Lion Guardians

Category: Lion Guardians work | Date: Sep 26 2008 | By: lionguardians

After our busy time filming with the BBC, which I will write more about soon, the Lion Guardians are full of activity yet again. They are passing on their expertise to some lion scouts from another ranch called Kuku. These lion scouts have come over to learn how to do the kind of work that we do, so they can help conserve carnivores on their ranch.

This morning Lion Guardians Koikai and Mokoi showed them how to read and write GPS coordinates, so that when they find a lion, a kill or anything of interest they can mark the location. In the afternoon they showed them how to track lions. I hope this will make an impact on the Maasailand lion population and the community in general. It will also be really useful for us, so that when any of our collared lions move beyond the borders of our ranch the Kuku scouts can help us to track them.

Koikai is one of the most experienced and sharpest of the Lion Guardians. That is why we had to pick him to train the lion scouts from Kuku. Mokoi is the oldest Guardian and with his expertise in handling issues with young people I decided to ask him to come too and help Koikai with the training.

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Tags: Kenya, lion, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, Maasai, masai, tracking

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Category: Meet the lions, lion research fieldwork | Date: Jul 09 2008 | By: lionguardians

We are very excited about a new website that has just been launched by the Kilimanjaro Lion Conservation Project, which shows exactly where one of our collared lions Ndelie has been in the previous few days.

Ndelie’s collar transmits GPS signals to a satellite, which then sends this information on his location to the site! You can look at the interactive map to see where he has been, and you can also see where our camp is, and a few of the Lion Guardians’ bomas. Please take a look and explore the new site. It’s really exciting! Here is the link:

http://www.abycats.com/maps/catmap.html

This is the lion Ndelie, with Lion Guardian Melubo, when he was collared. His name means cooking pot in Maasai. He is called this because when the Lion Guardians helped to collar him they thought his paws were as large as cooking pots!

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Tags: Kenya, lion, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, Maasai, masai, ndelie, tracking, website

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Category: Lion Guardians work | Date: Jun 28 2008 | By: lionguardians

We are still training up the new Lion Guardian Solonka, to make sure he is proficient in all the different skills he needs. Although most Maasai murrans are very used to identifying the tracks of different animals, we need to make sure that new Lion Guardians are able to give us accurate and detailed information about the tracks that they see. It is not all that common for them to actually see the lions, as they are always on foot, so it is really important that any information we get about them from their tracks is accurate.

By looking at tracks they try to find out what the animals were, which direction they were going in, how many there were, when they were there, whether there were any young, and perhaps even the sex and approximate age of animals.

Here are Lion Guardians Lenkina and Koikai talking to new Lion Guardian Solonka about tracking, and asking him to identify some tracks that he finds.

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Category: Lion Guardians work, ways you can help | Date: Jun 16 2008 | By: lionguardians

I thought I would tell you a bit more about the news story that has been on the internet and in a lot of the newspapers worldwide recently. The story is about the crisis in lion numbers, especially around Amboseli National Park, near where the Lion Guardians program is located.

It explains that big cats are declining at an alarming rate and may even be extinct in the region within a few years. There may be less than a hundred lions in the area. The main cause of their drastic decline is that the lions have been hunted by the Maasai because of the conflict between the lions and their cattle.

The story talks about the Lion Guardians program and how we employ Maasai murrans, who used to hunt lions themselves, but are now helping to conserve them. The Guardians track collared lions, and warn herders if they are grazing their livestock in an area close to where a lion has been spotted.

They also help herders make their bomas stronger so that predators find it harder to get in, and help them to find lost livestock, as well as educating their communities about how important it is to have carvnivores around. One of their main and most important tasks is to persuade their contemporaries not to hunt lions.

The National Geographic has started a new fund to raise money for big cats, which we hope will help conserve lions in the area. But the Lion Guardians also need your donations to allow us to continue with our important work with the local community.

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Tags: conflict, Kenya, lion, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, Maasai, masai, natinal geographic, news, tracking

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Category: Lion Guardians work | Date: Jun 15 2008 | By: lionguardians

All Lion Guardians have got their jobs by first volunteering for us for at least a month, sometimes for as long as three months. This shows us that they are committed to conserving lions, and we know that they will work hard to do this.

We have a new volunteer called Solonka working in the Ol Donyo Wuas area. There are lots of skills that the new Lion Guardian needs to learn. We went out with Solonka and Lion Guardians Lenkina and Koikai to train him in some of the necessary Lion Guardian skills.

The first new skill we taught him is how to track a collared lion. Here Koikai and Lenkina show him how to use radio telemetry to locate a lion.

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Category: lion research fieldwork | Date: May 24 2008 | By: lionguardians

A few days ago we went out to track lions with two of the Lion Guardians Olubi and Mokoi. We drove for hours, regularly stopping to try and pick up radio signals from the roof of the car. We were trying to find the large pride of 10 lions (with collared lion Nempakai) that we had seen last week. But despite our best efforts, we couldn’t locate them.

We even went all the way to this high point, Loosikitok, where you can look out over the group ranch, and all the way across to Amboseli National Park, and still couldn’t pick up a signal. This is maybe where the pride has headed back to for the moment.

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Tags: Kenya, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, Maasai, masai, tracking

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