With the year coming to an end we wanted to round up a few of the biggest (or more accurately – our favourite) conservation news stories of 2019. 4. Missed Targets for 2020 For much of the last decade 2020 has been seen as a […]
Year: 2019
Day 16: Into The Woods
For our second day in the Maasai Mara, Enoch was keen to show us something a little different. When you picture Kenya, dense woodland is probably not the first thing that springs to mind, and yet Kenya’s forest ecosystems are as vital to the sustenance […]
Conservation Newsletter 17/11/19
Here’s some of our favourite recent conservation stories, carefully picked out by Johanna: New Conservation Projects Aimed at Amphibians and Reptiles in Wales Over £400,000 of National Lottery funding has been allocated to the charity ARC Trust to protect Welsh herpetofauna (amphibians and reptiles). The […]
Day 15: Where the Wild Things Are
Our first full day in the Maasai Mara began at 5:30am, because apparently that’s when the animals are most active. Weirdos. We yawned our way into the jeep, shivering in the chilly morning air and waiting for some of that famous African sun to show […]
Day 14: To the Mara!
In the early hours of Monday morning, on the fourteenth day of our trip, we left the relative comfort and familiarity of Kiboko Camp behind to set off on a week of travels to the Maasai Mara and beyond. Packing our bags and saying goodbye […]
Days 11-13: Farewell to Kiboko Camp (for now)
We spent the last few days of our second week conducting more interviews, monitoring the camera traps, and preparing for the next leg of our trip into Kenya’s Rift Valley region. Mandela had left earlier in the week to return to his job at a […]
Day 10: Lion Lights and Late Night Frights
We began our tenth day with a feast. Chris had been busy all morning whipping up a huge batch of mandazi, triangular pockets of fried pastry which taste of sugary warmth and are best eaten by the bucketload. The supply seemed to be limitless, and […]
Lights, camera… try again
We had something of a rocky start with our camera traps. On the morning of the wedding day, we made a foray out of the camp into the surrounding bushland, ready to get the cameras up and running so that we could start collecting data. […]
A week of community interviews
Having spent a few days getting to know the area and its wonderful cast of characters, the time had come to start conducting our interviews and learning about human-wildlife conflict. This issue, which forms a major part of Enoch’s research, is a significant challenge for […]
Day 5: Maasai Marriage
I had been feeling a little apprehensive about the community interviews that we were soon due to conduct. There was no doubt in my mind that everyone we spoke to would make us feel welcome, but I wanted to give them reason to like us, […]
Day 4: The Big Beasts of Nairobi
Today I kissed a giraffe, and I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed it. Remarkably, this wasn’t even the most exciting thing that happened on our fourth day in Kenya – the giraffe-smooching barely made the top five. We had a packed schedule, so […]
Day 3: Getting kitted up in Kitengela
I awoke on Thursday morning to find Impi grazing outside my window. Our eyes met in a moment of polite acknowledgement: she was having her breakfast, I was about to have mine. As we tucked into our omelettes and Impi munched on her grass, Enoch […]
Day 2: Welcome to Kiboko
My first night in Kenya certainly lived up to expectations – the whirring of mosquitoes sounded like it was coming from inside my skull, the local dogs barked with such gusto that I thought half the lions in Africa had descended on them, and I […]
Day 1: Here be lions (probably)
I hadn’t expected to see a zebra in the headlights within an hour of touching down in Nairobi – but, then again, I’m not sure what I should’ve been expecting, and our driver certainly seemed unfazed. Fortunately, so did the zebra. Eight hours ago, there […]