It’s taken me quite a while to organise my thoughts after last week’s return visit to Nairobi and the Kinangop grasslands with Dominic Kamau Kimani (recipient of our Small African Fellowship for Conservation funding for the work he does protecting the globally Endangered Sharpe’s Longclaw Macronyx sharpei).

The day was packed, the flights either side busy, and I was suffering a touch of sunburn (how, with all the information I have and having watched my best friend succumb to skin cancer in 2007, could I forget to lather my ears in sun-block when I knew I’d be wandering around at over 6000′ right on the equator? ‘Distracted and not very bright’, springs to mind…), but those aren’t the reasons why: it’s because we talked about so much and discussed the pros and cons of so many conservation strategies that I genuinely felt “all shook up”, a bit like one of those snowshakers that stores sell at Christmas, and my jumbled thoughts have needed to settle a little before I can see the whole picture clearly again (let alone write them down in any coherent way).

As on my last trip (which like this one was just a short day-trip with my return flight later that same evening) I was to be driven up to the Kinangop Plateau, a 90 minute drive out of Nairobi. After a quick visit to the Nairobi offices of the National Museums of Kenya and Nature Kenya (the Kenyan BirdLife International partner) I would be joining a monitoring team counting Sharpe’s Longclaw in a small area of tussock grassland in Murungaru, go from there to a local school (Mugumoini Primary School, where it turned out I would be handsomely entertained by a traditional songs and dancing performed by some of the older children), onto the Murungaru offices of the Friends of Kinangop Plateau, and finally back to the Njabini Wool-spinning Workshop that I so loved when I visited in October last year.

James Wainaina, a founding-member of the Friends of Kinangop Plateau

On top of that, Dominic and I were accompanied by James Wainaina, one of the founder-members of the Friends of Kinangop Plateau (FoKP). An erudite and intelligent man, James has mentored Dominic from his initial interest in the area’s birds right the way up to his highly thought-out plans for protecting and promoting the Kinangop Grasslands and the Sharpe’s Longclaw. James and I had not met before (though I’d seen his name attached to various Kenyan conservation initiatives on many occasions) and he is something of a living legend in Kinangop conservation circles: he is also - fortunately - extremely friendly and welcoming (as has been everyone I’ve met on my trips to Nairobi). I am proud to say that I can now count James as a friend and colleague, and I hope that will continue for many years to come.

What makes James and Dominic such a great team (and one that 10,000 Birds is genuinely fortunate to have had the opportunity to link up with) is the depth of their knowledge and clear understanding of just how the threat facing Kinangop’s birds - conversion of native tussock grasslands into agricultural land - can be tackled.

Most importantly they are both Kinangop locals and can speak to land-owners as insiders who share their culture, values, and concerns rather than outsiders who want to enforce new ways of doing things without proper consultation. Reassuringly (speaking from my point of view as a fundraiser for the FoKP) they are both very realistic about what can and cannot be done. I’ve met any number of small conservation groups over the years who’s main thinking revolves around a ‘white knight’ arriving with sacks of money to save the day: James and Dominic are far more down-to-earth and are under no illusions that Mike, Corey, or I (or our readers) can walk in and solve all their problems - they know that they and the local villagers are the people that need to work on a long-term strategy of education, of creating pride and passion for the longclaw as a ’special Kinangop bird’, and enabling what might be termed ‘ecologically-wise land use’.

The Friends of Kinangop Plateau need our help of course. No conservation group anywhere is going to turn down an offer of help (particularly one from an area where the internet is at best sporadic and the annual monthly wage is less than many westerners’ weekly supermarket bill), but everything we discussed was based around 10,000 Birds being facilitators and communicators rather than being little more than passive funders and I’m convinced that’s the right approach. Money can disappear into regions this poor and hardly ‘touch the sides’ of the problem, but a long-term strategy based on locally-focussed education and on providing updated and accurate information on the status and whereabouts of the Longclaw is far more valuable and long-lived.

Without actually visiting Kinangop yourself it is of course difficult to understand the problems, but to provide an explanation is partly why 10,000 Birds became involved with the FoKP so I hope the following (quite lengthy) text will provide the information any interested readers might want.

Looking at the area of grasslands around Murunguru, where we counted Longclaws on this occasion (we found at least five, possibly seven incidentally in two small adjacent plots), it’s important to know that prior to the early 1960s most of the land was unsettled and human population levels were very low. After Kenyan Independence in 1963, the incoming government of Jomo Kenyatta parcelled up the grasslands into large packets and encouraged smallholder agricultural and timber production. Many of the families who own the tussock grasslands that the Sharpe’s Longclaw breed on have held their land since this period, and as the families themselves have grown the land has been divided and sub-divided into ever-smaller plots.

Despite all the hard work done on these plots few edible crops can be grown here. The soil is not actually very productive: it’s an arid area dependent on rainfall over the nearby Aberdare Mountains, and emerging potatoes etc are often hit by frosts which ‘burn’ new leaves and stunt growth.

Eucalypts grow fast though, and are the trees in the background of the photos above. Many species are of course derived from areas of Australia where the climate is similarly hot and dry, and they have evolved to efficiently suck any available water out of the ground (and, incidentally, poison the soil immediately around them to stifle any competition). As more trees are planted less water becomes available for both animal and human use.

As the planet warms (and for whatever reason you choose to believe, that is what’s happening) the problems of water shortage is only going to grow. If revenue drops the reaction will be to convert more and more land to try to grow more crops, and the cycle of ‘running ever faster just to stand still’ will speed up until the grasslands have been converted and the Sharpe’s Longclaw, Jackson’s Widowbird, wintering Pallid Harriers and many more threatened bird species will be lost.

Given that, the only realistic hope for the birds here is replacing the revenue from crops with sustainable alternative income sources. The FoKP-run woolshop at Njabini is part of the answer - sheep do far less damage to the grasslands than outright conversion, and if there is an outlet for wool products more farmers will be willing to build up sheep flocks on their land instead of growing water-dependent crops. Another potentially very important income stream is eco-tourism…

Kenya has long attracted huge numbers of what we now call eco-tourists. Most come for the ‘Big Five’ (lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhinoceros) and other ‘game animals’ but the country is renowned amongst birders (particularly European birders because of the relative ease Kenya can be reached from European airports) for the speed with which a huge list of some 600-700 species can be seen. Most of the world’s major bird-tour companies visit Kenya already and many birders come independently, but few - according to the locals who ought to know - visit Kinangop. Considering its location close to the popular tourist area of Lake Naivasha (which can be seen from the Kinangop Plateau) and the specialist birds that live up here, why is that?

Speaking from my own experiences of visiting Kenya on and off for nearly twenty years, I’m convinced that most birders simply don’t know about the Kinangop Grasslands, wouldn’t know how to get there even if they did, and wouldn’t know where to find Sharpe’s Longclaw even if they’d heard of it - and that’s not being as patronising as it sounds because until I saw my first Sharpe’s last year I knew next to nothing about it either and didn’t have a clue where to see one.

Breeding-plumaged Sharpe’s Longclaws

The fact is though that the longclaws are not that difficult to find - IF you know where to look. They are though difficult to see as like many pipits (which they’re related to) they tend to keep low and prefer to walk quickly through the long grass rather than show themselves to eager ornithologists. So even if you do know where to find a longclaw, a major problem is that as the population shrinks they are now (almost?) exclusively found on privately-owned land, and though public tracks (and in some cases tarmacced roads) do go through land where longclaws still breed you can’t just wander around the fields hoping to flush one. You need to be shown one, in other words.

What is clearly needed is for local land-owners to be involved in and benefit from the longclaws and eco-tourism. To a conservation-aware audience like the one reading this that probably sounds pretty obvious, but there are several large obstacles to overcome. As I said earlier not many birders know much about Sharpe’s Longclaw and the Kinangop Grasslands, and not many of the locals know what a Sharpe’s Longclaw is either. Even if we promote the heck out of Kinangop (which is what 10,000 Birds intends to do!) and even if we manage to make Sharpe’s Longclaw a ‘must-see’ bird for anyone visiting Kenya (which we also intend to do - it’s beautiful, very rare, declining, range-restricted and relatively easy to see after all, what more does a birder planning to visit Kenya need to put it on their wish-list?), at the moment only a very small number of local people can identify a longclaw or are even aware it breeds on their land.

Which is something that Dominic, James, Luca (who was back in Italy for the birth of his first son so best wishes to him, Stefania, and baby bump from me and everyone who knows him!) are fully aware of. They are doing what they can to spread awareness of the threats to the grasslands and to promote the Sharpe’s Longclaw among the Kinangop communities, but until recently there has been very little funding available to them, and until we delivered a lap-top to Dominic at the end of last year there was no computer and little internet access available to them either.

The funds we (’we’ as in everyone who donated to our ‘Small African Fellowship for Conservation’ appeal) provided has kept their efforts going for another year, but the campaign to save the longclaw needs to be self-sustaining - and that could come from developing an infra-structure that will mean that eco-tourists will be able to come to Kinangop, meet up with trained, local guides who can not only show them a Sharpe’s Longclaw but also identify a range of other exciting pipits, larks, warblers, and migrants correctly.

The key word there is “trained”. In a region where there are few educational materials available, how do you train up local farmers to a level that makes them valuable enough to be hired by visiting birders who need to - in effect - get in and out quickly, seeing everything available, and knowing that what they’ve just been told is accurate? You help provide the materials they need and you help make available ways to create those materials for themselves (by providing digital cameras etc).

And that’s what Dominic, James, Luca and I now feel 10,000 Birds needs to concentrate on doing.

Some of what we can do is fairly easy. Given that the FoKP already has a website I wasn’t sure until this visit precisely how much information or data they were happy for 10,000 Birds to put online: as I now know James himself uses our pages as his home-page, the photos of the Kikuyu dance-troupe I posted are the only ones on the internet, and our photos of the Sharpe’s are apparently the best openly available online. In other words whatever we want to post FoKP are happy for us to do so. I don’t want to undermine any work being done elsewhere, but if that’s what FoKP wants, then I’m absolutely thrilled. I have piles of photos I haven’t posted yet that they’d like me to, so - over the next month or so - I’m going to.

Obviously that will necessitate a re-working of what we already have online. A central page needs to be created with internal links to galleries/information/maps etc, and more summarised data needs to be accessible and easily found within the blog, but that’s achievable and useful so I’ll be settling down to organise that information as soon as I can. Once we have that online with a static URL it will be much easier to approach the bird-tour companies and show them what they’re missing…

Unconverted grassland

The monitoring team identifying the birds they are seeing using an excellent
but extremely large ‘Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania’ Helm Guide.

Secondly, how can we help train up the guides? We need additional funds of course (and I’ll be finding ways to make collecting and channeling funds easier), but the guides of the future also need ways to learn what the birds in the region are. Anyone who has birded Kenya will know that the field-guides to the country are fantastic pieces of work, but will also know that they’re not cheap, feature an overwhelming and confidence-shredding 800+ species (many of which occur only in localised areas of the region and will never be seen in Kinangop except in a photograph), and weigh as much as a house-brick. Why not, I suggested, create our own “field-guide” in the form of eg a spiral-bound, laminated/weather-proof note-book sized collection of plates which focusses entirely on the birds of Kinangop. I have photographs of about half the thirty or so birds we think the guides need to be able to identify, and surely I can source the ones I don’t have? If we can create say twenty or so of these ‘books’ we can deliver them easily and they will be invaluable to - for instance - the locals who made up the monitoring team I joined (see the photos below which show the members of FoKP who were involved).

Why not, also, create large posters of the Sharpe’s Longclaw using some of the photographs I’ve taken? At the moment even the FoKP offices don’t have photographs of the area’s birds with which to teach the local people. Posters would make a huge impression and don’t cost much (much like the leaflets and labels we’re creating for the woolshop, more of which later).

All these ideas are relatively easy to implement but will make an enormous impact on the ground. They will take time to create of course, and they will take funding, but I’m certain that making resources available at ‘ground-level’ is the best way forward: it supports Kinangop, frees up the resources of FoKP’s partner Nature Kenya, and - best of all - is what the local community want us to do. As James himself said, at last he feels that FoKP is moving in the right direction. He is extremely enthusiastic about what we plan to do via 10,000 Birds and I hope that our readers feel the same way…

Imagine how worthwhile and satisfying it will be if a bird blog really is able to make a long-lasting contribution to the survival of the Sharpe’s Longclaw and the Kinangop Grasslands. I for one feel incredibly charged up by the discussions we all had while I was in Kinangop, and my thanks go again to the community for making me so welcome and putting so much faith in my input and in 10,000 Birds.

So there is a lot of hard work ahead - and I haven’t even discussed our plans for the Njabini woolshop yet, but this post is getting rather long - but hopefully a few of you reading this will want to come along for the ride! As always, comments and offers of help welcomed…

From left to right: Dominic Kimani, James Waweru, Jack and Joakim Kiiru, James Wainaina, Kiboi Muthee and Njoroge Githuki.

 

Son and proud father, Jack and Joakim Kiiru

 

James Waweru

 

Kiboi Muthee

 

Njoroge Githuki

All photos copyright Charlie Moores 2009.

      - Dr Muchai Muchane and the National Museums of Kenya

      - Nature Kenya (the BirdLife International partner in Kenya)

      - and the Friends of Kinangop Plateau

Would you like to support the work we’re doing by having this 200×252 pixel button on your site (like Bubo Listing and The Birder’s Report) ? Either download it straight from this page or mail us and we’ll send it you.

Please link to this post for now (once I’ve created a central “Sharpe’s Longclaw/Kinangop Grasslands Campaign” page that will be the one to link to - I’ll email all the sites with the button on and give them the new URL as soon as it’s finished).

Thankyou very much.