Aidan Hartley is the Spectator's Wild Life columnist.
Maasai Mara Last night the hyenas made off with our fudge cake. We are camped with a group of four families on the banks of the Mara river, waiting for the wildebeest migration. During the night hours, tucked up in our sleeping bags, only slivers of canvas divide us from the African bush. It
Laikipia, Kenya A minotaur head glowers at me through the bathroom window while I am brushing my teeth in the morning. It’s George the bull, who wants his ears scratched. After I get dressed, it’s time to select a cattle stick, known here as a finbo, from an umbrella stand stuffed with crooks, wands, withies,
Laikipia I wake at 4 a.m. these days. At that time you might hear a lion or a braying zebra, but the birds and bullfrogs are quiet under the constellations. False dawn comes an hour later with the liquid song of sandgrouse and the bustards cackling as they angle into the first light. Just before
Laikipia, Kenya Neighbours Tom and Jo came by with a bucketful of wild African mushrooms, which they had collected in old cattle bomas on the way to the farm. I asked: ‘How do you know they are not toadstools?’ Tom said you could peel the caps, the gills were dark brown, not white, there was
Why would anyone who claims to care about the world’s poorest children try to shut down their schools? It’s strange and sad, but several British charities, in cahoots with some British unions, are making a concerted effort to close down hundreds of schools in Africa. They are doing this because they dislike private education, seeming
Laikipia, Kenya Erupe is a Kenyan farmer. He owns a smallholding of a few acres not far from my own place. When we meet our talk is usually about the vagaries that preoccupy farmers: crops, rain, livestock diseases and market prices. On his little patch he built a dwelling from mud and wattle with a
Laikipia, Kenya Before vets put him down in Kenya this week, I attended the deathbed of Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhinoceros, to observe up close what extinction looks like. Like a king he lay on his side, all 2,800 kilos of him. For millennia, his species had been one of
Laikipia Off Madagascar the other day the Indian Ocean gave birth to a little storm called 11S. As its gyre turned clockwise over the sea, 11S gained momentum until it was a huge vortex of thunder and lightning christened Tropical Cyclone Dumazile. Like a naughty lover yanking away the shower curtain so that everything in
In the early 1980s when I was a schoolboy, my father, Brian Hartley, worked for Oxfam during a famine in Uganda’s Kara-moja. Like Dad, the other Oxfam people I remember in East Africa were earnest agriculturalists or engineers who had been overseas most of their lives. Some of them were religious or socialist, but they
Laikipia I woke with the breath of a leopard a few feet from me as I lay in my bed. Before he came there were the sounds of Laikipia’s darkness: nightjars, insects, a wandering hyena. Then it all went abruptly silent and I heard him exhale, just on the other side of the bedroom door.
Kenya First comes a distant hum, rising in volume until I hear it coming straight at me like Niki Lauda behind the wheel of his Ferrari. The blue sky darkens. I duck as swarming bees zoom overhead, trailing their queen. They are gone again in a second, coiling off in a shadowy murmuration across the
Laikipia, Kenya The zebra lacks a rumen and eats at least twice as much as a cow. On our modest Kenyan ranch we run several hundred head of Boran cattle. In our arid conditions, this number is carefully calculated on a stocking rate of so many beasts to the acre. If you add hundreds
Laikipia Flying home across Laikipia’s ranchlands with Martin after a farmers’ meeting, I see the plateau dotted with cattle and elephants. Stretching away towards the north, it is all green after good rains. I think to myself that farming is hard enough without having to deal with toxic politics: will there be a drought,
Laikipia Ripping up the black cotton soil on the farm’s high savannah I get a sense of what it must have been like to be a sodbuster on the Great Plains of America 150 years ago. Riding my big yellow tractor I find it thrilling to plunge through virgin land that has been innocent since
Laikipia, Kenya Following Kenya’s recently concluded elections, I took a walk on my Laikipia farm and lit up a cigar, stale because I had saved it for a day when I might hear a bit of good news that never seemed to come. I felt it was the end of a terrifying five-year ordeal when
Indian Ocean coast Like most men I wonder if I have been much good as a father, but one thing I got right was that I gave our children, Eve and Rider, the Indian Ocean. Before they could even walk my Claire taught her babies to feel happy splashing about in the sandy coral pools
Kenya We are on the beach, where our home is full of dystopian stories. My daughter Eve is whizzing through her A-level summer reading list, and as we share her books around we all have our noses in post-third world war Australia, the Republic of Gilead, in a submarine London and totalitarian future states.
Laikipia, Kenya During our evening walk on the farm, Claire kept looking around nervously instead of engaging in conversation. At one point the dogs ran ahead, probably thinking that they were after the scent of a rabbit. Seconds later, they tore back past us, leaving a trail of dust, and heading after them came
The guests at my brother-in-law Rick’s 70th birthday lunch party were distinguished, silver-haired, well heeled. Long before Rick rescued the Rothschild’s giraffe from extinction, and did so many other things for wildlife conservation in Africa, I remember him and his friends in the 1970s. The chap sitting opposite me at table, now big in IT,
Laikipia, Kenya On my way home to the ranch, I stopped for a beer with my neighbour Martin. It was twilight and large herds of cattle were being brought into the yards around Martin’s house for the night. Pokot militias had been attacking for days, trying to rustle cattle and shooting at anybody in sight.
