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 our (10,000 Birds) 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 our readers. What we’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.

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 from 10,000 Birds via the Small African Fellowship for Conservation which 10,000 Birds set up…

[From Part One: "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…"]

Around 11:00 am, 14th June 2009:

We move on to another farm, Mr Wainaina’s, similar to the one we’ve just visited but a little larger. The farmhouse squats behind locked gates, there’s an old farm vehicle under a canopy, a couple of children skittling across the farmyard from another small house to the right as we pull in. The kids skid to a halt when they see me get out of the 4×4 - curiosity pulling them forward, uncertainty pulling them back. I smile and say hello, they smile shyly, the whitest teeth flash quickly, huge, beautiful brown eyes look up and lower again…They’ve no idea who I am and I’m never sure what I’m supposed to do when I meet them, but as a parent myself I just want to hug them - as a middle-aged white guy who’s arrived in a cloud of Kenyan dust and will depart in another cloud in about 30 minutes I just daren’t…

I look around. There’s a Kenyan matriarch in a voluminous pink cardigan sat on a pile of what could be large stones from an old farm building. She’s eating from a bowl, some sort of grain I think, shooing off a large white chicken that has its beady eyes on her lunch. To her left is a new-ish raised, slatted structure built of wooden poles and long, slender sticks that look to have come from felled eucalypts (trees are draining the water table in Kinangop, but it’s clear why the people here are still planting them). It’s obviously a pen or shearing shed of sorts.

We’ve been joined by a young man and a young woman who are either the owners of the farm or who will stand to inherit it one day. I should have found out of course, but there’s so much going on as usual that the details get lost. Dominic is saying, though, that he’s brought me here as this farm is run slightly differently - he implies more professionally - and that he wants me to hear how the relationship between FoKP and the farmers here are working out. He’s switching between Swahili and English (and probably Kikuyu) mid-sentence and back again. He makes it look easy. Like most Brits I’m pretty much ignorantly mono-lingual…

Mr Wainaina

Corriedale sheep

We go up a ramp into the wooden structure. It is of course for handling, separating, and sorting the sheep. Like the walls the floor is slatted too, set just far enough apart to allow the sheep’s droppings to fall through but not so far that their hooves would get trapped between them. The ground below is inches deep in droppings. The young farmer is explaining that they make great organic, natural fertiliser. Nothing’s wasted - everything costs too much and profits are too low to waste anything. I find myself surprised that it hadn’t even occurred to me that this wasn’t just waste that would end up polluting the water supply because of sloppy farming practices: I guess I’m either so used to reading about ‘bad news’ that even when ‘good news’ is (literally) under my nose I don’t always recognise it, or it’s a case of my subconsciously thinking I know better than they do…shame on me if it’s the latter.

Dominic is asking rapid-fire questions about how much more the farmers here are making now they get a good price for the wool rather than just throwing it away as they used to (substantially more, and that’s down to what FoKP are organising), where his sheep came from (they’re Corriedale, a long-established cross between Merinos and Lincolns apparently, that were bought from a wholesaler in Njabini), and whether he’s happy with working with FoKP. Yes, very happy. Something about the scene suddenly strikes me: everyone here looks so young. It could be that I’m getting older (”you know you’re getting older when policeman start to look young”), but Dominic the Wainainas, Bakari, Mary Mwendwa - they’re all young. The future of Sharpe’s Longclaw really is already in the hands of the next generation…

The next generation: Bakari, Jimmy, Dominic, Mrs Wainanina and son (? - I’ll update this as soon as I can), Mary Mwendwa. (Willy Kimemiah just out of shot)

Dominic smiles broadly. He smiles broadly a great deal. He has good reason too as I’ve already said, but it’s more than just doing a job he’s proud of. This is his community he’s helping, his people that he’s empowering. How many of us can say we do that every day I wonder…

I’m developing a much greater appreciation of how technical the work going on in Kinangop really is - which is why Dominic brought me up here of course. We head back down the ramp again and into the fields. It’s the same mix of short-grass and longer-grass pastures as Mr Gichia’s farm [described in Part One]. There are Longclaws here too (but we don’t have time to look for them - visiting overseas birders would of course!).

The fields are separated by barbed wire which I clamber over gracelessly (really, no more damn doughnuts!). Willy watches me, smiling, lopes towards a fence and springs off the ground like an Olympic high-jumper. He sails over the wires and the sticks (so high I imagine he has time to wave to the crowds in the stadium) and lands lightly with a flourish. ‘I could do that once’, I say. Everyone laughs - they know I couldn’t, especially up here where the air is thin and the sun so full. They know I know too. They’ll never know though (until they read this I suppose) how wonderful it feels that we’re so relaxed together - the outsider and the young conservationists…

Back at the farmyard we present posters and I make a (relatively) small donation on behalf of 10,000 Birds from the airline allowances I get. I’m never sure whether giving money is the right thing to do. I always check with Dominic first, he always says yes, but I’m so anxious - over-anxious perhaps - to not appear like some patronising European ‘patting the locals on the head for not killing birds’ that I always hesitate. There’s so much history between the UK and Kenya’s Highland peoples, and much of it very disturbing. The worst of it is relatively recent too - the Mau Mau Revolt, when tens of thousands of people were killed, took place in the 1950s, and though no-one has ever mentioned it to me I’m aware that memories are long: the elders here will certainly remember what happened…I don’t want my participation in the project to be about money, and especially not about ‘Kenyans’ and ‘Englishmen’ (it’s about birds and conservation), but am I supposed to be building bridges when I don’t even know whether there are rivers that need to be crossed? I’ve a feeling that it’s just my sensibilities that are unsettled: I’m handing over the equivalent of buffet breakfast in the hotel - hardly anything to me, but six month’s de-wormer to a farmer. Do they really care where it comes from? I doubt it. Next time I go to Nairobi I’ll pluck up the courage to ask Dominic and get my head round the question once and for all…