Lion Guardians

The Lion Guardians would like to say a very big THANK YOU and SEASON’S GREETINGS to all their fantastic blog readers! It has been a very busy but extremely successful year, with the expansion of the project to two more ranches in the Amboseli ecosystem, and the employment and training of 15 new Lion Guardians!

Most importantly there were NO LIONS KILLED in the areas where the Lion Guardians work! We are extremely very grateful to the communities of Mbirikani, Eselenkei and Oglulului, for working with us, and for ensuring that no lions are killed on their ranches, despite the devastating drought they have faced. Our annual report will be available for you to read after the Lion Guardian Games in early January.

We are grateful to each and every one of you that has donated to us, especially those who helped us raise the money for the Lion Guardian Games which we are now preparing for!

We would like to in particular thank our Lion Guardians Sponsors, who by making a monthly donation, are paying for the wages and all costs associated with one of our Lion Guardians.

Thank you to:

Anne C
Brenton H
Katherine J
Jia L
Richard V
Scott R
Susan C

As well as our fabulous Lion Guardian sponsors we would also like to thank Delineations, Hashi H. Lois C, Erin A, Adrienne H, Jacqueline G, Rachel W, Pirjo I, Eleanor T, Aleta W, Anila J, Ulrika E, Jessica F, Mary M, Charisse V, Ben N, Robert W and David S who have all donated in December.

THANK YOU TO ALL OUR FANTASTIC SUPPROTERS! We hope you have a wonderful holiday!

The Lion Guardians would like to thank each and every one of you that has donated on our blog recently. We are sending out our deepest gratitude to:

Aleta W
Amy B
Anne C
Black C
Brenton H
Bruce L
Cindy C
Delineations (Kate A!)
Hashi H
Jacqueline H
Jessica F
John R
Joyce N
Katherine J
Lois C
Michael L
Pirjo I
Richard V
Ruth K
Samantha V
Sarah A
Sauwah T
Scott R
Sharon M
Sharon S
Sheri H
Susan C

What a long list of wonderful people who are all helping to pay the wages of the Lion Guardians, and keep this project running. The Lion Guardians on all 3 ranches are phoning in their lion reports daily, and helping their communities by finding lost livestock (Mokoi found over 40 lost goats recently!) and calming angry herders whose animals have been attacked by predators.

In this way, the Guardians are protecting the remaining lions, like the one in the photo above, in unprotected Maasai land outside national parks here in Southern Kenya.

Please help us by telling your friends about the Lion Guardians project, so they too can help conserve lions. It might take 5 minutes to send the link http://lionguardians.wildlifedirect.org to 10 of your friends, and it takes even less time to make a donation!  

THANK YOU to all of you for reading and supporting our work!

Thank you so much for your purchase of Lion Guardians Christmas cards! So that we have your email addresses, and can email you to find out what address to send the cards to, please make a comment on the blog. This is the only way we can get your contact details, as we do not have access to any of the information regarding your online donations!Thank you very much, from the Lion Guardians team!

The Lion Guardins would like to thank everyone who has supported us recently.

Thank you to: Katherine J, Samantha V, Scott R, Richard V, Black C, Lois C, Hashi H, Anne C, Diane K, Jessica F, Mary P, Pirjo I, Mary H, Shannon C, The F, Angela G, Kerryn W, Mike S, Sauwah T, Jason L, Ana L, Sheri H and Angela D. Here are the Mbirikani Lion Guardians at our last monthly meeting, who would all like to extend their thanks to you.

Your support is invaluable. We use the money donated through this blog to pay the Guardians’ wages, as well as for all the essential items that are used by them on a daily basis, like paper and pens so they can fill in their data forms, phone credit so they can call camp with their lion reports and all the other monthly costs that enable us to run the project effectively. Thank you so much for helping us to keep the Lion Guardians project running.

With the expansion of the project on to the new ranch Eselenkei, we have also been able to use your donations to pay for equipment for the new Guardians – backpacks to carry their equipment in, GPS devices, and receivers and aerials for tracking collared lions. With your donations you are helping the survival of cubs like these two, who are in Nempakai’s pride.

Now plans are underway to start the Lion Guardians program on Olgulului Group Ranch, another neighbouring ranch in the Amboseli-Tsavo ecosystem. With this step we will be expanding the project to an area which borders Amboseli National Park, and therefore has very high human wildlife conflict.

Please continue with your generous donations, so that we can make a difference to the lions throughout the whole ecosystem. There is no point conserving lions in one ranch if they might be killed when they wander into a neighbouring area!

Than you so much for your help!

Once again the UK tourist attraction and zoo, Africa Alive have done an amazing job, and collected the huge sum of $4731 for the Lion Guardians! What fantastic news! We are thrilled that they have managed to raise this amount for us, which will help the project considerably, especially as we now expand the program to our neighbouring ranches Eselenkei and Olgulului.

As you may remember, Africa Alive have helped us with a donation in the past and we are extremely grateful that they are still supporting us.

We have now successfully expanded the project to Eselenkei Group Ranch, but we can’t wait to be able to start it up in Olgulului too. This area is still struggling with human wildlife conflict, especially during this severe drought, and though the Maasai Preservation Trust have recently started their predator compensation scheme there, we still need to get the Lion Guardians program up and running.

This donation will go a long way towards some of our start up costs for this expansion, including purchasing new equipment for the Guardians like GPS, mobile phones and telemetry receivers, as well as basics like pens, paper and backpacks.

Thank you Africa Alive, and everyone who donated money towards the project at the fundraising events!

In April we were very kindly donated a Wingscapes bird camera trap by Sheri and Owen Hogle from the Wild Bird Center in Utah, which gave us some wonderful photos of birds during the day. But we were even more excited when they told us they were also sending a Bushnell Trail Sentry camera trap which can be used at night! This means we can also see what carnivores are out here, and hopefully try and identify some lions.

To get started we put the camera up 5 minutes walk from our camp, and tied up some bait that we had earlier got to use with lions. We got some amazing results! Here are some of the highlights of our first three nights with the camera trap up.

Spotted hyenas were our most common visitor, with over 200 photos of them over the three nights!

We also had visits from black-backed jackals…

a white-tailed mongoose….

an elephant….

and even a serval cat, which came back two nights in a row!

Our photos on the third night were finally put to an end when an inquisitive animal covered the lens in a rather dirty mess! Unfortunately the camera didn’t pick up the culprit but we are guessing it was a spotted hyena!

This has now been cleaned off, ready for another night of investigations! Now that we have a better understanding of the camera we are going to put it up near to some fresh lion tracks, or hopefully a fresh lion kill, to try to get some photos of lions. We’ll keep you posted with all our results from the camera trap. Thank you once again Sheri and Owen!

Thank you to all our donors who have been so generous recently: Anne C, Lois C, Richard V, Black C, Brian M, Scott R, Cass N, Samantha V, Katherine J, Aleta W, Hashi H, Jia L, Kathleen W, Pirjo I, Jeremy W, Susan S, Jessica F and Loki Q. You have all helped the Lion Guardians with their work conserving our wild Maasailand lions in this last month, and we are all very grateful to you.

This monthly meeting where all the Lion Guardians get together to discuss their work, we were also able to give them a camera to use that had been donated by Sheri and Owen Hogle. Here is one of the photos they took of Lion Guardian Mokoi.

And here are some photos we got from the bird camera trap that was also donated to us by Sheri and Owen. Can you ID any of these birds that the camera picked up?

And here is another example of the variety of wildlife that we find at our camp. Can anyone identify this beautiful green snake?

Today we were very pleased to receive a great gift from our blog readers Sheri and Owen from the Wild Bird Center in Utah, who have donated a digital camera and a camera trap to the Lion Guardians!

Here is the first photo taken with our new camera, of two bird’s nests in our camp.

And here is the camera trap in action! We have set it up on the ground to try and get our first shots of birds, before we progress to trying for lions! We’ll show you the results soon!

We would also like to thank Anne C for sponsoring Lion Guardian Koikai, who is extremely excited and pleased with this fantastic news.

Thank you from all of us here in Kenya.

Yesterday and today the work of Living with Lions features on Alex Chadwick’s Day to Day radio program, which airs in the US. Alex came to visit us back in June and we told him all about the critical decline in lion populations outside national parks in Kenya and showed him what Living with Lions and the Lion Guardians are doing to save them.

If you have missed it you can listen online by clicking here.

Please tell us what you think of the program – and tell all your friends to listen too. The more people that hear about our work, the more likely we are to get enough donations to keep it running! THANK YOU from all the Lion Guardians, and the Maasailand lions!

Thank you so much for your donations over the last month. I am especially glad to see we have some new donors on the site. Thank you all for reading the blog and supporting our work. Here is a photo of the plains near to our camp, where the Lion Guardians located one of our collared lions Nemasi recently.

We couldn’t continue to help the lions and the communities here without you, so please carry on reading our news, tell your friends about the Lion Guardians and donate to us if you can. Here is Nemasi, with one of her three cubs.

Our thanks go out to Black C, Loki Q, Anna M, Tanya D, Pirjo I, Lisa R, Hashi H, Jia L, Deb O, Susan A, Eric B, Evan B, Micheal B, Louis B, Richard G and Richard V, who have all made donations to us in October.