A Rocha Kenya

I remember one time when I was swimming at Clearwater Beach in Florida. We saw some large shapes in the water near us and wondered if they were dolphins. As they came close and swam under us, they were clearly too big and slow. Manatees! Also known as sea cows, they are the Western Atlantic equivalent of the Indo-Pacific dugong. What an amazing experience to have an animal the size of a large car swimming near you. Other times in Florida our family has sought out experiences with manatees. Who can resist those interesting faces.

So their close relative the dugong has been spotted in Mida Creek. Who cares? I do, but then I like manatees and, I am sure, if I saw the dugong would like it. Is that a good reason that you should care? Is simply “liking” and animal, or thinking it’s “cute” or “amazing” reason enough to look after it? In his book Planetwise, Dave Bookless outlines three different approaches to thinking about the value of creation in general to which Martin and Margot Hodson in their booklet Climate Change, Faith and Rural Communities add a fourth: biocentric, ecocentric, anthropocentric, and theocentric. From a biocentric approach, this dugong has value as an individual, We could also value this dugong for its place in the ecosystem; an ecocentric approach. Dugongs are large herbivores which play an important role in tropical coastal ecosystems. We can also focus on the dugong’s value to us, to humans. This is an anthropocentric approach. Clearly a lot of people like to be near and look at large marine mammals. This presents an amazing opportunity for ecotourism, especially if we can get her (him?) to stay. Perhaps others will come. These three approaches all have their merits.

But for me, as a follower of Jesus, a theocentric (God centred) approach is especially appealing and the most compelling. God created dugongs (however that happened) and declared them good, before humans were around. Their value to God is not dependant upon their utility to me – though God, I am sure, knew that they would be of value to me and the ecosystem and this is also part of how things are meant to be. As God has asked us to be stewards of all he made, in obedience to God, I must care, actively care, for this creature.

A Rocha Kenya has embarked on a marine conservation project and we are very excited by the news that a dugon was sited in Mida Creek brought to us by the Watamu Marine Association, of which we are a member. Mida Creek is part of the area where A Rocha works. Whether or not the dugong stays, there are any number of organisms to which we could apply this thinking. We look forward to working with WMA, Kenya Wildlife Service, and others to protect wildlife. At A Rocha Kenya, we do this for God’s glory. We also are working towards the communities around Watamu Marine Park benefitting in any way they can from this beautiful place – which we also do for God’s glory. We hope you will follow this adventure. Bob Sluka – advisor for the marine conservation project.

Allard's Anemone Fish

The photo of this week is of a beautiful Allard’s Anemone fish nestled in its anemone home. Made famous by the film Nemo, clownfish or anemone fish are a well known coral reef inhabitant, of which we have two species in Kenya along with the Skunk Anemone fish. Their ecology of living in symbiosis with an anemone is a great example of the incredible complexity and inter-reliance of coral reef ecology, where no single species can live without the others. It is this complexity which makes reefs so vulnerable to human destruction where one influence has many ripples through the entire reef community and is the challenge of marine ecologists to understand these complex interactions.

In 1996 when I was working as a Research Scientist in the Ornithology Dept of the National Museums in Nairobi, I was tasked with the job of putting together a course for Kenyan birders and bird guides that would stimulate and enthuse them as well as equip them to become better birders. 17 years later and 18 courses on “Fundamentals of Ornithology” is going stronger than ever and we are having to turn people away who are keen to take part. In fact we have more participants than ever registered this year (26) with people coming from as far afield as Lodwar, Dakatcha and Kakamega. 

One of the key reasons for starting the course was because birding was becoming more and more popular with overseas tourists and yet very few guides in the tourism industry knew very much about birds other than ‘yellow weaver’ or ‘eagle’. It was felt by Dr Leon Bennun, then Head of Ornithology, that this would provide a really useful service to Kenyan birders and budding bird guides – and it has been proved correct. 

The course is designed to cover all the basics of what birding and ornithology is about and to stimulate further interest in birds and birding. Almost 400 students down the line, I now meet past participants around the country who have continued with their interest in birds with some becoming professional bird guides and now running very successful businesses guiding overseas birding tourists around the avian-rich habitats of Kenya.

We try to get a good balance of practical outdoor birding together with class-based teaching covering subject such as classification, explaining scientific names, colours for birders, principles of identification, breeding and feeding biology, migration and even how to make your garden ‘bird-friendly’. Days start off with a 1 1/2 hour birding around Elsamere Field Study Centre grounds where the course takes place and which is ideal for finding a rich diversity of birds for participants to get to grips with. Today (the first full day of the course) we had over 60 species recorded including Giant Kingfisher, Garden Warblers and the first Grey-backed Fiscals we’ve had at Elsamere for several years – a species that used to be very common here. 

 Tito teaching about adjusting binoculars at the start of the morning birding

 Njoro’s team birding the car park

The early birding was followed by several lectures including teaching people about books and references and getting them set up for a week’s long practical of searching through the library we’ve brought from the museum to find out about various birds. It’s 9pm now and none have gone to bed yet but are still beavering away on the homework!

 Njoro teaching about references and how to use them

Time has really raced the last few months for the marine team. Starting in January, Joy Smith an Oceanographer from Virginia, USA, joined me (Benjo) and together we really pushed forward with data collection on the reef. However all too quickly we’ve come to the end of this year’s field season, with weather set to get windier and the sea to get rougher from April through to September during ‘kusi’ monsoon. I’m now sitting in a coffee house in Nairobi thinking about all those wonders way down on the coast and realising that none of the magic of the reef has been lost. Below are a couple of photos from the last snorkel I did around a site we call ‘the larder’. A huge shoal of trevally completely surrounded us and beautiful sweetlips swam lazily over to figure out what these strange new creatures in their home were.

A final piece of news is that nearly all the plates we put down in December are now out of the water. I say nearly, because sadly we couldn’t find one of the plates placed in Kanani, but nevertheless recovering 35 small pieces of equipment that have been sitting on a large underwater landscape for 3 months is quite successful I feel. We did the work in collaboration with Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KEMFRI), which not only being another great contact for future work, but was a lot of fun for the three days we were zooming around the park and pulling the plates up. Juliet from KEMFRI started helping us analyse the plates looking at the major types of organisms settling. While I could see some little corals on the plates, we need to use a microscope and Juliet’s expertise for a longer period of time to get the final results of this interesting study. The plates are stored and can be analysed at any time in the future, so all the more to look forward to for the next field season!

For the past few months the marine team have started collecting baseline biological data about the coral reef here in Watamu. Baseline data is information about the general characters of the reef and its inhabitants, which is not designed to answer any particular scientific question, but rather provide a wide range of basic biological metrics for comparing and contrasting, over time and space. These simple methods are used by people around the world studying corals, and although they aren’t as standardised as methods used in other fields, say ornithology, these data can be used to compare with information from different scientists from the past or in other areas.

The two main areas we look at are benthic (bottom living) cover of the coral substrate and the fish that live around the coral. For both of these we lay out a transect, which is a standard straight line distance across the reef indicated by a tape. With the benthic cover we look at all corals, seaweeds, sponges and other bottom living organisms which are found along 10m. From this data we can calculate the percentage cover of different types of organisms, and for some, such as macro-algae and corals, the types which dominate an area of reef. For fish we lay out a 100m transect and swim along counting the numbers of fish from 10 main fish families, such as snappers, butterflyfish and wrasse. We also estimate their size into 10cm size classes, which will allow us to estimate biomass of each fish family for the different areas of reef.

These methods have been used in Watamu for a number of years by Kenya Wildlife Service research group and Wildlife Conservation Society, but only in a constricted area around “Coral Gardens”. The exciting thing for us in A Rocha’s marine group is that we are now able to explore more areas of the park  that haven’t ever had this data collected and so we are expanding into previously unstudied areas of the park. So far we’ve collected data in two unstudied sites and have identified a further 3 which need attention. This data is the first benchmark for what we hope will continue for years to come and be useful for future studies seeing changes in a range of coral areas in the park.

It is incredibly exciting to be collecting these data knowing how significant the information coming out is. Not only that but we get spend hours in beautiful reef habitat and seeing plenty of cool things along our transect lines. Below is a photo of beautiful pipe-fish (relatives of sea-horses) and scary and very poisonous scorpion-fish I photographed along the transects.

It has been a long haul to try and stop the Jatropha biofuel threat of at first 50,000ha of land being cleared for plantations, then 10,000ha and now finally NEMA have officially stopped the project from going ahead and the Clarke’s Weavers and Sokoke Scops Owls and other endangered wildlife as well as the community members who would have had their lifestyles and societies dramatically changed and poverty increased can breathe a sigh of relief. NatureKenya led the fray and often were very much in the hot seat with threats and even attacks being made on them (and A Rocha Kenya was included in some of these too) by the supporters of the project. NatureKenya deserve a lot of thanks for their effort and there is an excellent write-up by Birdlife about this with further details.

In response to this we are keen to get some further work happening with the Dakatcha communities to help them improve their own incomes and ways of living in that special environment without impacting it too negatively. We are looking at building on the initial efforts we’ve had of introducing “Farming God’s Way” or “Conservation Agriculture” to some of the communities which, for those who have taken the training on board and followed it, has made a huge difference in the outputs from their farms. Below is a shot of Elizabeth in her shamba (farm) who’s husband Katana works for us in Dakatcha and who has really got excited about Farming God’s Way. They have carefully followed the simple method of a) no ploughing, b) use plenty of mulch and c) rotate your crops and as a result their maize (corn) in the last short rains was huge and dense as you can see in the photos.

Elizabeth in her shamba showing how high and dense the maize has got – and beans adjacent to the maize.

Their neighbour’s crop which was planted in the traditional way was a very different picture…:

…there is therefore a lot of hope if we can persuade people to take it up. Unfortunately we’ve heard rumours of a response from community members to assistance the Red Cross is offering people in the form of ‘food for work’ – which is a great programme to have and certainly helps those who are really destitute, but what they have not counted on is that people are apparently purposely not planting maize well so that it fails and so that when the Red Cross team pass by that place they see only poor crops and therefore offer bags of maizemeal in return for digging 2′x2′x2′ holes in which to plant 9 seeds… this method may work in kitchen gardens, but it certainly hasn’t worked in Dakatcha. So whilst the Red Cross programme is designed to help people, in the long run it actually hampers growth and keeps people in a state of poverty. this has meant that very few farmers have kept coming to our training sessions and fewer still are actually implementing it. However we are convinced it is the Way to go and will pursue raising funds to support the project in Dakatcha – donations greatly received. A single 2-day training workshop for 20 farmers costs only $12 per person so do join us in this effort to assist the farmers and communities in Dakatcha.

Last week was a very busy week for the Research and Monitoring staff and volunteers. On Monday morning, we went to Sabaki for a shorebird, gull, and tern count. Sabaki town is at the delta of the Sabaki River (which is also the Galana River in Tsavo East, and starts in Nairobi as the Athi River). There were five birds of prey flying around over the roosting waders and terns, including Marsh Harrier, Mantague’s Harrier, Black Kite, and two Peregrine Falcons. Unfortunately, they were scaring up all the birds we wanted to count, so instead we practiced our identification skills.The falcons were very impressive to watch as they swooped down from great height to catch a bird, but each time we watched this, no bird was caught.  On our way back to the vehicle, we saw two hippos playing in the surf at the very point where the river becomes the ocean.

Colin mentioned that the delta has changed quite a lot in the last few years, with much less sticky mud, and mangroves starting to fill in where the water used to come up to. There are probably two reasons that these changes are occurring. One is that poor farming practices up river are causing a lot of erosion, which makes for a greater sediment load in the river, and then much more settling occurring at the delta. Secondly, there are a number of wells that have been drilled to pull water out of the river, and supply water to all of Malindi, Watamu, and the surrounding areas. To me, the habitat at the delta seems great for shorebirds, but I wonder what these changes will bring in the near and distant future.

On Tuesday afternoon and evening, we prepared for banding birds in the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, the largest remnant dry coastal forest in eastern Africa. This forest supports many endangered species, one of which is the East Coast Akalat, a small robin, which is on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (www.iucn.org) Red List, indicating that it is critically endangered. With a group of college students visiting from Washington State, USA, we set up 11 18-m mist nets in three runs, ready to be opened early the next morning.

On Wednesday and Thursday mornings, we banded four new akalats, and recaptured two, one from 2010 and one from 2008. Andrew, Colin’s research staff person, who has been here for about  five months as an official employee and was here previously as a volunteer, has never even seen the East Coast Akalat (he was in Nairobi for our two banding sessions), and I got to help band them! This was very exciting for me. We also banded four new Fischer’s Greenbuls, three new Tiny Greenbuls, four new Eastern Bearded Scrub Robins, four new Forest Batis, and one new Grey-backed Camaroptera.We were also lucky to catch a Crested Guineafowl, the first one that Colin has banded, on our first morning. Our total count was 30 birds.

Finally, on Friday morning (i.e., 3:oo am), we were up and out to the beach setting nets to catch waders. When the tide is high, a lot of the smaller waders, like Greater and Lesser Sandplovers, leave Mida Creek and come to roost on the beach in front of Mwamba. When the high tide is overnight, we can set up our nets in the dark and catch the birds to ring them, because they can’t see the nets and will fly into them. When we were setting up the nets, there were very few birds around us, so Colin went down the beach towards Garoda, and “twinkled” the birds toward the nets. At the end of the morning (i.e., 8:00 am), we had caught 20 birds, with eight of them being retraps.

It was a great week for the R+M staff here at A Rocha, with lots of field work and birds-in-hand. As a volunteer leaving in early April, I look forward to all opportunities to get into the field and learn about Kenyan wildlife and culture.

Post written by Maggi Sliwinski, a volunteer from New York, USA.

Its really astounding how much stuff one needs when starting something new. From seaweed books to snorkelling bags all the little items necessary for effective research add up to a lot of new equipment. Africans are well known for their resourcefulness and being able adapt and reuse items for novel tasks and its no different here at A Rocha Kenya. When I told Henry (the Centre Manager) I needed a clip board for my underwater paper we looked around what scrap material we had here at Mwamba and settled on an old plastic toilet cistern as being the perfect tool for my new clipboard.