In the early hours of the 6th of July three very fatigued members of the Cambridge University Wildlife Conservation Society (CUWCS) and Cambridge University Expedition Society (CUEX) touched down in windy Nairobi to embark on the CUWCS-CUEX Kenya expedition 2017. Battling through tedious visa forms and fears of lost luggage the expedition members managed to fight their way out of Nairobi airport to meet their local guide and fourth member of the expedition. Pilling into a beat up four-by-four the full contingent of the CUWCS-CUEX Kenya expedition 2017 made their way to their beds for the night to catch a few hours’ sleep before starting their work in the savannas and villages of South Kenya.
The expedition team aims to develop a project to train pastoralist communities in the use of camera trap technology to reduce human-wildlife conflict in key wildlife migration corridors around Nairobi National Park. Such capacity building aims to allow communities to monitor predator movements into their land, allowing pre-emptive changes to livestock management regimes so as to reduce livestock losses to wildlife, and as a result reducing retaliatory killing of wildlife. By reducing such conflict this project will prevent loss of wildlife along key migration routes into Nairobi National Park allowing local wildlife populations to remain viable and hence the park to remain an effective conservation asset.
A pilot project with target communities was started by CUWCS in 2015 where a small number of camera traps were donated to communities following training. The results of this pilot project have been closely monitored over the last two years. Based on the very positive feedback from communities and local wildlife conservation organisations the CUWCS is pleased to be able to enact the project in full, starting larger scale camera trap implementation as of the 2017 expedition.
Over the coming three weeks the team of three University of Cambridge students (Tom Jameson, Charlie Jordan, and Andrew Dixon) along with support from local guide and University of Exeter PhD student, Enoch Mobisa, aim to develop this project whilst also gaining a first-hand insight into some of the conservation issues and solutions present in East Africa. Through these blog posts we hope to keep CUWCS members and supporters updated with how our project develops and our experiences of Kenya.
Check for updates regularly as we’ll be posting whenever we come across wild patches of Wi-Fi. For information on 2015’s pilot project see earlier posts below.