Asante sana - Thank you to our suppoters.
Category: Gratitude | Date: Oct 15 2008 | By: davidngala
A photo of the Sokoke scops owl - David’s favourite bird.
We are extremely grateful to all our supports, donors, members and faithful bloggers who have in one way of the other made a significant impact in our work.
We are grateful especially to those who have been able to donate through this blog. Your support and contribution has enabled us to keep on working at what we do best.
We may not be able to acknowledged all of you but would like to specifically thank the following for their donations that we received through this blog.
· Jeremy R for your donation of US$ 27.50,
· Steven G for your donation of US$ 100.
· David F for you donation of US$ 200.
· Emerentiane M for your donation of US$ 2,000
· Theresa S for your donation of US $ 250
· Theresa S for your donation of US$ 25
· Sherri S for your donation of US$ 25
We are also grateful to our partners and members for their continued support. We acknowledge the following for their guidance and support in forest surveys and monitoring work: A Rocha Kenya, Nature Kenya, Kenya Wildlife Service, Kenya Forest Service, Wildlifedirect, Sunbird tours, Watamu stakeholders association, Local ocean trust, Conserve forever, and our faithful blog readers among others
To you all we say “Asante sana” (Thank you very much).
David Ngala (hugging a tree?) estimating the width of the baobab tree.
Tags: Arabuko-Sokoke
14 year old boy caught poaching!
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 15 2008 | By: davidngala
Hi this is David,
Over the past weeks there has been a lot of activity here at Arabuko-Sokoke Forest. More and more people continue to poach wild game as well as trees for timber and fuel wood despite the joint efforts of Kenya Wildlife Service, Kenya Forest Service and other support groups such as the Friends of Arabuko-Sokoke forest (FoASF)
Last week I took some forest guards to the western part of Arabuko-Sokoke forest. A place known as Malanga in the local language. I was showing them various paths the locals use, and some that I suspect the poachers use for hunting down game meat.
Accompanied by the armed forest guards, we took to three different transects, and we randomly walked to the three points that I had marked on my GPS. Two of the way points that I had selected had snare activity, poles were tied in ropes at the two places.
We took a visible path along the nature reserve boundary and followed it east wards, about eight kilometres from the edge of the forest, before we suddenly came across two young boys and one of them had a dead female suni (a type of antelope) in his possession. On seeing the forest guards, one of the boys ran away while the other one was caught by the guards.
The young 14 year boy handcuffed by the forest guards.
The 14 year old boy later confessed to the forest guards that his father sent him to the forest to trap animals. His father had about five hundred different snares which he uses to snare animals such as the suni, dicker, bush pigs and at times buffalos. The boy was later detained and his apprehended.
Young boy confesses of poaching the suni.
The boy’s father handcuffed with the suni on his neck.
We are slowly having progress with getting the poachers as we have backing from the Kenya Forest Service, however the illegal activities still continue and the forest continues to be destroyed.
Tags: Arabuko-Sokoke, FoASF, Poaching, Suni
Surveying paths entering the forest
Category: Forest surveys | Date: Jul 11 2008 | By: davidngala
One of the tasks that David has been working on over the past month or so has been to follow the boundary of the entire forest and, using a GPS, mark each path entering forest and record how used it is. This is to get an indication of how used the forest is and to identify the most appropriate paths to follow in order to search for traps and cut trees. It is a very time consuming job as he usually leaves the motorbike at the edge of the forest and follows the path a short way to see if it really is a proper path leading somewhere or is just a very short one that peters out quickly.
Below is a snapshot of the data that I just downloaded off the GPS David’s borrowing to do the work. It’s downloaded into the Map Source program from Garmin and will later be properly mapped using a full GIS program.
You can make out the boundary of the forest where David has been following it. There are still two sections that he needs to do on the north west and the eastern edge. The mass of waypoints to the north-east of the forest is around the forest station and where David has done quite a few surveys for illegal activity.
Tags: Arabuko-Sokoke, GPS, surveys
Bird surveys and cut trees
Category: Bird Surveys, Tree poaching | Date: Jun 12 2008 | By: davidngala
It was a little while back now that this happened as we’ve been having difficulty getting information to Colin who’s got the internet access for posting blogs, but I wanted to tell you about one of our typical surveys we do in the forest. It was one of our regular surveys in the Arabuko Sokoke forest; actually it was very cold that morning as we drove our motorbike to our designated transect. Our target was doing a common bird point count survey for the first two and a half of the morning hours and then doing forest disturbances as it was to be hot for the birds.
Albert Baya, an A Rocha Kenya Field technician, who has been with me for almost 14 years doing the research and monitoring of the Arabuko-Sokoke forest and the surrounding, stopped counting the birds and pointed out some cut stems which were almost 2 metres from the transect, trying to look more further away, it was bad to see the most vulnerable trees were cut.
In a distance of 5 km we were able to count 46 cut stems, for wood and carving, 4 active campsites and 2 old
camps which we thought they moved two or three months ago.
Whilst our forest is being managed by an active Forest Management Team, we are actually frustrated to see all these activities still happening.
We have several vulnerable and endangered bird, plant, butterfly, lizard species in the forest, but on the day of this survey we saw Clarke’s Weavers about 25 in one group of which we used to see 50+, and we were not able to see any male actively feeding on a Brachystegia tree. The Clarke’s Weaver breeding ground is not yet known and now the feeding grounds are being destroyed, we need to have a support to help stop this distraction otherwise we will lose our heritage. The picture here is one that was taken by Steve Garvie who is a birder and photographer who I took into the forest last year to see the specialities. These are the best photos I have seen of Clarke’s Weaver and we like to say “asante sana” to Steve for letting us use them.
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