Guardians: Protectors of Livestock and Livelihoods

Livestock are paramount in Maasailand – they are a form of wealth, and are the lifeblood and livelihood of communities. Guardians help protect local livestock not only because keeping them safe limits the opportunities for lions to prey on them, but also because these efforts show communities that we are there for them. Guardians such…

A New Name for a Long-time Guardian

  Recently, Olubi got some much-deserved recognition from a community in the form of a new name. Here, Lion Guardians’ Assistant Manager, Jackson Kikardi, describes what happened. Two of our Guardians, Olubi and Tonkei, woke up early one morning and began their daily work of tracking lions and helping their community coexist peacefully with predators.…

A meeting with Murrans

Murrans [warriors] are not only critical to Maasai culture; they’re also key to the success of our organization. That’s partly because members of this age class make up the majority of the Guardians themselves, but also because they are an important and active part of the community that Lion Guardians serves. We have begun to…

Four New Guardians Join Our Team

This year, we have experienced extremely high levels of conflict, mostly as a result of heavy rainfall and a booming lion population. And although the communities have been extraordinarily tolerant, we have hired four new Guardians to help proactively mitigate conflict in our operating areas. Our office manager Merishi recently got a chance to catch…

Troubling Times for Lorpait

Our Guardians and lion monitoring team have been particularly busy on the ground this year, mitigating conflict and keeping lions and communities safe. Here’s some recent news from the field from our community manager Eric Ole Kesoi. Lorpait, a male lion born near the western side of Amboseli National Park, had an unusual early life.…

Better Bomas = Less Conflict

In the following dispatch, our program manager Luke Maamai explains how a collaborative project between Lion Guardians and Born Free Foundation will help local lions, livestock, and community members. Much of the decline in the lion population in Africa results from the illegal killing of lions using spears, snares and poisoning in revenge for livestock depredation.…

Big Local Progress on Wildlife Poisoning

Recently, a powerful National Geographic article depicting wildlife poisoning in Africa featured our work and that of many conservation partners, as well as the Kenya Wildlife Service.  And while poisoning is a critically important conservation issue, we would like to share that we actually experience very little poisoning in the Amboseli-Tsavo group ranches where we…

Planting Seeds for the Future

Last week, we held an outreach event at a local primary school. Here’s a dispatch about the event from our office manager Merishi. The event was a follow up of the previous meeting that was held during the World Lion Day. During the first meeting, Lion Guardians and the participants agreed to participate in a…