By Duncan Mboyah
Ecologists have warned that competition for scarce water between wildlife and pastoral communities is causing rapid disappearance of wildlife in the Masai Mara Game Reserve.
This life and death struggle threatens to erode the potential earnings from the tourist market, reports a new study by International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).
The presence of livestock close to water interferes with wildlife patterns and reduces the safety of their resting sites.
"These changes, coupled with repeated droughts, floods and declining woodland cover, have jointly contributed to nearly 70 per cent decline in wildlife numbers in the Mara in recent times," says lead researcher Joseph Ogutu.
The researchers are concerned by the clustering of people around water points during serious droughts in the region, a practice that encourages pastoral settlement in ideal wildlife areas, displacing wildlife and therefore upsetting present and future earnings from tourism.
The study found that pastoralists, their livestock and dogs are a danger to predators (lions and spotted hyenas) as they force them to stay away from the water points.
At such times, only the giraffe and elephant, which are free from predation, risk due to their large body size, forage right next to water sources where their preferred food is most abundant.
Conducted in the Mara region in south western, the study found that human population in the region has increased 25-fold since 1957, while pastoral settlements have increased 23-fold over the same period. "As the numbers of homes and associated development infrastructure have increased, wildlife calving grounds have been ploughed for commercial wheat cultivation and grazing areas for wildlife and livestock fragmented and lost in parts of the pastoral ranches in the Mara," Dr Ogutu says. The ILRI scientists foresee the decline in tourism earnings in Kenya and Tanzania as a result.
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