Climate change changes animal behavior in Africa – 05/13/2023 – Environment

On a sweltering afternoon in the tiny Kenyan village of Njoro Mata, a farmer desperately surveys the damage done by elephants to her smallholding.

These animals, a symbol of Kenya, have been invading the lands of Monicah Muthike Moki in the south of the country, near Mount Kilimanjaro.

The 48-year-old woman is a single mother of three children whose livelihood depends on her hard work planting cassava, corn, bananas, sugar cane and mangoes.

Their harvest increased after employing new farming methods introduced with the help of the Kenya Red Cross, but in recent months, everything has been destroyed by elephants.

Moki says the animals come every day from Tsavo National Park, one of the largest sanctuaries in the world, home to around 15,000 elephants.

About 40% of Kenya’s entire elephant population lives there.

According to her, ranchers cut the park fence so that their oxen could access the pastures inside, but the elephants cross in the other direction.

Amid back-to-back years of poor rainfall, ranchers are desperate to feed their animals, while elephants have begun to wander farther afield in search of sustenance.

The new animal behavior patterns are driven by the escalating climate crisis and drought in Kenya, making conflicts between animals and humans become more and more frequent.

For Moki, the elephant attack on the crops is “very painful” to see.

She says elephants are “bold” and “not afraid”. The animals, according to Moki, can come at any time, but usually at dusk, and they attack in groups, in pairs or sometimes individually with their young.

The elephants recently ate their entire crop of maize, bananas and cassava.

temporary shelter

If not for the elephants, Moki would have been harvesting five to six 200-pound bags of maize that he would sell at the local market in the nearby town of Taveta for 6,500 Kenyan shillings (R$236).

But without her harvest, she cannot feed her family or sell her produce to pay for her ten-year-old daughter’s schooling.

Farmers in her village also use the bags of maize they harvest as a deposit or payment of school fees for their children to attend the local primary school.

In turn, schools use maize to make children’s meals.

Now children as young as four are forced to walk up to four kilometers for lunch before walking the same distance in the opposite direction in the afternoon.

Elephants, the world’s largest land animal, can consume 150 kg of food a day, and spend up to three-quarters of the day eating.

Moki explains that they often leave “nothing behind”.

They also drink 100 liters of water a day — including from reservoirs with water that residents receive from local authorities to use for irrigation.

homemade alarm system

It’s a vicious cycle that, according to Moki, only gets worse.

She tries to deter the elephants with bright lights and loud noises. She also developed several makeshift techniques to stop them from invading her crops.

Moki uses old water and oil bottles around the farm connected with a string to serve as a warning for her to get up and react if the elephants hit them.

“I climb a ladder, shine my flashlight on them and make noise because you can’t get close to the elephants,” he says.

Every night, she sleeps away from her family alone on the farm, agonized by the rustling of gallons or the barking of dogs.

Unfortunately, her inventions don’t deter the elephants, but at least alert her to their presence.

These animals can be extremely dangerous.

“If an elephant hurts or kills me, my family will suffer,” says Moki.

‘Near death’ experience

Her neighbor, Jonathan Mulinge, a farmer and father of four young children, says he had a recent near-death experience with an elephant.

He tried to stop one from destroying his crops, but the animal turned and attacked him.

“The only thing that saved my life was that I managed to outrun the elephant and take refuge at home,” he says.

Mulinge says this is “a conflict between us humans and the elephant” in which farmers like him pay the highest price.

“You plant your crops so you can benefit from them, and then the elephants come and destroy them, and the farmers are back to square one.”

The community feels helpless and blames the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), the Kenyan government’s environmental agency, for not doing enough to help them.

The BBC reached out to the KWS but did not hear back at the time of writing.

Moki says the situation is becoming untenable.

It also alleges that its concerns were ignored by the authorities.

Joram Oranga of the Kenya Red Cross argues that arid conditions, lack of rain and extreme weather patterns caused by climate change are driving human-elephant conflict due to dwindling land and water resources, something he says it will only “get worse” in the future.

For Moki, this conflict is taking a toll on her mental health, made worse by her extreme lack of sleep.

She suffers from anxiety and panic attacks and fears for her children’s future if an elephant kills her.

“I’m scared because if I leave,” she says, “who will take care of them?”