The vultures feasting on an elephant carcass fly away and perch on a nearby tree as I approach the animal remains with two rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service at Amboseli National Park.
The eight-year-old female elephant died five days earlier. She is one of 20 elephants that has died in suspicious circumstances since June, the start of the high season for one of southern Kenya’s leading tourist attractions.
Amboseli National Park is a relatively small, unfenced 392sq km parcel of land managed by the state through its wildlife service. The park sits within the wider 8,000sq km Amboseli ecosystem, which straddles Kenya’s border with Tanzania.
While driving through the communal conservation area outside the park, we greet a local Maasai patrolling the land on foot. For centuries, local Maasai grazed their cattle and sheep alongside herds of wildebeest and elephants whose numbers flourished, as eating wild game was taboo for the Maasai.
But during the 20th century, the international ivory trade encouraged by the British colonial regime in Kenya decimated the local elephant population.
Today, a partnership between the wildlife service and the local Maasai has drastically reduced poaching in Amboseli and helped revive the local elephant population to more than 2,000.
We drive past zebras and giraffes migrating from dryer areas towards the springs and watering holes in the national park on the way to inspect the remains of another elephant. This 12-year-old female elephant died three weeks earlier in the conservation area outside the park. Ranger Josphat Wangige says she was found dead beside her surviving one-week old elephant calf, which was adopted by another herd.
At the wildlife service offices inside the park, Gilbert Rop, assistant director for the Amboseli ecosystem, says almost 10 more elephants were lost within two weeks of the first death on June 24th last.
Seven of the dead elephants belonged to a single family grazing outside the park near Kimana, a major agricultural hub in Amboseli which is known for producing tomatoes, onions and beans. After this cluster of deaths, the wildlife service began to suspect that the elephants may have been poisoned.
The wildlife service conducted postmortems on 10 of the elephant carcasses and sent samples to a laboratory at the University of Nairobi.
“Six out of 10 samples screened tested positive for cyanide,” says Rop.
Other remains were too decomposed or scavenged to establish a cause of death.
Cyanide is a potent toxin that stops the body from effectively absorbing oxygen. According to rangers, the affected elephants in Amboseli first fell behind their herds as they became increasingly breathless. Eventually they collapsed on the ground, often convulsing for several days or lying semi-paralysed.
Outside of mining, cyanide’s use is heavily restricted in Kenya and local farmers have denied using agricultural products with cyanide.
“This situation is a new phenomenon,” says Rop. “I’ve been working for KWS for the past 18 years, and this incident is the first we have ever recorded as connected to elephant poisoning.”
Four members of the local farming community in Amboseli have been charged with offences related to the elephant deaths and released on bail pending prosecution.
Rop says those charged had moved to the Amboseli region from other parts of Kenya in recent years. In a media interview in September, the governor of Kajiado county, Joseph Ole Lenku, rejected claims that cyanide was responsible for the elephant deaths, dismissing the wildlife service’s preliminary findings as “completely false and misplaced”.
Instead, Lenku claimed the elephants could have died after consuming a type of grass that had grown excessively following unusually heavy rains.
Rop maintains that as no other wildlife died in similar clusters or areas, it is more likely that the elephants were poisoned, possibly in response to their destruction of farmland.
The elephant deaths come at a sensitive time for the state-run Amboseli National Park and Kajiado County, which was due to take control of the park. The transfer was halted after a legal petition argued that the transfer violated the Kenyan constitution and placed a national resource at risk.
The African Wildlife Foundation supported the return of Amboseli to local control and its chief executive, Kaddu Sebunya, has stated: “Many Africans checked out of conservation because they didn’t see this sector as benefiting them.”
But others questioned Kajiado County’s ability to manage conservation efforts, with pressure on land resources in the Amboseli ecosystem leading to more frequent conflict between humans and wildlife.
Since the park opened in 1974, the human population of Kajiado County has increased 12-fold to 1.2 million. The Kenyan government has encouraged seminomadic Maasai communities to settle; while farmers from other areas of Kenya have moved to Amboseli to avail of cheaper land and plentiful water supplies.
This has decreased communal grazing land and disrupted the traditional migratory paths of wildlife, with bush land increasingly converted for growing crops such as watermelons and tomatoes, which attract elephants.
“What became very clear is that this ecosystem, which was initially elephant corridors, is now paving way for agriculture, which is an incompatible land-use practice,” says Rop.
“That is the source of conflicts, because in this region we record very high human/wildlife conflicts, especially crop destruction.”
The Amboseli Ecosystem Trust estimates that 15-20 people are killed every year by local wildlife; while the environmental society Nature Kenya says income from tourism often does not properly compensate local communities from the damage caused by wildlife such as elephants.
A new government compensation regime provides payments of up to €33,650 for death, injury and property loss due to wildlife. Rop says that 20 years ago, elephants in Nairobi National Park – some 200km away – used to migrate to Amboseli. Now, much of the land south of Nairobi has been fenced off and used for human settlement and industry.
“That corridor has been compromised completely,” says Rop. “And we are nearly losing this corridor.”
