Rare black leopard caught on camera in Kenya. So, who deserves the credit?

February 16, 2019

Who was the first person to reach the summit of Mt. Everest? History records that it was Sir Edmund Hillary, on May 29, 1953, but purists have always wondered if his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, was the first to actually set foot on the summit. Hillary addressed this issue directly in an interview with National Geographic Adventurer contributing editor David Roberts in April, 2003, in a story titled “50 Years on Everest.”

“When we came out toward Kathmandu, there was a very strong political feeling, particularly among the Indian and Nepalese press, who very much wanted to be assured that Tenzing was first,” Sir Edmund recalled. “That would indicate that Nepalese and Indian climbers were at least as good as foreign climbers. We felt quite uncomfortable with this at the time. John Hunt, Tenzing, and I had a little meeting. We agreed not to tell who stepped on the summit first.

“To a mountaineer, it’s of no great consequence who actually sets foot first. Often the one who puts more into the climb steps back and lets his partner stand on top first.”

You may be wondering what the story of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on Mt. Everest has to do with a series of stunning photos published in the past 10 days of a rare black leopard on Kenya’s central Laikipia Plateau, but there is a connection.

It has to do with shared credit, and what the protocol is when a hard-earned wildlife photograph goes viral on social media and becomes front-page news for major news organizations around the world.

Who deserves credit? The person who took the photograph of a rare animal, or the person who found that rare animal in the first place.

It’s how that news was reported — on the BBC World News’ main website, for one— that the controversy started.

Veteran UK nature photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, who leads photo expeditions of his own in Africa for avid shutterbugs and animal lovers, captured the startling image of a black panther — actually a regular leopard with a rare melanistic gene that causes the fur to appear black, though not a pure black exactly but grey, which is why the leopard’s spots, or rosettes, are clearly visible against the background fur when — using a remote-controlled trap camera. It was a local Samburu tracker and research assistant with the San Diego Zoo Global outreach NGO, Ambrose Letoluai, however, who knew where to find the leopard and told Burrard-Lucas where best to set the camera. LetoluaLetoluaii has lived his entire life in Koija, a small village which borders Loisaba Conservancy, and was hired as a leopard researcher after recalling tales elders in his community had told him about black leopards being common on the Laikipia Plateau.

San Diego Zoo Global researchers, working with biologist Dr. Nicholas Pilfold, Ph.D deployed remote cameras as part of a larger-scale study aimed at understanding the population dynamics of leopards on conservation land that, like much of northern Kenya, is shared by both wildlife and pastoral cattle herders. Human-wildlife conflict is inevitable where goats and calves encounter an apex predator like a leopard, and researchers believe more needs to be known about wild animals’ habits if they are to have a chance to survive. Leopards are not critically endangered, but the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists them as “vulnerable” on its official Red List of threatened species.

Black panthers have always held a special place in the human imagination, in part because they’re seen so rarely and in part because they’re such a familiar symbol in popular culture.

Burrard-Lucas got wind of the Laikipia program and its trap cameras, and decided to try to fulfil a lifelong dream to capture a black panther, if not on film exactly, on-camera. Letoluai was his assigned minder — his Sherpa, if you will — and the subsequent images, part luck, part good timing and part insider knowledge, exceeded their expectations.

So far, so good.

The mainstream media like nothing better than a good story, though, and while “Night-time Photos of a Rare Black Leopard” might sound like a good story to some people, “First Black Leopard Spotted in 100 Years” sounds much better.

In a media climate desperate for some good news about the environment for a change, rare photos of an animal that hasn’t been seen for a century is a headline grabber.

There’s just one problem. It wasn’t true. Local media in Kenya, among them photojournalist and staff photographer Phoebe Okall of the Nairobi Daily Nation newspaper, had captured images of a black leopard in the wild just a few years ago.

Many Kenyans, politically sensitive toward any perceived slight by westerners in the post-colonial era of independence, saw this as a double insult: Ambrose Letoluai was being given enough credit for finding the black leopard on BBC World’s main news site, and local, Kenyan photojournalists were not being given any credit for having captured images of black leopards on not one but several occasions prior to “the first capture in 100 years.”

Burrard-Lucas, for his part, found himself caught in the middle. What should have been the crowning achievement of his photographic career — and still might — is suddenly at the centre of an increasingly noisy and fractious controversy.

He posted an immediate clarification on his website: He never said it was the first photo of a black leopard in 100 years. That was something the media added, for effect. He was also more than willing to credit Letoluai for his work in setting up the camera trap — it’s quite common, and perfectly acceptable, for nature photographers to credit the guides who take them to the rare animals in the first place.

Earlier this week, a reasoned, thoughtful, well-researched — and properly sourced — article in the Washington Post, by general assignment reporters Alex Horton and Reis Thebault, sought to put an end to the controversy by outlining exactly what happened, who did what, where, how, why and, importantly, when.

The damage is done, though, and the outrage on social media sites like Twitter, mostly from Kenyans proud of their heritage and the wild animals they know as their own, continues unabated, even today.

Perhaps, if and when Burrard-Lucas’ images are recognized at some of the big wildlife photo awards, such as the UK Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards in October — which I suspect they just may — Burrard-Lucas and Letoluai can accept together, in person, much like Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay before them.

Enough about that, for now. Here, then, are some key links to the controversy, as it unfolded.

https://www.camtraptions.com/black-leopard.html

https://naloolo.com/2019/02/14/how-a-24-year-old-samburu-warrior-captured-images-of-kenyas-black-leopard/?fbclid=IwAR10jnCgSeIiOomn8po_x1MeFEoIwzMjbvtJb-XuW9yN9AByDpkyPNRYn-E

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/13/black-leopard-photos-are-definitely-not-first-years/?utm_term=.7f87481a31e1

Tourism and cheetahs: When too much of one can lead to too few of the other.

June 24, 2018

Think of it as an “eco” challenge for uniquely modern times.

Recent research by Oxford University shows what wildlife behavioural scientists have long suspected — and told anyone who will listen. Namely: Unchecked, unregulated wildlife tourism can be detrimental to those animals most vulnerable to having their hunting and breeding cycles disrupted by swarms of safari vehicles all jostling to get an ideal position from which to get that perfect picture.

The four-year study, authored by Oxford zoologist Dr. Femke Broekhuis from 2013-2017, focused on cheetahs in Kenya’s world-renowned Maasai Mara National Reserve, site of the annual wildebeest migration that moves through the protected wilderness area every July, August and September.

(The rest of the year, the migration winds its way through the larger, more expansive Serengeti National Park, across the border in Tanzania.) The Mara, as Kenya’s part of the park is known to locals and area residents alike, is especially popular with overseas tourists because Kenya is more conducive than its neighbour to mass tourism, thanks to better facilities, more competitive pricing.

Also, the aptly named Mara River, for which the reserve is named, provides the sight of yearly “river crossings,” featuring some 1.3 million wildebeest in total, which in turns acts as a magnet for the reserve’s resident predators, including big cats like lions, leopards and cheetahs.

©Pixabay/Cheetah Conservation Fund-CCF Namibia

Most predators are nocturnal, but cheetahs are diurnal, meaning they hunt during the day.

Cheetahs are easily intimidated, because of their light build — they’re built for speed, as befitting nature’s fastest land mammal — and show a tendency to flee from a perceived threat rather than stand and fight. Lions will kill cheetahs whenever they can, as nature has conditioned lions to see cheetahs as competition for a finite supply of food. Cheetah cubs are especially vulnerable, as they’re born basically defenceless.

Cub mortality is exceedingly high among cheetahs — it’s one reason they have such large litters — but it’s especially high in the wide, flat, short-grass savannahs of East Africa, where the very terrain that makes it easy for cheetahs to find and chase down food also makes them vulnerable to being spotted by other predators.

The crisis comes when too many tourists — Broekhuis’ study cited as many as 30 vehicles crowding around a single cheetah at the same time during one sighting — disrupts a cheetah’s hunting pattern.

If a mother cheetah doesn’t make a kill during daylight hours, the time when tourist vehicles are most active — obviously — she may starve.

Also, because cheetahs often have their kill stolen by larger, more aggressive predators, including hyenas, large numbers of tourist vehicles crowded together often sends a signal to other predators that an easy meal may be in the offing. Cheetahs may even be intimidated by packs of jackals or vultures in large enough number.

Since even a slight injury to a leg is tantamount to a death sentence for an animal that relies on speed to chase down food, nature has conditioned cheetahs to back down rather than stand and fight. The hungrier a cheetah is, however, the more it might be inclined to take foolish risks, especially if hunting has been hard and it has cubs to feed.

“Studies from about 10 years ago by the Kenya Wildlife Service showed an average of 19 vehicles,” Dr. Laurie Marker, founder and director of the Namibia-based Cheetah Conservation Fund (https://cheetah.org) told Dispatches in a Facebook message. “So, yes, this is very bad for cheetahs.”

None of this is new to anyone who has studied cheetahs in the wild, or even read about them and seen them in animal documentaries. What makes the Oxford study different, though, is that this time researchers have hard numbers to back up their claims.

The study found that the average number of cubs raised to independent adulthood in the Maasai Mara was just 0.2 cubs per litter, meaning a mother cheetah in the Mara would have to give birth to five litters just to raise a single cub to adulthood. The average birth-to-adult success rate in more remote, less heavily touristed wilderness areas is 2.3 cubs per litter.

The Maasai Mara is renowned for its big cat populations; it’s one of the reasons so many tourists choose that park over any other. The Mara has been featured in countless TV documentaries, and provided the setting for BBC-TV’s popular Big Cat Diary series, which followed specific family groups of lions, leopards and cheetahs every year over a period of a dozen years between 1996 and 2008, creating a snapshot view of individual cats’ entire life cycles, from birth to death.

Big Cat Diary promoted and popularized the Maasai Mara as a travel destination for wildlife enthusiasts, more so than any other park in Africa, including the Serengeti and South Africa’s world famous — but very different — Kruger National Park.

Broekhuis is enough of a realist — and honest enough — to know that wildlife tourism does a great deal to help endangered animals, especially icon species like cheetahs. Catching even a glimpse of a cheetah in the wild is a more stirring and profound experience than a lifetime of seeing them in zoos. One of the more overlooked, less-reported unintended side effects of wildlife tourism, especially in Africa’s magnificent game parks, is that it can shape a child or young person’s outlook and future career choice for life.

The question, Broekhuis argues, is not whether tourism is a benefit or a hazard, but a matter of degree.

The Maasai Mara is popular for a reason, but 64 vehicles over a two-hour period — the most vehicles Broekhuis recorded at a single cheetah sighting during her four-year study — is untenable.

Broekhuis says the solution is strict viewing guidelines and enforcement of the rules, whether it’s a ban on off-road driving (in effect in the Mara, and in virtually every other official national park on the African continent) a limit on the number of vehicles around a cheetah at any one time (Broekuis recommends five) at a minimum distance of 30 metres.

The study’s timing could not be more apt: July, just days away, is the beginning of high season in the Mara.

https://www.wildcru.org/members/dr-femke-broekhuis/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.4180

©Wildlife Conservation Research Unit/University of Oxford

Africa’s unsung wildlife heroes: Wayne Lotter did not die in vain.

September 10, 2017

Here’s the thing. Every day, thousands of park rangers and conservationists like the late Wayne Lotter, shot to death late last month by as-yet unidentified gunmen in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, risk their lives to fight against global wildlife trafficking. Too often, their lives end in tragedy. More than 1,000 rangers have been killed in the line of duty in just the past 10 years.

The killings are not meant to be taken in isolation. They’re designed to send a chilling message to anyone who vows to expose crime syndicates that traffic in animal skins, illegal trophies and body parts, from Chilean sea bass and shark fin soup to rhino horn and, in Lotter’s case, elephant ivory.

Violence rarely — if ever — deters committed crusaders for the environment from pursuing their goal, though it can have a chilling effect on potential whistleblowers, those people on the inside who can point law enforcement in the right direction, on those occasions law enforcement isn’t compromised by corruption in high places.

Neighbouring countries often take a different approach to the same problem, though. Despite Tanzania’s gift of a natural bounty unmatched in neighbouring countries — a thriving tourist industry based on the annual Serengeti wildebeest migration, the justifiably famous “Cradle of Humankind” in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and one of Africa’s largest surviving remnant populations of wild elephants — Tanzania is also home to endemic corruption on an almost epic scale. Here’s a harsh reality: Where there is corruption on an institutional, national level of governance, China is rarely far behind.

Kenya, Tanzania’s neighbour, has traditionally taken a radically different approach to wildlife conservation, though, just as Botswana routinely and consistently annoys its neighbours Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia with its own, forward-thinking conservation practices. Trophy hunting, for example, is part of the natural order of things in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia; Botswana has banned it outright, despite the loss in potential income and revenue. Big game hunting is de rigueur in Tanzania; Kenya has banned it outright, despite the loss to its economy.

Thanks to its natural bounty, Tanzania has managed to generate income from both hunting and tourism; Kenya, despite being more prone to droughts — much of northern Kenya is semi-arid desert as it is — and despite endemic street crime, a serious terrorist threat and its own share of government corruption, has gone all-in on wildlife tourism, even as it has mounted some of the toughest, most aggressive anti-poaching military campaigns on the entire continent.

Whistleblowers are key. Without ordinary, everyday citizens finding the courage to report trafficking activity, it’s hard for law enforcement to bringwildlife criminals to justice, let alone put a dent in the Asian crime syndicates.

Lotter, interestingly enough, was closely involved in equipping and training Tanzanian park rangers in how to defend themselves in a firefight and mete out justice of their own — based on the Kenyan model, in other words, instead of looking the other way and pretending nothing happened.

This is not simply a case of the great white man telling the black man what to do and how to do it. In Kenya, in Botswana and in the gorilla parks of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), it’s local — black — citizens who are donning automatic rifles and camouflage gear and putting their lives on the line, often for little more than what developed nations would regard as the minimum wage. Once again, as is so often the case in Africa, it is the most impoverished people who are the most incorruptible, and the monied class, often at minister level, who are most inclined to take kickbacks from crime syndicates.

If anything, Kenya is ramping up its anti-trafficking campaign, not scaling it back, despite recent setbacks in Tanzania. Kenya has announced it is about to “significantly” increase the number of specialist prosecutors who prosecute wildlife crime. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) currently has two full-time prosecutors on call; that number will soon jump to 14. The conservation organization Space for Giants — Space for Giants’ patron is Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the UK Independent newspaper — is underwriting the training and mentoring of the new prosecutors.

KWS acting director general Julius Kimani told The Independent that while Kenya has experienced success in both intelligence and criminal investigations, they recognized there was a gap in the courts.

Lotter understood this. There is an argument to be made — as yet unproven — that this is why he was murdered.

Murdered, yes, but not silenced. It might not look like it now, but Lotter may well have been on the right side of history. As the heavily armed elephant and rhino rangers and a newly invigorated court system in Kenya show, and as the heavily armed gorilla rangers in Rwanda and Congo prove, ordinary, everyday people can and will stare down the international crime syndicates, given the chance, given the moral authority and the knowledge that doing the right thing almost invariably wins out in the end, despite the potential terrible personal cost.

No, Wayne Lotter did not die in vain. Kenya is showing the way.

http://spaceforgiants.org

Poorer nations doing more than their affluent cousins to protect large mammals.

May 16, 2017

Where special requirements meet spacial requirements, it’s the poorer countries that do more for the conservation of large mammals, not the wealthy western nations.
That, at least, is the conclusion of a recent survey by the respected Panthera organization, a respected NGO renowned for the scientific study of the world’s remaining big cats, and Oxford University.
Of course, one can say that the world’s remaining critically endangered large mammals — from rhinos and elephants to lions, leopards and cheetahs — are more apt to be found in African countries than those in the northern hemisphere.
Even so the idea that, say, Tanzania has done more for its indigenous wildlife — in terms of setting aside wide open spaces for the animals to roam— than the U.S., which is considering removing protections from several national monuments, many of them established under Barack Obama, is not just sobering but worrying to anyone who cares about the planet.

Recent surveys show that 59% of the world’s remaining predators and 60% of the world’s largest herbivores are facing extinction square-in-the-face.
You can argue the numbers if you want, but some truths are obvious to anyone willing to look past next quarter’s profit statements.
Large herbivores like rhinos and elephants need large spaces in which to find enough water and food to sustain them. Rhinos have a gestation period of 16 months, and only give birth to one calf at a time; it’s easy to see how their numbers could dwindle rapidly in a relatively short period of time, even without the recent spike in poaching that has seen their numbers crash in just the past five years.

Apex predators such as lions and tigers need both space to find enough prey animals to hunt, but also find suitable mates that are genetically diverse enough that inbreeding doesn’t become a problem.
Naturally, the bigger or more dangerous the animal, the harder it can be for people in the area to live with them. Human-wildlife conflict is inevitable where towns, villages and big cities rub up against ecologically sensitive wilderness. Carnivores and herbivores alike can and often do pose a direct risk to human life, crops and livestock.
Panthera researchers created a “megafauna conservation index” in which to measure 152 countries, based on three factors: the percentage of land occupied by large species; the percentage of that land set aside for protected, officially recognized conservation areas; and the amount of money spent by each country on conservation, relative to that country’s GDP.
Interestingly — crazily, you might say — African countries in general make more effort toward the conservation of large mammals than any other region on the planet, despite facing, in many cases, poverty and social instability, whether caused by drought, famine, flooding, tribal conflict, war or bad governance.

Of the five top performing nations, four are in Africa: Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.
There’s a lot of negative reportage about conservation efforts around the world, and with good reason: The planetary environment is a mess, and the current U.S. administration is going to do little to change that.
Even so, the Panthera survey found small but bright beacons of hope. The survey isn’t just an exercise in numbers crunching: Researchers sought to find out why the top-performing countries are doing as well as they are in the battle to save the planet’s remaining megafauna.

These beacons of hope include “rewilding” of landscapes, by reintroducing large mammals to areas where they had disappeared — the desert-adapted rhinos and elephants of Damaraland in northwestern Namibia, for example, or Kenya’s recent reintroduction of critically endangered rhinos into Lake Nakuru and Nairobi national parks.
Other beacons of hope include setting aside more land as protected areas — in other words, the exact opposite of what the current U.S. administration is considering — and investing more in conservation, both at home and abroad. (Germany and the U.K., despite facing ecological and environmental pressures of their own at home, have always punched above their weight overseas; many of the most pro-active conservation organizations in Kenya and Tanzania are financed in large part from northern Europe.)

Yes, planet Earth is a mess right now — there’s no way top sugarcoat it — but as the Panthera survey points out, and as Jane Goodall keeps saying, there’s reason for hope.

More information about the Panthera-Oxford study can be found here, and by following Panthera on Twitter at @PantheraCats:

https://www.panthera.org/affluent-countries-commit-less-conservation-large-mammals-rest-world-panthera-and-oxford-university