Tracking rhinos and elephants with Maasai rangers

Senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown writes from Amboseli National Park, where he is reporting on elephants endangered by the rise in poaching. On Tuesday, he played with baby elephants in an orphanage in Nairobi National Park.

Brown is also in Kenya to report on the Storymoja Festival, a week-long celebration of storytelling. The festival comes one year after the attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, during which Ghanaian poet and author Kofi Awoonor was murdered. Awoonor was a speaker at least year’s festival.

On a hunt for rhinos, senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown follows Big Life rangers in the bush in Amboseli National Park. Big Life rangers track animals in an effort to protect them from poachers. Photo by Molly Raskin

We are hiking through the bush in an area just outside Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya. Every so often we feel the sharp pinch of the thorns that bite into our clothes and skin; impossible to avoid altogether, the rangers we’re with are good about gently raising branches and brambles to clear a path. They are members of the Big Life Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting elephants and rhinos against poachers. We’ve joined an afternoon patrol of six rangers led by Joseph Kotoke Meikoki, who laughs as he tells us of the “short walk” we’ll be taking.

To these two elephants, this is playing, but to us, an elephant charging like this would be very dangerous. Photo by Molly Raskin

These men, all local Maasai tribesmen, are part of a 300-strong group of Big Life rangers, who typically go out for eight hours at a time, tracking animals to monitor their movements, looking for signs of poachers intent on killing them for their tusks or horns and responding quickly when a report of danger – or worse, a killing – comes in.

This particular area is one where rhinos roam. And the rangers know them all.

After a half-hour or so, we come to a small clearing and Joseph tells me we’ve reached the boundary line marking the territories of two bull rhinos – “Lari” (“green” in Maasai) on one side, “Dixon” (named for a longtime ranger) on the other.

Elephants have poor eyesight but a keen sense of smell. They use their trunks, not just for eating, but for sensing what is and what is not a threat. Photo by Molly Raskin

Today, Joseph decides, the rangers will look for Lari – or signs of danger to him. Along the way, Joseph shows us how what look like dry branches actually hold water in them, and how the rhinos bend and break them to drink. We find rhino dung – about two days old, the rangers say — and some openings in the brush that look recently cleared by a large animal. But no Lari, not on this day. Better news: We find no signs of danger for Lari.

Ambolesi National Park in southern Kenya is one of the few places in the world where elephants can be see in large herds. Photo by Molly Raskin

On the way back, Joseph tells us it’s actually better that we didn’t run into Lari or another rhino. Apparently, when frightened they just might charge you. And that is not a pleasant experience. “Now you tell us,” we say. Joseph just laughs.

It’s incredibly difficult and painstaking work these rangers do, but increasingly necessary as elephants and rhinos are being slaughtered all over Africa. Amboseli, we’re learning, is a small success story – requiring constant vigilance – in a much larger catastrophe.