Connecting Communities and Wildlife for a Conservation Win

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Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Rick Schwartz bos the s World.

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Speaker 2: I'm Marco Winn.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Amazing Wildlife, where we explore unique.

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Speaker 3: Stories of wildlife from around the world and uncovered fascinating animal facts. This podcast is a production of iHeartRadio's Ruby Studios and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and international nonprofit conservation organization.

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Speaker 1: Which oversees the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park.

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Speaker 3: Hey, Marco, you remember back a couple episodes when we were talking about nocturnal animals.

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Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, totally, man, I remember that we talked about owls and raccoons and bats and all sorts of nighttime adaptations.

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Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.

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Speaker 3: What do you think of the idea about taking sort of a broader look at some savannah species like leopards, gravity, zebras, and rangeland grasses.

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Speaker 2: Huh?

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Speaker 4: You know, I really dig the idea of talking about multiple species, but I'm not sure I completely follow the rangeland grasses connection. It's where wildlife lives, but it's not really a species of wildlife we normally talk about.

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Speaker 1: Yes, yes, exactly, and that's true.

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Speaker 3: And when we were first talking about having this episode focus on the savannah conservation hub. I was really having a hard time, honestly deciding on which species of wildlife to spotlight.

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Speaker 2: Oh man, that's understandable. I mean, there are lines we featured in episode two. There are the giraffes that we just talked about.

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Speaker 4: Also, I thought you said you were leaning towards leopards or grevy zebra.

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Speaker 3: Well, yes, I am, or at least I was, But I mean I still am. Okay, okay, Well I know I'm not being clear and I'm sorry.

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Speaker 1: But here's what happened.

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Speaker 3: I started talking to our conservation team and was learning about how San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance supports and works with several conservation groups in Kenya. And like you said, I was leaning towards leopards or grevy zebra.

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Speaker 4: That's a tough one, friend. I mean, do you go stripes, do you go spots? So did you end up choosing one?

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Speaker 3: Kind of sort of bull So, you see, the more I learned about the conservation work being done for both species stripes and spots, the more I've learned there are a lot of parallels to the work being done, or a lot of work that is the same, are similar that's being done for each species, and most of it comes together at the community level. In other words, the communities of people who live across the Kenyan rangelands where hundreds of different species of mammals, birds, and reptiles live are doing incredible conservation work.

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Speaker 4: Oh yeah, definitely, I've heard about this. I really love the human wildlife connection and how plant life is a part of this conversation. Oh, Migel, you got me super pumped about this show.

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Speaker 3: Now, well, I'm super pumped that you're super pumped because I just happen to know the perfect person to talk to about this.

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Speaker 5: I am Tamas Pickering. I am a senior researcher here at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, working in community engagement. I'm working on the human dimension side of our conservation efforts, mostly for our Kenyan.

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Speaker 3: Demas's really is amazing work, and Marco and I were just talking about how I couldn't decide on one particular species to focus on for this episode, and this work, honestly is the reason. Why can you tell us more about how your work impacts the wildlife of Kenya?

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Speaker 5: Oh?

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Speaker 4: Actually, can you hold on just one little second at the butterfest, I want to hear about that too, for sure, but Domas, can you give us first and our listeners an idea of the bigger picture of the work in Kenya.

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Speaker 5: I would say Kenya is unique in some ways in that it's one of a few countries at the forefront of community based conservation. They have a massive movement in establishing and supporting from the central government level a community based conservation movement. So now in Kenya, many community areas and villages have come together and established what are called community conservancies. And these community conservancies are working not only for the purposes of doing wildlife conservation, but they're also working to improve their livelihoods. And they have this kind of dual role set up there to help manage land and make land use and planning decisions with communities for these different purposes.

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Speaker 3: And I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of these communities are pastoral communities, and for the listeners that may not know, because honestly, I didn't know until about ten years ago. A pastoral community is a community that lives with the land, moving herds of goats or cows on foot. They move around as needed to keep their herds safe and fed.

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Speaker 4: No Yeah, man, thanks for the clarification, right, I mean, it's worth noting that they don't live in cities or even small towns like many of us do. Here exactly the mus How do we is San Diegazoo Wildlife Alliance fit into this part of the conservation puzzle?

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Speaker 5: Our role as San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is much more as a supporting partner to these community conservancies and other NGOs on the ground, working with them directly. And then my role more specifically is on that human dimensions front to better understand the conversation that is going on in the community, their motivations, their challenges, what they're experiencing, to help them better address and accomplish their goals around conservation.

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Speaker 4: Why is this such an important part of saving wildlife like leopards or zebras. There are protected areas like national parks and wildlife reserves in Kenya, aren't there?

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Speaker 5: In Kenya? There are limitations to how far you can grow the protected areas the formal national parks or the formal national reserve kind of system. Right now, those take up about approximately ten percent of the land area in Kenya. But outside of those parks, it's something like sixty five seventy percent of wildlife live outside of the existing parks and national reserves in Kenya. So there's a huge amount of conservation potential in these community lands as well as there's a huge amount of desire from the communities to increase the benefits that they can get from wildlife, whether that's from tours, whether that's from different types of ecosystem services, to be able to live on a healthy landscape and coexist with wildlife in a way that works for them and their culture and livelihoods.

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Speaker 3: Wow, when you put it like that, listing those numbers at sixty five to seventy percent of the wildlife living outside of the parks and reserves, it really puts things into perspective.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that really is a much higher number than I thought.

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Speaker 4: So, Tomus, what are the different species of wildlife that this community conservation is impacting?

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Speaker 2: Are these communities focused on.

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Speaker 4: Specific species or is it several different kinds of wildlife?

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Speaker 5: Yes, so these are many of the large mammal species that Kenya is kind of iconically known for and or across the savannahs of East and Southern Africa. So these are the savannah elephants, These are African lion, leopard, cheetah. We have Grevy zebra also in northern Kenya and endangered species up there. We have vulture species, We have lots of species of antelope, buffalo, giraffe, black rhino, so numerous species living in these grasslands and savannahs.

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Speaker 3: Domas I was lucky enough a few years back to go to Kenya and visit with a few of our conservation partners, one of which was Grevy Zebra Trust. Can you share with our audience the work that they do, because honestly, I'm sure you'll do a much better job of it than me trying to explain it.

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Speaker 5: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is very happy to be supporting Grevy Zebra Trust. Just last year we established a new partnership with them where we're more directly supporting their healing rangelands in northern Kenya, and that program is set to help villages and communities come together to do planned grazing management with their livestock. So this is establishing wet and dry season grazing areas and it's also working with those communities to train them in rangeland restoration practices. So that would be the removal of unwanted or invasive plant speed. This would be helping with challenges around soil erosion. It may be receding native grasses back into these areas to help re establish better pastures both for livestock and for wildlife.

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Speaker 3: Wow.

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Speaker 4: So the communities are working to manage what is happening with the land for their herts. But because they're doing it by removing invasive plants and receding native grasses, it benefits to wildlife in the area as well.

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Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, So the receding of grasses will benefit the grazing wildlife, right, especially a species like revy zebra that enjoy feeding on grass and coarse grasses. It will also benefit many other species in that sense, so gazelle and pala It will benefit also even elephants and anything that would use those resources and that shared landscape. I think the key is that you know, when you establish planned grazing, you can set aside spaces for wildlife conservation, but then those same spaces can also sometimes act as your route forage reserve for your livestock, a place to go when everything else has been used up. So it's for the benefit of the community to plan these areas out both for the wildlife as well as for their livestock in that sense.

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Speaker 3: And Tomas, when I first reached out to you, I was asking about the Grevy Zebra conservation work and the other conservation groups we work with, and you had mentioned that sometimes these communities will host other communities to teach them what they have learned about restoring native grasses.

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Speaker 5: Yeah. So we are now also supporting a community based organization women's group called the Chewy Moments which means Leopard Mothers in Swahili. They are a newer organization close to Loisaba Conservancy where many of our programs are headquartered. We are supporting them to get training through Grevy Zebra Trust in these rangeland restoration practices. So Grevy Zebra Trust, they were able a few months ago to travel up to Westgate Conservancy where Grevyerrat Trees as headquartered and visit with the Grevi's Mamas, another women's based organization up there, and to see and learn about the successful work that they've accomplished up there in rangeland restoration in planned grazing. Then Grevy Zebra Trust has also come down to the Chewy Mamas center and conducted trainings there for the women and other community members to practice out and start doing demonstration sites in rangeland restoration practices.

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Speaker 4: I love that the Chewy Malmas and Grevy Malmas are visiting each other and sharing knowledge.

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Speaker 2: I mean, my Mama Levema, she has got to set it out to ma.

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Speaker 4: When she has her mind set on something front, she gets stuff done. I can almost feel the mama energy here in San Diego. But I have to ask that Chewy Mamas are the community group that is working in leopard conservation, a species that is a carnivore, but they also work to restore grasses.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's a bit complex, but the idea here is that the Chewy Mamas are working to reduce conflict with carnivores. So the main challenges around leopard conservation or a lion conservation is that many carnivore species will predate and feed on livestock from these communities, especially sheep and goats. And if the women can more successfully grow and re establish a healthy rangeland system with productive grasses, this is going to benefit all of the prey species of carnivores. So our hope is to decrease conflict. So you're increasing benefits for the livestock, but you're also reducing the risks of conflict.

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Speaker 1: This is such a great approach to conservation. I love it.

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Speaker 3: I mean, just a few decades ago, the idea of conservation was to fence off habitat and focus on saving a single species, but time has proven that isn't always a realistic or completely successful approach for some regions.

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Speaker 2: And to add to that Rick it just makes so much more sense too.

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Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, it's complex, but if we're truly going to see some long term success in conservation, we.

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Speaker 2: Have to look at the big picture of the ecosystems that wildlife and habits.

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Speaker 5: Absolutely, I'm very enthusiastic and excited for this strategy moving forward. It's a new strategy for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Mostly we've focused on more directly reducing the costs and helping the chewing mamas and families in these communities that we work in reduce the chances of carnivore attacks by increasing protection around their livestock corrals at night. So we're more having a direct intervention on some of these fronts. And now this is the long term strategy to help us at our contribution to the very large landscape and help create a system that will be sustainable in the long term and not require our assistance all the time.

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Speaker 3: This really is an exciting strategy and one that really makes sense when you think about it. But I want to ask a follow up question, what has caused so many invasive or non native plants to come into the landscape?

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Speaker 5: Yeah, so the invasive plants, it depends on which species. There's multiple species that they're working on managing and controlling. Most of them are taking over and getting established because the landscape has already been degraded as a summary term, due to overgrazing.

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Speaker 4: So eremano, is it fair to say that human activity of the past has created an adverse impact on the rangeland habitat and now they're approaching it at this angle?

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Speaker 2: It's really up to humans to solve this challenge, right.

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Speaker 5: Yes, absolutely, I do think humans can solve this challenge, and these communities can solve this challenge. They have made massive strides in that direction already by establishing community conservancies and this new form of community based conservation. It allows them to better coordinate with one another and use both a mix of their traditional systems of decision making around where to go graze, as well as now new information from research and science and support from international andngos like ourselves or from the central Government of Kenya and working with the Kenyan government to better plan grazing, to better plan wildlife management. There's a lot of opportunities that this has allowed them.

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Speaker 3: In one of our previous episodes, we were fortunate enough to talk to our conservation partners at a wattle lions We learned about how much pride the community took in its work to save the lions of their region. Would you say, Tomas, that the same pride and enthusiasm exists within these other communities as well.

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Speaker 5: Definitely, the Cheery Mamas. I've been fortunate enough to now visit them at least three different times on trips to Kenya over the last few years, and they are very enthusiastic and very prideful that they can have an impact. They want to take control over their lives. They want to be able to secure the future for their children, be able to send their kids to school, be able to raise their livestock, to support their family, to support their culture, and I think they are very excited to learn these rangeland restoration practices. This is a first step to kind of empower them and have the tools to make a difference in that kind of long term strategy.

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Speaker 2: Ah, this makes my heart smile.

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Speaker 4: Empowering the people to be the stewards of their home environment so that all life can benefit.

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Speaker 2: Just hearing about this makes me want to do even more to get involved and support this work. The musk can I ask you, what is it about this work that excites you.

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Speaker 5: I'm very excited to get to support this community based conservation approach. To me, it is probably one of the most hopeful strategies for conservation across the globe where we're likely to have a lot of success. As I was mentioning earlier, there's limited land remaining that is true wilderness if there ever was that, you know, true wilderness kind of concept of land. To begin with, There's always been indigenous groups and communities living across these landscapes and so establishing systems of kind of this fortress conservation mentality of setting up these hard boundaries between where wildlife are supposed to live and where people are supposed to live really misses the point in my mind, it separates off and limits where you can have abundant wildlife and abundant people that are coexisting in the landscape together. So this communities conservation and the efforts that we're supporting through the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance are really opening up the landscape and the possibilities of how far conservation can go. It's not just the government right that convation. It's for all of us. Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Well, I am curious though, with your experiences and the work you have done thus far with our partners across Kenya, would you project that this is the future of conservation or to ask it another way, do you project that this is the way we will see success moving forward and finding balance to maintain wildlife alongside humans overall?

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Speaker 5: Yes, I think it's at least a very important stepping stone in that direction and setting up systems that are international systems where we're all contributing to and supporting the wildlife and conservation that we all benefit from across the globe. So, for instance, also in these community conservancies. Very recently, another partner of ours, Northern Range Than Trust, has helped establish a currency questration program and project for the rangelands of these community conservancies, so I think those types of economic systems are also needed in conjunction with these community conservancies or community based approaches. I think historically they absolutely could do it alone. They truly have. I've learned to live with wildlife and many respects these pastoral groups in Kenya for thousands of years. But it's a different world now and there's no reason for them to do it alone when we can all work together because it's to all our benefit.

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Speaker 4: I have to admit, speaking with you, Frond has really given me a lot of hope for the future of conservation. Would you say, seeing how this program is going right now, that you're pretty optimistic about the future.

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Speaker 5: Yeah. I definitely am optimistic overall for the future, both of conservation kind of worldwide as well as in Kenya specifically. I think there's a lot of exciting new strategies that we are filing out as well as other conservation partners are trialing, and I think the next challenge will be upscaling having the government policies and the economic systems in place that allow and support for community based conservation to naturally spread where it's not top down dictated and directed, but it's done through the common servation, goals and will of the people on the ground.

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Speaker 3: And I think that's what's really so impressive and what will give this work longevity that people want it, they are creating it and showing.

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Speaker 1: The world how community conservation works.

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Speaker 3: Demas, thank you so much for taking the time to share all of this with us today.

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Speaker 5: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed and appreciate the conversation with you. It's nice to be able to talk about this.

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Speaker 1: So what do you think, Marco, Does it make sense to you now.

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Speaker 3: Why I could not just focus on one species of wildlife for this episode.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, man, I totally get it.

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Speaker 4: Honestly, my mind is spinning around all the possible ways community conservation like this could be replicated around the world. Many indigenous peoples of the world have lived in a symbiotic relationship with the earth. I mean communities like my families as an example, the Sapple tech, the Yacky people thriving for hundreds, if not thousands of years alongside wildlife and the vibrant lands of Mexico. I mean, so many indigenous people already know the land and wildlife better than anyone, and especially to understand the connectivity of all living things. Chief Seattle of the Suquamist and Duwamist tribes of North America has this quote that really resonates in conservation. For me, it's the earth does not belong to man, that man belongs to the earth. We need to listen to understand and.

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Speaker 2: Support these communities.

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Speaker 4: And now this partnership with conservation groups, I mean utilizing technology and funding can help make a greater impact in today's world. Diverse cultures of humanity working together to positively impact not only human lives, but wildlife as well.

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Speaker 2: Man, this is just incredible.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm right there with you, buddy.

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Speaker 3: I absolutely love that quote from Chief Seattle to really well placed, I think, especially for this episode, and I really hope our listeners gained some insight to how everything is so interconnected. Like you mentioned, I love hearing about the Chewy Mamas whose focus is on leopard conservation, a carnivore, but they went and spa time with the Grevis Mamas of the Grevy's Zebra Trust to learn how to bring grassland restoration back into their own area.

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Speaker 4: Yeah. No, right, And it makes sense when you think about it. Healthy grasslands means healthy herbivores, and that means healthy carnivores like leopards and lions.

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Speaker 3: And when those carnivores have healthy natural food chain, well they are less likely to be interested in hunting the community's livestocks as well.

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Speaker 1: It's all connected, Oh for sure.

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Speaker 4: I mean it just goes to show you, Rick, when we say San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is working to create a world where all life thrives.

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Speaker 2: I mean, we mean it.

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Speaker 1: So true, Marco, so true.

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Speaker 4: I have to admit, Rick, I'm really enjoying learning more about the intricate details of our conservation work. Makes me proud to be an ally for wildlife and human kind.

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Speaker 3: Well, I'm happy to hear you say you're excited about the conservation work, because the other day I was in our conservation center of the Beckmann Center and spend some time with our conservation technology team.

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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, how was that?

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Speaker 3: Well, let's just say, all the advanced technology that we get to enjoy, from algorithms to AI to easy data transfer and imagery technology go well beyond social media and video games.

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Speaker 4: What I would love to join in in that conversation with the conservation technology team.

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Speaker 2: Can we do an episode on that.

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Speaker 1: Oh, I think we should, Marco, I think we should.

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Speaker 3: All right, everyone, be sure to subscribe and tune into our next episode, in which Marco and I explore how AI is supporting conservation technology across several of our conservation.

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Speaker 2: Hubs at PIMO. I'm Marco Went.

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Speaker 1: And I'm Rick Schwartz. Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 3: For more information about the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park, go.

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Speaker 1: To SVZWA dot org.

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Speaker 3: Amazing Wildlife is a production of iHeartRadio's Ruby Studios. Our supervising producer is Nikiah Swinton, and our sound designer and editor is Sierra Spreen. For more shows from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.