Land Use, Risk and Elephant Ecology in Laikipia District, Kenya
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Coexistence in a land use mosaic? Land use, risk and elephant ecology in Laikipia District, Kenya This dissertation is submitted to the University of Cambridge for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Max Graham King’s College November 2006 PREFACE This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text and acknowledgements. No part of this dissertation has been submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at any other University. The text does not exceed 80,000 words. Abstract This thesis is about the patterns, determinants and consequences of human-elephant interaction in Laikipia District in northern Kenya. Laikipia is located outside of formally protected areas, supports a range of land use types and harbours Kenya’s second largest elephant population comprised of over 3,000 animals. I use interdisciplinary methods and multiple scales of spatial analysis to examine elephant distribution, persistence and interactions with people in this human landscape. At a course scale, results from several data sources show that elephants occur across almost 50% of Laikipia District and, intriguingly, are relatively evenly distributed across locations under cultivation, settlement and livestock production. At a finer scale, however, results from over a 100 km of ground transects, show that the relative abundance of elephants varies in relation to specific forms of human activity, in particular the risk of mortality presented by human occupants to elephants. Elephant use of areas where they are not tolerated by local people, such as smallholder farms, is determined by human population density and distance from daytime refuges. Elephant use of smallholder farms increases with the proportion of land under smallholder production within an elephant range. Male elephants use areas where human occupants are elephant-intolerant, and/or present a threat of mortality, more than female elephants. Elephants use cover of darkness to exploit areas where they are not tolerated by local people. In addition, I show that elephants increase their speed of travel through such areas. I argue that these findings, together with some preliminary evidence for aggregation in response to risk, suggest that elephants demonstrate behavioural plasticity in response to risk and are resilient to human induced landscape change, to some degree. Contact with elephants among local people in Laikipia varies with patterns of resource use by different households. Negative attitudes towards elephants were, however, not shaped by the likelihood of contact with elephants but rather by negative experiences involving elephants, such as crop-raiding, and/or knowledge of incidents in which elephants had either injured or killed local people. A district-wide electrified fence is currently being constructed in Laikipia to mitigate human-elephant conflict, in particular the damage to crops and human fatalities caused by elephants. While electrified fences can impede elephant movement if well maintained and ‘enforced’, they are also beset with maintenance problems. In addition, electrified fences may reinforce perceptions of who owns elephants, which is shown to be a determinant of negative attitudes towards elephants in this study. Electrified fences may also contribute to the emergence of a perceived ‘elephant problem’ in Laikipia, with declines in woodland and some wildlife species. Therefore, other options for the mitigation of human-elephant conflict should be explored, alongside electrified fences. In this thesis, I discuss these other options, including affordable community-based elephant deterrents, land-use planning and the promotion of conservation-based benefit streams to local people that live with elephants. A combination of these methods could assist with the future conservation and management of elephants in Laikipia and beyond. Acknowledgements Thanks to Bill Adams and Phyllis Lee for making this journey possible and for sticking with me when I veered off the main road and into the woods! Their continued input, constructive debate and encouragement gave me focus when I most needed it. Thank you. I thank the Office of the President of the Republic of Kenya and the Kenya Wildlife Service for granting me permission to carry out this study. I am grateful to the landowners of Laikipia and the Laikipia Wildlife Forum for accommodating my research. Boniface Kiteme, the Director of the Centre for Training and Research in ASAL Development, in Nanyuki provided me with an office, administrative support and a political shield throughout my fieldwork. Thanks also to the rest of the CETRAD team for putting up with my incessant questions and impromptu muddy visits, especially Simon Mumuli, Boniface Mworia and Jacinta Muchugu. Human-elephant conflict data were collected by a team of hardworking ‘elephant scouts’, David Wanjau, Stephen Macharia, Onesmus Wambugu, Richard Ndirangu, Joseph Wahome, Thomas Kuntai, Samuel Tema, Peter Kiyaa, Issac Matunge, Charles Kinywa, Musa Chepkerio and Simon Waweru. Elephant scouts collected valuable data among angry people and angry elephants, no easy task. Amon Lekea, Paul Kariuki and Tobias Ochieng assisted with supervision of elephant scouts in the field. Lucy Chepkochei and Carol Muriuki assisted with entering piles of scout data into an access database. Supervision of scouts would not have been possible without the generous provision of a motorbike by the Laikipia Wildlife Forum. Benedikt Notter, a Swiss volunteer with CETRAD, provided invaluable advice with the GIS based analysis presented in chapter six and the use of ArcGIS software, more generally. For the questionnaire survey and informal interviews, Amon Lekea, Samuel Tema, Francis Ngilisho, Steven Macharia and Carol Muriuki assisted in data collection. Paul Kariuki, Carol Muriuki and Lucy Chepkochei assisted with entering questionnaires into SPSS and transcribing interviews. For the transect surveys, I would like to acknowledge the help of Justine Cordingley, Julia Latham, Richard Thimbleby and Tobias Ochieng, all of whom volunteered to assist me with counting dung in tough terrain under a hot sun. Laban Odouri, from the Department of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing, helped with the identification of plant species in the field. I am indebted to Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants for the enormous support he provided with the design and implementation of the GPS tracking component of this thesis and for his ideas and enthusiasm, generally. David Daballen, Daniel Lentipo, Ian Craig, Richard Moller, Michael Dyer, Claus Mortenson, Zahoor Kashmiri, Phil Mathews, Simon Everett and Alan Binks provided me with logistical support during elephant collaring operations. David Gachuche gave much needed technical support with elephant tracking software. Henry and Jessica Henley and Michael and Nicky Dyer provided me with a home from home and emotional sustenance during my fieldwork in Kenya. Anne Powys helped me to forget I had a home from which I had come from altogether! It is her love and patience, given unconditionally and sometimes over the most difficult of times, that has been the single greatest source of support to me while writing this thesis. Thank you AP. This study was financed primarily through an ESRC-NERC interdisciplinary studentship. Ancillary support for fieldwork was provided by the Smuts Memorial Fund and King’s College. The elephant scout programme was financed with generous support from CETRAD through a Swiss Government ESAPP grant. In 2004 Save the Elephants provided me with a living allowance and financed the GPS tracking component of my fieldwork through grants from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Safaricom Foundation. The British Institute of East Africa provided logistical support for the transect survey and a grant for procuring aerial survey data. Last but not least I would like to thank my family for enduring my physical and mental absence with patience, support and love. Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………… 1 1.1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………….. 2 1.2. Research questions…………………………………………………………………... 5 1.2.1. Question 1…………………………………………………………….. 5 1.2.2. Question 2……………………………………………………………... 5 1.2.3. Question 3……………………………………………………………... 6 1.3 Introduction to Laikipia……………………………………………………………… 7 1.3.1. Geography…………………………………………………………….. 7 1.3.2. History………………………………………………………………...11 1.4 Thesis structure…………………………………………………………………...… 18 1.4.1. The challenge of complexity………………………………………… 18 1.4.2. Ecological patterns and land use…………………………………….. 21 1.4.3. Human livelihoods, land management and perceptions of elephants.. 24 Chapter 2. Human-elephant conflict and the persistence of large mammals……... 27 2.1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 28 2.2. Elephants and ivory………………………………………………………………… 29 2.3. Land use change, people and elephant populations………………………………... 32 2.3.1. The ‘elephant problem’……………………………………………… 33 2.3.2. People and elephants in competition………………………………… 35 2.4. Eggs and baskets: habitat fragmentation and wildlife persistence…………………. 36 2.4.1. Metapopulations……………………………………………………... 38 2.4.2. Wildlife corridors……………………………………………………. 40 2.4.3. Nature fights back: Resilience among large mammals……………… 42 2.4.4. Big movers: Elephant movement across time and space……………. 44 2.5. Human-wildlife conflict……………………………………………………………. 46 2.5.1. Measuring vulnerability……………………………………………... 47