… so called because of their habit of dousing themselves with Tsavo’s iron-rich soil.
Tsavo East is one the largest parks in the world, covering 5,000 square miles. Together with its neighbour, Tsavo West, on the other side of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, this adds up to nearly 9,000 square miles of designated wildlife reserve.
The map gives little clue of Tsavo East’s vast wilderness. The solid drawn lines of the designated parks suggest containment, but this is not the case. While areas near human settlement maybe fenced, elsewhere the boundaries are largely permeable. In 1994 the then director of Kenya Wildlife Service, Dr. David Western, famously stated that there was more wildlife outside the parks than in them. He also believed in protecting the free movement of animals, and especially in the one small park whose access was increasingly under threat from human settlement, i.e. Nairobi’s city park. This is still an ongoing issue, the one-time corridor from the southerly plains all but closed.
The business of maintaining wildlife areas is fraught with problems. Elephants may invade farms and destroy a season’s food crops in a few moments. In times of drought, starving farmers may resort to age-old habits of hunting game for food. It is also a fact that elephants can kill people if they feel threatened. Lions and buffalo and crocodiles kill people too. Then there is ivory poaching, small-scale and big-crime funded. The latter comes with highly armed gangs with automatic weapons. So it’s hats off to wildlife rangers who try to do their best by all concerned, and may risk their own lives in the process.
I don’t seem to have many photos from our stay in Tsavo East. I remember the weather was mostly gloomy and driving along dirt tracks for hours without seeing a thing. But the photos at this site are well worth a look.
