Local conservancies create new hope for wildlife in Kenya’s Maasai Mara (commentary)

Set amid the open plains and rolling savannas of Kenya’s Maasai Mara landscape, Naboisho conservancy hosts some of the finest wildlife viewing that Africa can offer. Covering around 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) directly adjacent to the Maasai Mara National Reserve (MMNR), Naboisho hosts thousands of zebra, wildebeest, gazelle, giraffe and other wildlife. This profusion of prey supports healthy predator populations. Naboisho itself is home to about 50 lions, and the surrounding conservancies contain another 110 adult lions and additional cubs. The density of lions in Naboisho and neighboring conservancies is among the highest in Africa, and actually higher, according to research published in the journal Conservation Biology, than in the adjacent Maasai Mara reserve itself. This abundance of large predators is not only a local conservation success, but holds important lessons for reversing lion declines across Kenya and other parts of Africa. Naboisho and roughly a dozen neighboring conservancies now contain a total of about 162,000 hectares (400,000 acres), an area greater than the extent of the Mara reserve itself. These conservancies constitute a totally unique new conservation model for East Africa. The conservancies are made up of hundreds of individual plots owned by local Maasai residents of the Mara, who converted their traditional communal lands in this part of Kenya to individual holdings of about 40 hectares (100 acres) during the 1990s. The conversion of communal rangelands to individual plots — which people could then fence off, cultivate, or sell to outside commercial agricultural interests — poses a major threat…

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