Kilimanjaro Lion Conservation Project

Have you ever thought of visiting africa? Have you pondered following an african lion? Would you like to learn more about the meeting of the tried and tested old style of tracking (tyre-tread sandals, a sword and sharp eyes) and the new tools of wildlife research (GPS collars linked to the internet via a satellite phone)?

I have good news for you. Today from the comfort of your armchair you can now visit a small part of maasailand via an online map and follow one of our study lions. This is thanks to a new lion-tracking website that our volunteer Mike has built for us. It accepts downloads from Ndelie’s GPS collar and translatesthe data into a google map API. Simply put, the website will show you where Ndelie the lion has been. Please visit the site, either from the link in this post, or by clicking on the icon in the sidebar. Mike and I would like to hear your thoughts / comments / ululations / condemnations. Also… please pass on the link to the tracking site if you think it looks interesting. And, well, perhaps there are some well-off folks out there who will pick up an envelope at the back of the church, if they like what they see.

This is mentioned on the site, but just to re-iterate: the data presented here is not real-time, mostly due to the fact that we have tried to optimise the power consumption of the collar (it takes a great deal of battery power to send the data through the satphone). You will see a delay of a few days sometimes. There is also the possibility that the collar will stop transmitting altogether for periods of time. Its extremely difficult to design housings for sensitive electronic equipment for lions, that can go the distance (so to speak). Thank you Robert and the team at Vectronic-aerospace for donating the collar, and Mike and Samira for volunteering weeks of their time to build the site.

This is not Ndelie, but if you click on this guy’s nose he will lead you to the tracking site…. enjoy!

Technorati : lion conservation, lions, maasailand, technology, tracking

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This morning we found some of the collared lions, specifically Nemasi (hiding on a hill somewhere) and Kasaiyo. Kasaiyo was with some of his pride, and we caught a glimpse of them.

Here is what we had to drive through to get to them. Every tree is covered in very antisocial thorns, and highly agressive ants that drop onto animals / people / vehicles that brush the trees. And bite.

Here is one of the youngsters. I might be able to use this photo for my ID files later, as you can see the whisker spots quite clearly.

This is a short post. More later….

Technorati : acacia trees, hot panting cats, lions, more thorns, thorns

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Somehow, between my more bookish northwestern readers, a small yellow bird, a master paddler and a wimsical science enthusiast, this blog has made some money. So, for June thanks are due to Suzanne, KD, Carmine, Wim and Herb.

As a special treat, I present to you, a scene from my last trip back from Nairobi, on the Mombasa-Nairobi highway, arguably on of the most important roads in East africa as it leads from the coast to the capital of Kenya. It dissolves into unbelievable, apocalyptic scenes like this as a matter of course.

Imagine my surprise when I caught a glimpse of The Original Black Ninja. As you are no doubt aware, ninjas are normally quite stealthy and unintrusive. This one wasn’t.

Technorati : donor report, kenya, roads

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People all over the world respond with strong emotion to the losing of an animal. Just like Maasai who develop strong bonds with their livestock, westerners (it seems) are passionate about their cats. See for yourself here.

Whilethe catnapping story is a farce beyond belief, it brings out a thread: the use of animals to define people’s social or political relationships. This south Florida woman wanted her dog back, so she abducted someone’s cat. Similarly here in east africa wildlife has been either killed outright, or threatened, to elicit a reaction from the powers that be. A few years ago when the lions of Nairobi National park were massacred it was said that the perpetrators wanted to attract attention to their discontent with widllife, rather than target specific problem animals. There was a great deal of polarisation in how the killings were interpreted as you can imagine. The end result seems to be that there has been more attention paid to people’s losses to wildlife. And there is some form of consolation for losses to wildlife.

Technorati : cats, conservation, lions, looney americans

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Yesterday I alluded to the fact that image-recognition software has been expensive and clunky in the past. An acquaintance of mine subsequently emailed me a few links. It turns out that not only is there freely available software on the web, but its quite user-friendly. The following example is a Tiger recognition package from a chap called Lex Hilby (the Conservation Research homepage), partially funded by the same people that have supported my research in the past: the Wildlife Conservation Society. In true geek fashion, the site is not prettily laid out, but there is some good stuff. Examples from the site shown below.

And further, a group called “Wildtrack” have developed a “Footprint Identification System” with the genius-pun acronym “FITS” Pictured below is a screenshot of a rhino footprint with the markers overlaid.

I don’t think any of this is quite suited to lions, for a couple of different reasons. Nevertheless, its great to see the intersection of imaging technology and wildlife surveying.

Technorati : conservation, lions, rhinos, software, tigers

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Automated pattern recognition has been something of a grail for wildlife researchers wanting to sample large populations of animals. The first I heard of this was in connection with some cheetah work in Tanzania. It was rumoured to be fairly expensive, but I thought it intriguing [every cheetah has a unique spot pattern, like a fingerprint]. Sometime in the past few months I had coffee with a slightly wild but brilliant acquaintance of mine who studies zebras. We got to talking about how efficient it would be to simply record zebra stripe patterns and then apply some kind of wickedly-complex mark-recapture stats to come to come up with estimates of population density. The only tools required: a camera, some fancy software and a formidably mathematically-inclined brain. No collars or unique ID marks necessary. By the time I had finished my coffee (they make ‘em large and strong here in Kenya) I had established that he had a prototype going, but it requires careful manual entry of the images, and the user needs to show the software where to look for the parameters. In other words, its still fiddly.

This is why I was excited to learn that some folks working at the place of Mandela’s incarceration, Robben Island, have got it right. They describe pretty much an automated system for penguin image capture and mark-recognition. Click here to read all about it.

(photo from PJ Barham / BBC)

You might ask how this applies to lion conservation. Well, I haven’t thought of an answer to this yet. But its an important development, which I think could be almost as significant as the advent of the GPS collar in wildlife monitoring. Of course, lions are uniquely identifiable (I’ve written about this before on this blog) but automated pattern recognition might be more applicable to surveying what lions eat, than lions themselves.

Technorati : conservation, cool science, lion research, lions, pattern recognition, penguins

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Some of the best lion research to date has come out of Tanzania, often in association with Dr Craig Packer. The most recent findings to be published are (I think) no exception. Scientists from the universities of Illinois, California (Davis) and Minnesota looked at the impact on lions of canine distemper virus outbreaks in Serengeti and Ngorogoro in 1994 and 2001. They found a fascinating relationship between climatic conditions, prey and blood parasites.

The story by the way is very engaging, and has a catchy title. Click here to see the press release.

An international research team, including University of Minnesota researcher Craig Packer, has found the first clear example of how climate extremes, such as the increased frequency of droughts and floods expected with global warming, can create conditions in which diseases that are tolerated individually may converge and cause mass die-offs of livestock or wildlife

Colleen’s comment on my previous post refers to this study. I think generally climate change is important to african wildlife conservation. Perhaps one of the reasons why it doesn’t receive much attention on these blogs is because 1)there are other threats to wildlife that could be more significant and 2)climate change is someting that we as field conservationists can’t do very much about. Like you Colleen, I will be interested to see what people have to say about these findings.

Technorati : lion research, lions, pathology

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If you have a moment, do have a look at William’s post (the Mara triangle blog) on the recent BBC story that covered the poisoning of several lions. It makes for some thought-provoking material. I’ve posted a few comments there. What do you think?

Technorati : BBC, kenya, lions, media

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I’ve been quiet for some time (blog-wise) as I have been hosting two journalists in camp who have been travelling around east africa to learn more about the challenges facing lion conservation. Later this year I’ll post links to podcasts of the radio-show. It’ll be good exposure for lion conservation generally, and will probably mention the work that Living with Lions is doing quite prominently.

Its been a busy few days, so I have no fieldwork to report on. As we hurtle towards the weekend, let us please be mindful of the story of Christian the lion, the tragic death of 42 of Cambodia’s best fighting midgetsin an encounter with a lion, and, last but definitely not least: you can get anythin’ you want at Alice’s restaurant, ‘cept Alice, that is (aka tiger cubs for sale at Walmart story). As always, speak your mind in the comment section please. This is the internet after all. All’s fair in blog and blackberry. There are a few threads in the comments from previous posts that I would like to pick up on, but I’ll get to that soon.

Technorati : lions, radio journalism, tigers

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Another day, another obtuse blog-title. Apparently its Tennyson. Its for my one-armed friend in little Nigeria.

This post is to draw my reader’s attention to the fact that we have our donation-reporting sidebar up and running again. I’ve been harassing the techs at wildlifedirect mercilessly for the last two months and they have finally pulled through. Thanks David and Masumi!

So… Katherine, Theresa, Suzanne and Carmine: thanks for the contributions. I’ll wait until the donations have amounted to a sizeable chunk before I draw the Benjamins from wildlifedirect and deploy them.

Again, one of the adult females in Nempakai’s pride. If you look closely under her nose on the left side you will see a scar. This is very distinctive, and can be used to identify this lion in future.

News from the field: I went out to check on Nemasi last night. She still has all three of her cubs. It was dark and they were moving too much for me to take good photos. I am happy to report they are about twice the size they were the last time I saw them (which is when I took the photo for the header of this blog).

Technorati : conservation, donations, lions, poetry, unique identification of lions

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