Of drought, lions and a late-falling rain - this is Amboseli long, rain

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Of drought, lions and a late-falling rain - this is Amboseli
AMBOSELI, Kenya - The drought was intense. Persistent. It had dragged on for 18 months, or longer. No one knew how long. The Maasai herders had lost track of time. The seasons blurred together under the equatorial sun, forming an endless haze of sweltering days and scorched nights. The long rains had failed. The short rains failed after that. The long rains failed again. Hardly anyone could remember the feel of rain on their skin.


The lions were a growing problem, a Maasai herder told me. So many prey animals had died in the park. Wildebeest. Zebras. Impala. Gazelles. Elephants. By the hundreds - thousands, possibly, who knew? The lions gorged on what was left of their remains, then turned to Maasai cattle in surrounding bomas. The drought had turned into a good season for the lions.


The Maasai were hurting. Their cattle had died off in unheard-of numbers - by 80 per cent, according to some official estimates.


There had been droughts before, the herder said, but none like this. His grandfather had lived through the Big Dry of the 1950s. This was worse, he said.


In a good year, between 300 and 400 millimetres of rain falls on Amboseli’s parched plain. By December 2009, barely 10 millimetres had fallen in the previous 12 months. Mt. Kilimanjaro, the lonely, snow-capped sentinel that rises some 5,900 metres above Amboseli’s plain, glowered in sullen, burnt silence. The famous glacier - one of the most photographed and visually recognizable glaciers on the planet - was a mere trace of its former self, barely visible through the heavy heat haze.


Amboseli’s name derives from the Maasai word ‘empusel,’ for the fine layer of grey, saline ash that covered Amboseli’s plain during the now-extinct volcano’s formation some two million years ago. "How can such large numbers of game live in this extraordinary desert?" Joseph Thomson, one of the earliest Europeans to explore Maasailand, wrote in 1883.


It’s the eternal question of life on these alluvial floodplains. Then, as now, Amboseli’s ever-changing maze of channels, marshes and streams is fed by the run-off from Kilimanjaro’s glacial cap, in the form of springs and melting snow. The run-off from the mountain’s shrinking glaciers makes it possible for the swamps and dense stands of acacia woodland and umbrella thorns to cling to life, despite the arid, semi-desert flatlands that surround them.


Amboseli’s austere yet evocative setting would inevitably lead to the establishment of one of East Africa’s most idyllic and famous national parks. The British colonial administration declared Amboseli "a protected game reserve" in 1899, but it wasn’t until 1974, under a recently independent Kenya, that Amboseli was officially gazetted as a national park. At just 390 square kilometres, Amboseli is one of Africa’s smaller national parks, but it is one of the continent’s most famous. Amboseli provided the setting for Ernest Hemingway’s 1961 collection of short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and his 1935 travelogue The Green Hills of Africa. Mt. Kilimanjaro itself lies across the border, in neighbouring Tanzania, but it is from Amboseli that the iconic, all-defining image of wild Africa - an elephant, framed by Kilimanjaro looming in the background - has burned itself into the popular consciousness.


Today, though, it was the same fine dust that gave Amboseli its name that was proving to be its undoing. The Maasai, long known for their self-reliance, were being forced to turn to food aid, a terrible indignity for such a proud people.


It was late on a December afternoon, in sweltering heat and clouds of dust, as I passed into Amboseli through the park’s western gate, at Namanga. I was struck by the difference a single year can make. I had visited Amboseli the previous December, almost to the day, looking for what most first-time visitors to East Africa look for: the opportunity to see and, with luck, photograph the so-called Big Five: elephant, rhino, lion, leopard and buffalo in their natural environment, with Mt. Kilimanjaro looming as the picturesque, ever-present backdrop.


Amboseli was dry the previous year, too, but not like this. On that occasion, Amboseli had proven to be a photographer’s paradise, where the dust kicked up by the hoofs of countless ungulates refracted the rays of the day’s dying sun into myriad shades of red-orange, tawny yellow and ochre. The previous year, I had seen elephants in huge numbers. Giraffes, too. Hippos, zebras, hyenas, lions - everything one associates with Africa. Everything the glossy tourist brochures promise.


This time, though, it had changed. The scene was sadder, more desperate. Where before there had been a single dirt track, now there was an endless flat plain of what looked like powdered chalk, criss-crossed as far as the eye could see with the tire tracks of 4x4s, heavy trucks, Land Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers. Amboseli’s western approach resembled a salt pan at the bottom of a dry lake bed. No longer the shortgrass savannah of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, but more like a nightmarish vision from Dante’s Inferno.


"What happened here?" I said, when at last I arrived at Ol Tukai lodge, a dusty but comfortable safari camp in the heart of Amboseli’s diminished marsh lands.


A field worker with the Amboseli Elephant Research Project - one of the most scientifically respected elephant study groups in the world, thanks to the efforts of pioneering researchers Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole - shook his head and said, simply, "It’s the drought."


The mountain causes a rain shadow, even in good years, he explained.


"But when there’s no rain to begin with. . ." His voice trailed off.


One of Africa’s bigger, more pleasant surprises is how quickly blighted land can recover, given time, patience, a little care and a lot of luck.


My Luo companion and guide for the month, Oscar Nyadimo, knew there was one area of the park where the animals would almost always find water. Nyadimo had been my eyes and ears a year earlier. Nyadimo’s family hails from the region around Lake Victoria that lays claim to being the home of U.S. President Barack Obama’s paternal ancestors. We hit it off. I decided I would retrace my steps, with Nyadimo as my eyes and ears once again.


Nyadimo was downcast by what had happened during the intervening weeks and months, but not depressed. The drought was bad, he said, but there was reason for hope.

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In times of drought, Amboseli’s prey animals - wildebeest, zebras and gazelles - would migrate to a hidden corner of Amboseli known for its permanent grass, when times got desperate, Nyadimo explained.


Only, this time, their secret garden failed them. Hundreds of wildebeest and zebras - perhaps thousands - had reached the hidden plain, seen there was nothing there to sustain them, and simply gave up. They stood there and died - in the hundreds.


Nyadimo offered to take me there, mere days after my return. Out of curiosity, and perhaps not believing such a strange thing could happen - a secret garden? a mass death? - I agreed.


The killing field was exactly as Nyadimo had described it. The stench was difficult to describe, even though most of these animals had died weeks, if not months, earlier. The lions had picked over their remains, followed by the hyenas, but enough traces of their carcasses were left - bone, horn, torn patches of skin and hide - to know that something terrible had happened here.


We drove back to the lodge in silence. It was Christmas Eve and Ol Tukai was half-empty - the twin result of the economic meltdown in northern Europe markets and downbeat publicity about the drought - but there was a noticeable, and yet hard-to-define sense of something different in the air.


A subtle change in air pressure, perhaps. A lone cloud on thehorizon. A small herd of elephants strolled into the park from the north, in single file, barely visible against the haze cast off from the giant mountain, seemingly headed for the edge of the abyss. The elephants, too, sensed something.


They had left the park, months earlier, by the hundreds. They had crossed the open border into Tanzania and foraged up Kilimanjaro’s lower slopes, looking for greener pastures. There had been trouble. Kilimanjaro’s lower slopes are checkered with agricultural farms, where homesteaders, villagers and communal farmers struggle to make a meagre living off the land.


Elephants and humans don’t mix, especially during times of drought. When an elephant wanders into a village, often at night, it’s an emergency. Elephants can turn murderous, if provoked, but humans have guns, and wire snares. Elephants are vulnerable to poaching, even inside protected areas like national parks. The ivory trade, virtually banned by international law, flourishes on the black market. To an impoverished landholder, an elephant can represent a year’s earnings.


Elephants are not wanted - except where tourists are willing to pay to see them. A healthy, sustainable elephant population is critical to the survival of parks like Amboseli, Tsavo and their more famous, glamorous cousins, Maasai Mara and Serengeti.


Rain is the trigger for East Africa’s vast wildlife migrations, and wild animals seem to have an uncanny sense of when and where the rains are coming, in years when the rain doesn’t fail altogether.


On this late December afternoon, the elephants were moving onto ground that hadn’t seen rain for months, but they seemed to know something that scientists, climatologists and visiting tourists didn’t.


On this day, it began with a dust storm. An angry red cloud swept in off the mountain, followed by dark layers of brown, grey and black. In seconds, Kilimanjaro vanished in the storm - the world’s biggest free-standing mountain paling into insignificance. A lone bull elephant made its way toward me, at first a tiny speck against an angry red sea, and then a looming grey shadow. The wind tore at my camera, and then I felt the soggy wet splash of a rain drop the size of a hailstone, and as warm as bathwater. And then another . . . and another.


The rain came, a rain storm so violent that -_within moments, it seemed - the dry, parched earth was a fast-moving lake bed of shallow water. A herd of buffalo, animals ordinarily in a semi-permanent state of sullen belligerence - Hemingway described them as Africa’s most dangerous animal - horned their way across what remained of the muddy track, now a raging torrent. The rain had been a long time coming, and the buffalo weren’t about to let a 4x4 slow them down. Somewhere close and yet far away, the elephants trumpeted and, to my eyes, seemed to frolic with delight in the rain. The drought had ended.


It rained for three days and three nights, at times without stopping. It rained so hard that the dirt road linking Amboseli with Tsavo West was washed out in a matter of mere hours. The regularly scheduled armed convoys that shepherd visitors from one park to the other - armed because of a spate of bandit attacks several years ago - were forced to detour north over mile after mile of dirt track to the relatively smooth tarmac of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, adding several hours to what would ordinarily be a two-hour jaunt through the Chyulu Hills.


Overnight, it seemed, a landscape of stark desolation gave way to a carpet of green. Africa’s shortgrass plains are home to a hardy seed that hibernates through drought, invisible in the dust, and springs to life at the first hint of rain.


In time, the elephants returned from the mountain. Amboseli’s elephant population had swelled to nearly 1,000 from several hundred over the previous half century, but 26 years of drought had taken its toll.


Nyadimo and I watched a lone bull work his way through the marsh reeds, his shoulders protruding through what, on a healthy elephant, would normally be a thick hide of muscle and bone. The elephant looked weak, but Nyadimo said the mere fact that it had survived was a good sign.


"If an elephant has lived through this," Nyadimo explained, "it is very strong. It has survived the worst."


Sustainable wildlife management is an ever-changing, ongoing process. Mindful that it was only a matter of time before Amboseli’s lions turned to killing cattle again, the Kenya Wildlife Service - Kenya’s government-run management agency - organized a relocation of more than 7,000 zebras and wildebeests from other parks, less affected by the drought, into stricken Amboseli.


The massive operation was covered extensively by the media, as part of Kenya’s effort to restore the parks’ predator-prey balance.


A year later, the Maasai cattle are recovering. The grass is green again. Elephants once again stand against the shadow of Africa’s biggest mountain. Tourists areonce again visiting Amboseli.
The circle of life goes on.

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A  lion couple on alert.