then the woolshop, and then the Murungaru Nature Centre. We’ll be back in Nairobi by 17:00. I know that whatever Dominic says we’re doing we’ll end up doing more and that whatever time he says we’ll be back we’ll be at least an hour late. He knows I know and jokes about African time. I like African time better than Airline time.
I take the labels we’ll be giving to the woolshop out of my rucksack and pass the bag round. It suddenly feels a lot smaller and lighter than it did at home and I wonder whether I should have had 1000 made instead of just 500. Too late now…
Dominic has seen a picture of the labels on the blog so he knows what they look like, but the other two haven’t so don’t. They look at the labels politely. They say they like them. I realise I’m smiling a little too hard, and wonder why I think they would feel comfortable making any comment on a bag of labels when they have no clear idea what they’re for or what they could possibly say to me if they didn’t like them…
I have another ‘gift’ too: small A3-sized posters of Sharpe’s Longclaws I’d had made up a few days before. I’m rather proud of these. I’d designed them for Dominic to give to schools or at the presentations he gives and perhaps decorate the woolshop which is very bare. There’s very little text (few people who get the posters will understand English well enough to cover them in print), but there are three large photos of Longclaws I’d taken on two previous visits.
These everyone likes. Posters make more immediate sense than labels – and were far cheaper to produce incidentally. It’s a good start to the day and I start to relax. It may seem like a small matter but I’ve never produced this sort of thing before…
We hit the main road out of Nairobi towards Naivasha and Kinangop. The traffic isn’t as bad as usual (note to self – always come here on a Saturday). The traffic police are still manning chicanes of spiked bars lying across the road en-route but for a change they don’t stop us. Dominic thinks they normally stop white people travelling with locals in case they’re Al Qaeda who have struck Nairobi before. I’m sure he’s right but it seems odd in a country that depends quite heavily on tourists being ferried between National Parks by locally-based drivers. Still, they don’t stop us this time and we speed along…
The sun is coming out and I remember that I forgot to buy sun-block to replace the one I’d left in my hand-luggage and had taken off me by Security at Panama Airport in April (the ‘liquid’ was in a container larger than 100ml, and could be used to make an IED according to the world’s security experts).
By about 10:30 we’ve picked up Samuel Bakari who is a key member of the Njabini woolshop team and we’re pulling up in front of a small farmhouse. It’s painted the same colour blue and white as the sky and the clouds behind it. The farmhouse is surrounded by non-native trees – every building up here is now, eucalypts and pines sucking water out of the ground. A Dusky Flycatcher flicks off a fence made of thin, knobbly sticks. A male Bronze Sunbird sings from a tree.
A friend of Dominic’s who’s also in FoKP, Jimmy, comes out to meet us. He’s the son of the landowner, Mr Peter Gichia. We all shake hands, then go inside. For tea! Excellent. I’m English, there’s usually more tea in my bloodstream than water and Kenyan tea is fabulous – strong, thick, earthy, and a rich brown. Mary Mwendwa uses my camera to take a photo of the Englishman drinking tea in a Kenyan farmhouse: I silently curse chocolate doughnuts and hope no-one notices me sucking in my cheeks…
Yours truly and Bakari
The landowner, Mr Gichia, has come in. He’s a smallish man in a frayed suit and a canvas hat. He lowers himself regally into the largest chair in the room. He has an etched face full of character, and eyes as bright as lights. He fixes me with a steady, challenging gaze that gives nothing away but he is obviously weighing me up. Dominic explains who I am, that I am working with FoKP, that I am part of the community (his community, of course), that I helped raise Dominic’s salary. He hasn’t smiled yet but he is not unsmiling either.
When he speaks the others go still and focus on him in the same way I remember I used to listen to my grandfather talk, when I still understood that if I listened carefully there would always be something of interest to learn.
Willy, Dominic, and Mr Gichia
The others translate as I try to understand what life is like in Kinangop for farmers, why land is being developed increasingly fast after an influx of refugees from the political violence in late 2005, how much it costs to protect sheep from parasites but how much more money he can get selling his Merino wool to the Njabini woolshop if the sheep are healthy, why planting crops is so risky up here where there is not enough water, and how livestock is so much better but still a lot of hard work…
The tea drunk we go back outside to have a look around the 100 acre farm and the Merino sheep. The land is a patchwork of paddocks, some heavily grazed, some less so, and one large field looks like it has never been developed. They tell me about how the farm practices rotation, how they’re managing the land for the Longclaws. They’ve found that even cultivated land will return to something like original grassland in less than ten years. The large field was going to be developed but Jimmy talked his father out of it. It’s cost them revenue but they think it’s worth it. They’re proud of the fact they have Longclaws on their land. I’m proud they think it’s worth telling me, this tired but very happy blogger who is suddenly standing on their land this beautiful morning, all about it.
Merino Sheep
Jimmy, Bakari, and yours truly
We don’t see the Longclaws but Dominic says that they’re here somewhere. They apparently feed on the short grazed grass where insects are easy to see early in the morning (when their prey is still a bit sluggish) and then retreat to the longer grass as the farm gets busier. He likes this farm, is proud of the fact that he helped teach Jimmy about the Longclaws and how to help them. He should be. He’s been working miracles in my opinion…
We do though see a Black-winged Lapwing Vanellus melanopterus, a bird I rarely see although it has a huge range across Africa. It’s holding its ground as we walk towards it heading up to a completely dry dam that Dominic and the farmer wants me to see. I suggest there must be a nest. Dominic seems to know exactly where it will be, tucked behind a tussock (the same sort of site a Sharpe’s Longclaw would choose). He’s right of course, and we find two heavily marked eggs lying on the ground. I take one quick photo and back off. The plover has returned to the eggs by the time we’re ten yards away. The BirdLife description includes “This species breeds in short-sward grassland on highland plateau and mountain slopes…(especially in areas with large wild or domestic ungulates and game animals)…“. It’s evolved to keep an eye on clod-footed mammals straying too close to its nest, and we’ll have been nothing more than a temporary blip in its day. I, of course, feel rather differently about seeing the Lapwing…
Black-winged Lapwing – adult (above) and nest with eggs
