My first participatory mapping chapter (and 3rd out of 4 dissertation chapters) was recently published in Frontiers in Conservation Science!

Essentially, we found that observed & perceived human-carnivore conflict are equally important for understanding the big picture, but they may be driven by different social & ecological processes. These different processes can contribute to and explain a spatial mismatch in perceived and verified conflict. Thus, integrating the spatially explicit experiences and perspectives of local communities with more traditional ecological methods is critical to identifying lasting and socially just forms of conflict mitigation.

I’m sending many thanks to the communities who participated in this work, and for whom the work was conducted. And of course, so much gratitude to my co-authors: Justin Brashares, Alice Bett, & Maggi Kelly.

…Fun fact, Frontiers has some amazing article-interaction metrics they capture. In just 3 days, our paper has attracted hundreds of views from all around the world!

I am pleased to announce that Mammals Week premieres this week, as one of eleven exciting weeks with Disney/National Geographic Explorer Academy Adventures! As a carnivore ecologist and a National Geographic Explorer, I’m appearing on a new interactive kid’s show and activity series called Explorer Academy Adventures, for our mammals-themed week. Explorer Academy Adventures features tons of fun & interactive science for kids.

Peep the promo below to learn more about this awesome experience and visit natgeolive.com/academy for more info.

In our recently published paper “Quantifying wildlife responses to conservation fencing in East Africa“, we developed a classification scheme to explore mammalian behaviors around the Lake Nakuru National Park boundary fence. At least 27 different mammal species cross in and out of the national park, and fence maintenance has inconclusive effects. In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Life finds a way.”

Also, we can use factors such as microhabitat, season, human activity, and connectivity to predict whether certain taxa will cross the fence.

Check out a piece I wrote about this work here.

A group paper I led on using ecology to understand carnivore-livestock conflict and promote coexistence has just been published in Conservation Biology! Working with such inspiring, multidisciplinary coauthors was a joy. You can find the study here.

Additionally, here is the UC Berkeley press release about the study.

And here is a blog I wrote for Defenders of Wildlife.

Our group’s goal is that the framework we present in the study will provide a concrete set of ecological guiding principles for researchers, conservationists, and livestock managers who are seeking to alleviate carnivore-livestock conflict.

Since last I wrote, my field work has come to an end and analysis has begun. It has been a multidisciplinary wild ride. I’ll stick with the ecology and behavior components of my research for this first update.

Hyenas in fancy necklaces

After much government-level controversy and a decent amount of time, the ban on darting of wildlife in Kenya was finally lifted in February 2019 (I’ll save the juicy longer story for a future post). Because I had been geared up to collar since July 2018, I was one of the lucky few researchers to get my collaring plan re-approved right away- so I dropped everything and hopped on a plane to Nairobi almost immediately after hearing the news of the lifted ban. With much ado, drama (dare I say?), and effort by many parties, we ended up collaring seven spotted hyenas, representing 5 clans (two clans in Lake Nakuru National Park and three clans in Soysambu Conservancy). It was a great success.

The goal of this part of my study is to analyze the fine-scale (5-minute fix rates) movements of spotted hyenas in relation to linear barriers (fences, roads), other anthropogenic features and activities, land cover, livestock enclosures, and livestock predation events. Though spotted hyenas are heavily implicated in human-carnivore conflict, these aspects, especially at such a fine scale, have hardly been studied. Though the start-up effort was immense, there’s something inherently satisfying about having these hyenas out there collecting data for me, and looking at their movements each day on Google Earth hasn’t yet stopped being exciting. So far, the hyenas are showing us a few things: 1) the clans are using up every single inch of space in these two small protected areas (~180km sq each), 2) some of these hyenas are likely trying to disperse and failing due to linear barriers, resulting in some fascinating and unusual behavior, and 3) the Lake Nakuru National Park fence is currently not very effective at stopping hyena movements in and out of the park. Here’s where things get really fascinating.

Oh the places they’ll go…

Lake Nakuru National Park (LNNP) is one of only two fully-fenced national parks in Kenya (the other being the Aberdares). We’re talking a ~3 meter high, electric, parallel-wire fence. Some sections of the fence, particularly in the areas where the park directly abuts Nakuru city (one of the fastest growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa), have an extra reinforcement of woven wire extending a minimum of 1 meter underground, to prevent digging by wildlife. Like many barriers, the LNNP fence has a complex sociopolitical history. The fence was created not only to keep wildlife in the park and protect local communities from crop-raiding and livestock predation, but also to keep people out: the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is concerned about poaching (especially of the endangered black rhinos living in the park), people gathering firewood inside the park, and other activities. KWS is trained to shoot on sight if they see any unauthorized people wandering in the park at night; when I would do night field work or travel through the park after dusk I had to warn my KWS ranger colleagues ahead of time so as not to get shot. The fence is complicated. People are grateful for its protection, yet sometimes do cut the wire to enter for resources. They illicitly graze their livestock in the perimeter (a grassy 2 meter space between 2 fences that’s technically a part of the park), yet express that as long as wildlife are blocked by the fence it’ll be fine to have large carnivores living just a stone’s throw from their homes.

As it turns out, just as the fence isn’t entirely keeping people out, it’s not keeping wildlife in either.

By walking, hiking, driving, and sometimes jogging along the entire LNNP fence several times, we discovered about 170 weak points where it was clear that wildlife were crossing in and out of the park. KWS rangers, who live in camps within the park, were integral to this effort since they see the fence every day. Using evidence such as fur and tracks (it was the rainy season the first time we did this, so, luckily for us, tracks were abundant), we chose 18 sites at which carnivores were definitely crossing. We posted camera traps (motion sensing cameras) at these stations to get a sense of the fence-crossing behaviors of carnivores and other wildlife, and monitored the cameras for a full year from June 2018-June 2019.

After the year was up, I had my work cut out for me (re-cut? was it ever not being cut…?): sorting the photos. Because most of the cameras had to be within the park facing the weak point or hole (to avoid theft outside of the park), the amount of erroneous grass photos was immense. My team of undergraduate students and I sorted through over 1 million photos, and were left with ~85,000 photos of wildlife doing all sorts of things at the fence line. I then reviewed each of the 85,000 wildlife photos (what better to do indoors on a winter day?) and assigned fence-specific behaviors to the wildlife in each photo (i.e. cross from LNNP, cross to LNNP, searching at hole, vigilant across fence, etc.). One of the first things that has become clear is that carnivores are crossing in and out of LNNP every single day. Baboons and vervet monkeys cross the fence with ease and constantly, warthogs aren’t too far behind the primates in their indifference to fences, and even large ungulates, such as cape buffalo, are also crossing the fence. Wildlife appeared at the fence line on every single camera, every single day. Final results are TBD, but it’s safe to say that the Lake Nakuru National Park fence will bring a new perspective to the current debate about whether conservation fencing is effective, economically viable, and ecologically sustainable.

Major funding for this project: National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, Andrew & Mary Thompson Rocca Foundation

MZUNGU has followed me for my time here in Kenya and every other time I’ve lived in East Africa. It comes in the form of high-pitched screams trailing their Doppler effect through my car window as I drive past a group of schoolchildren, in the form of a deep and demanding voice accompanied by an expectant stare from a man walking by on the street, in the form of idle chat from older women twittering amongst themselves “that MZUNGU should…”, “ask the MZUNGU for…” while I’m standing right next to them understanding every word of Swahili they’re speaking (and they know it). Though it is a noun, meaning “foreigner”, or more frequently, “white person”, the word MZUNGU is so often spoken as a command. MZUNGU as a command means I never have to guess what’s coming next- “Give me a sweet.” “Give me your money.” “Give me your car.” “Give me some food.” From poor to upper middle class, young and old, almost everyone I’ve met here in East Africa has mastered the MZUNGU command and all of the stereotypes living within it.

As a POC student from a lower socioeconomic background branded MZUNGU, I face a number of unique challenges and experiences which resound with me and, frankly, exhaust me each day. Some of these are minor things: being charged double, triple, or 8x the price when buying vegetables or trying to catch a quick lift around town; having crowds of “MZUNGU”-screaming people shove their heads into the doorway to try and catch a glance of the MZUNGU while I’m getting a routine haircut; innocently complimenting someone on their bracelet and that person offering to sell it to me for an exorbitant price (happens every time!); using some Swahili in casual conversation and hearing a nearby stranger exclaim in complete shock that the MZUNGU isn’t speaking “Kizungu”, a colloquial term for English. Other things are more complicated or frustrating: having village chiefs I’ve just met refer to me as “madame” which is a sign of money, status, and higher hierarchy; as a result having my community member research participants look to me for monetary and other gifts (an expectation which not only can I not provide but also may affect my research results) unless explicitly warned ahead of time that I am just a student without extra money; having people I work with talk behind my back about how “that MZUNGU should give us her money”; having people I meet seem completely taken aback when I won’t just give them various things of mine for free (anything from writing pens to my car); strangers insisting on taking photographs with me the moment they meet me, even as I’m insisting “no”; people of all ages and backgrounds following me for blocks on the street and grabbing at my clothes and hands, either to ask me for things or simply to touch me because my skin is a lighter shade of brown; having an acquaintance insist publicly that I take everyone out and treat them to food and drinks at an expensive hotel that even I cannot in my wildest dreams afford, “because you have money of course”. Just recently I was asking a Chief if she knew of a hotel room I could stay in within the village and much to my initial confusion she burst out laughing and said “not for someone of your class” which, since we had just met 5 minutes before, was a reference simply to my skin color. Meanwhile I am in severe debt and many of these people have steady jobs and some semblance of wealth, my knowledge of which makes such interactions with these particular people seem to be a little twist of the knife.

When I ask my Kenyan friends why these things happen, the closest I’ve gotten to an explanation is that in the past, when white missionaries first flooded East Africa, they would hand out gifts and money to convince mass amounts of people to convert to Christianity and attend churches, and that largely because of this and the mainstream media, all foreigners are lumped in with white people and their history here as money-givers. Even today in Kenya, while a regular foreign work permit costs a person thousands of dollars per year, a missionary permit is a mere $50 per year. The MZUNGU is seen and taught to children not only as a source of ever-flowing money, but also a status symbol- hence the insistence on photos. In the words of so many people I’ve met, “The way people see it, the MZUNGU has lots of extra money, so let me help him by taking some off his hands.” Many of my Kenyan friends have been incredulous or utterly shocked to learn about class divides and homelessness in the USA. It is just not what most people learn about us.

My being a POC makes these MZUNGU interactions hold more weight over me than I presume they would otherwise. In the USA, my birthplace and home, I also stand out. Being called “exotic” by white people, having them touch my curly hair without asking, and having people cock their heads and gaze curiously while asking that awful question – “What are you?” – have always been frequent occurrences in my life at home. Growing up as Halfrican, I was never Black enough and never white enough to those around me, and thus found myself in the minority of people who frequently feel unwed to any culture or group- a philosophy which can be both eye-opening… and lonely. Being called a white person (implicitly, via “MZUNGU“, and explicitly, via “you and those other whites…” or “you whites really like…”) while possessing an ethnic history and emotional self-perception of non-whiteness, and having gone through (and still going through) a journey of otherness as a mixed person, instills in me a defiance and an exhaustion with yet again being labeled “other”. It robs me, just a little, of the utter joy I feel whenever I first re-arrive in East Africa and am refreshingly in a country dominated by Blackness. For many people that I meet, I cannot first be seen as a person. I am first seen as an other, and simultaneously as a basket of money, walking on two legs. Rather than having a simple and natural first interaction, I must steel myself, stay calm, and immediately begin the subtle work of undoing the person’s perceptions of me. I do this work- deftly countering the MZUNGUs and the “madame”s with my name (I have a name!) and my story- because only then can I be seen without the MZUNGU filter, and begin a meaningful relationship with that person. When I’m not completely exhausted, I maintain my humor about these situations by making MZUNGU into little jokes with myself- such as saying in Swahili to MZUNGU-screaming kids: “Where is he? I don’t see him!?”, or in response to “Give me sweets!”: “Oh, you’re going to give me sweets? That’s so nice, thank you!” – then there is laughter and for a moment MZUNGU doesn’t seem like such a heavy weight.

By this time you’ve probably noticed my textual portrayal of the word MZUNGU in this post. The way I’ve written it here is the way it feels to me each day, whether it is shouted, snickered, whispered, or implied. It is almost always present, knocking on the back of my eyes like a bright light shined directly in.

I sometimes wonder what a country of fellow Halfricans would be like- would I finally lose my feeling of otherness? Would this just be because we’ve all shared these same experiences at home and when traveling to places we initially and mistakenly think we might feel more belonging? I don’t know. What I do know is that my East African friends and I are doing the quiet work of breaking down these walls, and for that I am grateful. My blessings while living here far exceed the emotional weight and exhaustion I sometimes carry from interactions with people who hold preconceptions. Though I will never know where my enslaved ancestors arrived from so long ago, for so many reasons Kenya will always feel like a home to me.