Wild life | 1 November 2018

Laikipia

  My two Jersey bulls Halcyon and Hosanna were grazing happily on the lawn in front of the house when a pride of lion breached the 7,500-volt high-security fence enclosing our garden, pounced on the cattle and broke both of their necks. I am down by 24 sheep so far this year thanks to the old leopard who patrols the hillside above us. A cheetah boldly tried to grab a calf in the valley the other day. The pasture grass I planted at huge expense has attracted great numbers of oryx, buffalo, zebra, eland, gazelles and warthog. The electric fences I placed around the perimeter of the farm have completely failed to keep out the roaming elephant, giraffe and plains game. In my lucerne field, we attempted to get rid of the termite colonies by digging into their mounds until we found the white slug queens at the heart of the brain-like masses of fungal combs — but despite killing several of these the efforts were ultimately fruitless. Within weeks fresh mounds appeared, spreading their mud capillaries across the soil, building earth chimneys heavenwards — and then in moved the ant-eating aardvarks. And so after 15 years of struggling as a neophyte rancher, losing money and stoking my blood pressure, at last I can say that I have been remarkably successful at rewilding the African bush. If you looked only at our farm, and avoided reading the news, you might find it absurd to hear that there are only 7,000 cheetah in the world and perhaps just three or four times that number of lion. About 70 years ago there were few zebra left in our county of Laikipia because they had all been slaughtered to feed Italian prisoners of war incarcerated on the western slopes of Mount Kenya. At times on our plains today zebra seem as common as starlings, despite my best efforts to keep them out of the land.