Lion Guardians

We are very excited that all of the ground work for our expansions into the Ruaha and Sinya areas of Tanzania are now bearing fruits. Earlier this year, we hosted a group of Barabaig community leaders from the Ruaha ecosystem in central Tanzania on an exchange visit to Kenya. They interacted with our Lion Guardians and the Amboseli community members who have partnered with the program over the past 6 years ; they went back very excited and eager to start a Lion Guardians program in Ruaha. After their return, they held community meetings throughout their territory to describe the program to their peers using their own words. The meetings resulted with the community giving us the blessing to go ahead and start the program.  Within a week of our arrival, we were able to interview and select five new Lion Guardians. They are currently undergoing training by two of our best Lion Guardians who traveled to Ruaha from Amboseli; so far the news is encouraging.

Mokoi is one of the Lion Guardians who traveled to Ruaha to train the new recruits

In West Kilimanjaro, Sinya area, the process began with a meeting of the area leaders which was attended by all zonal representatives and their community Chairman, as well as the traditional chiefs. They then convened several community meetings, all of which gave us the final blessings to start the initial process in this conflict prone area. In fact, I have just returned from there, leaving behind two of our team members who are conducting interviews for potential Lion Guardians.  The final selection will be done soon and the results announced in a community meeting. Soon thereafter, the training of the selected Lion Guardians will begin.

The new Lion Guardians will be trained in radio telemetry, the use of GPS and data recording

West Kilimanjaro is a very important area if the Amboseli lion population is to be protected; many of the lions that frequent Amboseli cross into the Tanzania border and are often killed in retaliation as a result of human-wildlife conflict.  In fact, a lion was recently killed there in early September 2012, just a few days before we started community engagement.

We believe that the the presence of Lion Guardians in this area will greatly reduce the incidences of human-wildlife conflict, thereby preserving the life of these precioius few remaining lions. Please help contribute to the success of these noble expansion plans by helping us fund the costs of getting these new sites up and running.  Your support helps us cover cost such as the salaries of the Lion Guardians and their equipment.  It also helps us pay for important field costs such as phone airtime, vehicle fuel, maintenance and repair, which are all imperative to the effective operation of the progam.

It’s that time of year again! We will be holding the 2012 Lion Guardian Games the first week of July. Thank you Eco-Sys Action for providing the funds and soccer balls to ensure that a good time will be had by all!

In the shadows of magnificent Mount Kilimanjaro, the Lion Guardians from the three group ranches, Mbrikani, Olgulului and Eselenkei all choose their best athletes to compete against each other in traditional Maasai contests (and a match of football/soccer!). The Guardians practice all year long to perfect their skills. We also take this opportunity to thank the Lion Guardians for their dedication and hard work. Especially this year – once again no lions have been killed in Lion Guardians patrolled areas – despite high conflict and the introduction of a new age set of warriors eager to prove their bravery.

Please help support the Lion Guardians program by donating here

Here is a recap of the 2011 Games

Here is a video from the 2010 Lion Guardians Games

Lion Guardians hard at work

We are getting close to the 2nd Annual Lion Guardian Games.  We have raised $505 of the $1,000 needed to cover the costs of the games (food, accommodation and prizes), but still need your help to raise the difference.  Please help us show the Lion Guardians our appreciation for their hard work over the past year.  We have had such exciting results this year (see our recent posts here and here) and we owe it all to them!

Donate $10 by texting BIGCATS to 85944 from your US mobile phone or make a contribution online.

Thanks!

Living With Lions, the parent organization of Lion Guardians, has several other projects operating in Kenya, in addition to Lion Guardians!  Please read LWL’s annual report, which we have just posted to our website, to learn more about these great projects!  And please remember that we rely on your support to finance these projects, so please support us by donating here.

Click here to go to Living With Lions Annual Reports

It was a remarkable year for Living with Lions, with conservation accomplishments in each project area which can be adapted for use in many other parts of Africa. In the Amboseli region, the drought of 2009 killed off 70-85% of lions’ wild prey, forcing them to turn to the remaining Maasai livestock, itself reduced by at least 60%. Starving lions started invading Maasai bomas to kill cattle, and in the first three months of 2010, 16 lions were speared or poisoned in the one small area which as yet had no Lion Guardians program; in the rest of the region, the Guardians stopped dozens of lion hunts, and none were killed.  This stunning success in protecting lions during a major crisis has shown the Guardians concept to be an extraordinarily effective lion conservation strategy for areas outside parks. To a biologist, an equally impressive development has been the Guardians’ efficacy at finding, identifying, and cataloguing the region’s remaining lions. Persecuted predators are nocturnal, very shy, and nearly impossible to count. Working with our biologists, the Guardians have identified essentially every lion in the region, documenting lengthy movements and very large home ranges. This is an unprecedented accomplishment, remarkable testimony to the field skills of the Lion Guardians and incredibly hard work by LWL biologists.

In the Mara, Sara Blackburn has demonstrated the accuracy and efficiency of her lion monitoring method that depends on training tourism guides and their guests in accurate lion identification. This year, she is expanding her coverage from 350 to over 1000 square kilometers of this critically important region.

In Laikipia, Alayne Cotterill has made great progress in her dissertation work to determine if lions can change their spatial and temporal use of the landscape to reduce conflict with people and livestock. Long time collaborator Michael Calvin has re-activated the lion tracking website he developed several years ago, which plots the details of GPS-collared lion movements on Google Earth, allowing anyone to see how our study animals are using the landscape: http://www.abycats.com/laikipialionmap/ and http://www.abycats.com/klplionmap.

As Project Administrator, Lisette Gelber has transformed LWL into a far more organized and efficient organization. In 2010 LWL became  formally incorporated in Kenya and in 2011 we will be incorporating as a US nonprofit.

We hope you will find the reports interesting, and welcome any questions or inquiries.

Best regards,

Dr. Laurence Frank, Founder and Director
Living With Lions

The beginning of 2010 marked an extremely difficult time for our Lion Guardians. First, a prolonged devastating drought wiped out over half of the herbivore population – both domestic and wild. Livestock, which are the backbone of the Maasai economy, were drastically reduced by both the drought and the subsequent diseases which affected the survivors once the rains did come. The lions fared quite well during the drought, as they didn’t even have to hunt for their food – wildebeest, zebra and other prey species were dropping dead everywhere from starvation. This widespread loss of wildlife brought about an imbalance between predators and plains game. The few remaining primary prey species that were strong enough to survive the drought left the area as soon as the rains came. And those that stayed were strong enough that lions found it hard to find them and bring them down. As a result, the Lions therefore targeted livestock, as they were much easier prey. The Maasai pastoralists meanwhile vigorously guarded their remaining livestock, each of which had become tenfold more valuable as a result in the drastic reduction in herd size; conflict was clearly inevitable. Our Lion Guardians found themselves with a dual mission – they had to protect livestock from being killed by lions as well as defend lions from being killed by Maasai Morans in retaliation.

Even though their physical and mental strengths were tested to the limit, our Lion Guardians performed extremely well in 2010! With the help of other stakeholders within the Amboseli ecosystem, the Lion Guardians managed to stop over 44 lion hunting parties, most of which would have resulted in lion deaths had they not been stopped. Also, the Lion Guardians helped find 4,808 of the 5,635 lost livestock reported to them, most of which would have been killed overnight in the bush by predators if not found…deaths which would have no doubt resulted in further retaliation by the pastoralists. This translate to an 85% success rate, an impressive figure by any standard! The Lion Guardians also helped fortify over 100 bomas visited by carnivores at night, part of our effort to increase communal tolerance towards lions. In addition to creating lion protection “buffer zones”, the Lion Guardians also help create conservation awareness while acting as teachers of better animal husbandry within their communities.

Another major highlights of 2010 is that, with the help of our donors, we were able expand our Lion Guardians’ coverage to southern Olgulului, a conflict-prone zone that saw tens of lions being killed in the start of 2010. We recruited 5 new Lion Guardians and since they have started, not one lion has been killed in this stretch of land that is reknown for lion killing.

Also in 2010, we successfuly held the first ever Lion Guardian Games. Click here to read about it and click here to see a video of the games’ highlights. And now, at the end of an extremely productive year, to show the Lion Guardians our appreciation of the hard work they have done, we are providing each Lion Guardian with a D.Light S 250 solar lantern/phone charger. They will be able to use their lanterns in their searches for lost livestock as well as to provide illumination in their homes at night – rather than having to use smoky paraffin lanterns.

Please help us cover this and other important project related expenses such as salaries, phone credit and fuel.  If each person that follows us via our blog or Facebook donated even  $10, we would be able to cover the annual salaries of 8 Lion Guardians!  Please help us to continue our work – your support makes the difference!  Click here to donate (make sure to specify Lion Guardians)!

We would like to take this opprtunity to wish all our friends a prosperous Happy New Year and we look forward to your continued support in 2011!

All the best from Eric and the Lion Guardians

We told you a while ago that with the help of Lion Guardians Mokoi and Kisimir we had finally found male lion Sikiria, who likes to wander far and wide. We were able to download his movements from his collar and we are pleased to tell you we now have the results mapped out for all to see!

Project biologist Stephanie Dolrenry has added Sikiria’s previous movements to the map so that you can see where he has been from September 2009 to the end of October 2010. And what a journey he has been on! He has visited 8 different Group Ranches and 2 countries!

It is amazing to see how far he has travelled, and it really shows you how our conservation efforts must be widespread in order to protect lions like Sikiria who live outside protected areas, in community lands.

So far the Lion Guardians cover three Group Ranches – Mbirikani, Eselenkei and Olgulului. With more funding we would like to expand the project to even more Group Ranches, and every single donation will bring us closer to this goal. And all you have to do is CLICK HERE! This link will take you to our partners Panthera who will pass on 100% of your donations to the Lion Guardians project. Please make sure you allocate your donation to us in the drop down menu.

Thank you very much from all the Lion Guardians who have been protecting Sikiria and the other lions that live in these conflict-prone community lands. Asante sana!

For the next 62 days, Panthera who support the work of the Lion Guardians, will bring attention to the plight of wild cats by showing a video on the billboard in Times Square! For the remaining days of this campaign, any donation you make to Panthera to save wild cats will be matched dollar for dollar, and we would like to encourage everyone to make a donation to Panthera during this time, and help them to support wild cat projects all over the world, like the Lion Guardians.

The video, which can be viewed by clicking here or by visiting Times Square, features photographs of lions by Philip Briggs who works with the Lion Guardians and lion monitoring in the Amboseli ecosystem. You can read more about the campaign here.

If any of our blog readers in New York see the Big Cats in the Big City feature up on the billboard please take a photo! We’d love to see what it looks like on the big screen!

Hello and thank you to all our blog readers and Wildlife Direct donors. This is the final day of making donations through Wildlife Direct, so please give generously! From 1^st April donations through this blog will be directed through our partners Panthera. Through them we will get the full 100% of your donations, which is fantastic news for the lions we are protecting in Maasailand.

Those of you with monthly donations will need to set them up  with Panthera instead – the change over will not be happening automatically, so please click here to visit Panthera’s site, allocate your donation to Lion Guardians, and continue to support the Lion Guardians in their work.

Tension is running very high on all three of our group ranches at the moment. The Lion Guardians are working as hard as they can to reduce human-wildlife conflict, but it is a very tense and difficult situation right now. We will bring you more news when we can – but it suffices to say that the Lion Guardians are under huge pressure at the moment, and are in desperate need of your continued support so that cubs like this (one of Nemasi’s cubs, photo taken in July 08)

…will have the chance to grow up like this (here he is a year later!)

Thank you for your support and donations, from all the Lion Guardians.

From 30^th March onwards, Wildlife Direct will no longer be accepting donations on behalf of the conservation groups that blog with them, like the Lion Guardians. But don’t worry! You will still be able to get all the latest news from the lions and their Guardians right here on the Lion Guardians Wildlife Direct blog, and you will also be able to support our work by donating too.

We will receive all donations made to Lion Guardians through Wildlife Direct up until the end of March BUT as of April 1^st, when you click on DONATE, you will be taken to Panthera’s website, who also accept donations on behalf of the Lion Guardians (as well as many other big cat conservation groups). The brilliant news is that 100% of the donation you make to the Lion Guardians through Panthera will go straight to us!

For those of you who make monthly donations to the Lion Guardians, your subscriptions will be cancelled on 30^th March and you will have to move these over to Panthera in order for us to continue to receive your support. We really need your continued support, so please please CLICK HERE, to start donating monthly to us through Panthera instead.

After April 1^st when you click on DONATE you will be directed to Panthera’s donate page. You will be given the option of choosing which project to support in the Allocation drop down menu – please choose the LION GUARDIANS option. Then just fill in the details and pay with a credit card as before. You can choose to make a one-off donation towards the Lion Guardians, or a monthly, quarterly or yearly donation (choose this from the drop down menu).

The only difference is that you won’t be able to see your donation on the sidebar of the blog. However you will get a confirmation email from Panthera, and please be assured that we will be getting 100% of your donation from them.

You can either choose to sponsor a particular item from the list on the blog, and make a donation for that amount, or choose any amount to donate. All amounts are in US dollars. If you are making a donation from outside of the US, visit this currency converter site to work out the exact amount in dollars that you wish to donate.

If you are already sponsoring a Lion Guardian we will keep a record of this and when you move your monthly donation over to Panthera your Guardian sponsorship will continue. If you are a new donor and would like to sponsor a Lion Guardian, please just make a comment on the blog telling us which Guardian you would like to sponsor.

We would like say a huge thank you to all our blog readers and donors, and to Panthera for their fantastic support, and would also like to encourage all our blog readers to visit their website http://www.panthera.org and have a look at all the cat programs and projects they work with around the world.

THANK YOU from all the Lion Guardians!

Pupils at a school in the UK were given a talk and slideshow about the Lion Guardians project, by Lion Guardians team members Amy and Philip. They told them about the problems that lions are facing in Maasailand, and also about the Maasai people, their way of life, and why there is conflict between the Maasai and carnivores.

The children were really interested in every aspect of the project from how the Lion Guardians track and monitor lions, to the Maasai clothes and houses, which are very different to those in England. Some of the children got to dress in Maasai clothes and learnt a little Swahili.

One pupil even had a go at jumping as high as a Maasai warrior! How do you think he did?

The children also joined in with singing a Maasai song and asked lots of very interesting questions, like ‘Do Maasai get arrested if they kill a lion?’ and ‘How many cows do each Maasai family own?’

They also wrote letters to say thank you for the presentations, and drew some fantastic pictures of lions and the Lion Guardians!

Perhaps we will be lucky enough for these school children to hold a fundraising cake sale for the Lion Guardians like the previous class did! Thanks for inviting us to the school. We hope you enjoyed it!