Uganda Wildlife Authority rangers. For game rangers, protecting wildlife has become a life-threatening mission. PHOTO | MORGAN MBABAZI
On July 31, Uganda joined the rest of the world in commemorating World Ranger Day, albeit in a low-key manner. Rangers are, the Thin Greenline Foundation notes, the last frontier between species and ecosystems on the one hand, and those who would want to destroy them on the other hand. Confronted by conflict, smuggling or poaching, it is the duty of the rangers to provide effective protection at any cost.
And what a cost. This year alone, 140 rangers in 37 countries are reported to have lost their lives while working to protect nature. Across the last decade, 1,300 rangers have died in the line of duty, per the International Ranger Federation (IRF). By its own admission, the IRF says many ranger deaths go unreported and unrecorded due to the remoteness of their work.
“Another concerning trend is that again we see homicides make up the majority of ranger deaths (27 percent), followed by animal encounters (26 percent). This highlights the many life-threatening risks rangers face in their fieldwork, and why it is essential to ensure rangers are appropriately trained and resourced to face these risks…,” IRF says.
At any rate, this job, which, among others, involves taking punishing treks is, pun unintended, no walk in the park. The Thin Greenline Foundation’s dataset shows that 42 rangers in 17 African countries have died this year. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Kenya, and Tanzania are among the African countries with the highest number of casualties. They join Kazakhstan, whose 10 rangers lost to a forest fire contributed to Europe’s tally. Meanwhile, India registered 43 deaths, which contributed to Asia’s tally of 74.
“I love this job because I am interested in conserving wildlife and this protected area, preserve it, and protect these resources for future generations,” Lance Corporal Sam Droma, who joined the Uganda Wildlife Authority as a ranger in 2009 after training for one year, says.
Fascinating work
The work is never boring, says Private Gloria Asasira, a 40-year-old mother of two. To get into the ranger service, she underwent a six-month course with UWA.
“Every day, you meet different people, and you get a new experience by interacting with these new visitors,” Asasira, who has worked in both the Mgahinga and Bwindi national parks, says.
The love that rangers have for animals in the wild is there for all to see. Droma tells Saturday Monitor that his grandfather once said “some animals help us to tell the weather and climate change, when the rains will start, when drought will occur, and the danger from other wild species.”
The 42-year-old father of two adds of his grandfather: “He said it was not always good to kill wild animals, but also conserve them for our common good. This is what influenced me to become a ranger later in my adulthood.”
Gloria Noheri, who became a ranger in 2018 after coming through a 41-month training programme with UWA, says: “As a ranger, I am conserving the wildlife in this park, and not only in Bwindi but also in the community.”
Noheri was among the rangers who recently hiked the steep terrain of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park to trek the Kanywani gorilla group. The goal was to locate the nests where the apes had spent the night before. During the trek, our group, which included scientists, came across a small L’Hoest’s guenon (Cercopithecus l’hoesti) monkey with light grey cheeks perched in a tree. We also saw a black-and-white colobus (Colobus guereza) that was feeding on wild fruits in a tree. We then finally encountered the neat night nests made of tree branches and leaves in the Kanyarutokye area. This was in the northern sector of Bwindi in southwestern Uganda near the Uganda-DRC border.
Cleaning up
Every day, the endangered mountain gorillas (gorilla beringei) defecate in their nests where they spent the night. New nests are then built in other areas of the park for the next night. During our trek, rangers and scientists collected part of the warm faecal samples in specimen containers before placing them in a portable freezer. The ape’s faecal samples were then taken to a nearby lab at the Gorilla Health and Community Conservation Centre. The centre, which is managed by Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), analyses the faecal matters for any possible zoonotic diseases.
“Gorillas defecate in their night nests as part of their natural behaviour, but this necessitates the construction of new nests each day to maintain hygiene and health. This normally happens in the morning just after waking up,” Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, a veterinarian who is also the founder of the CTPH, discloses, adding: “By building new nests daily, they minimise the accumulation of faeces and other waste, which helps to reduce the risk of parasites and diseases that could spread through the group. This behaviour is a crucial part of their survival strategy, ensuring their living environment remains clean, and that they stay healthy.”
Per Kalema-Zikusoka, “building new nests each night allows gorillas to choose safe and comfortable locations. These, she adds, “can vary depending on food availability and environmental conditions.”
When we got to the location where the Kanywani gorilla group was, we learnt that it had six members from one family. These include one silverback called Kanywani, three adult females, one sub-adult, and a one-month-old infant yet to be assigned a name by UWA.
Currently, there are 459 endangered gorillas living in the 331 square kilometres of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, which has been recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) as a World Heritage Site. The biologically diverse region in southwestern Uganda that crisscrosses the three districts of Kisoro, Kabale and Kanungu also provides shelter to a further 120 mammals. These, per UWA, include several primate species such as baboons and chimpanzees, as well as elephants and antelopes. There are around 350 species of birds hosted in this forest, including 23 Albertine Rift endemics.
Territorial
Three hundred and fifty metres into our trek, we found some group members led by Kanywani up the Ficus natalensis tree. They were feeding on the ficus wild fruits. Other members were below the tree. Musigye (foundation in Rukiga), who was breastfeeding her baby on the ground, was very uncomfortable and protective of her infant. When she saw us get closer, she quickly climbed the tree to partake of the fruits. The gorillas made chants as they competed for the fruits on tree branches, with some of the fruit dropping to the ground.
“These fruits are some of their favourite fruits. They eat these fruits,” Noheri informed us in a hushed tone. “It depends on the season of the year. They can climb up and eat the raw or ripe fruits or the leaves. They generally depend on leaves and shoots. It all depends on what they want to eat at any given moment.”
Gorilla trekking, Noheri further offered, starts “from where we left [the gorilla groups] the previous evening by following their footmarks, food leftovers and faecal matter up to where they nested for the night.” After confirmation of the nests, the rangers count them before following “the fresh trail until we reach them.” This usually takes, Noheri says, “200 metres or less from the nests to the gorillas.”
Asasira chiped in, telling us that some gorilla groups tend to “run away from visitors.” The behaviour of the apes “depends on the level of habituation…if they are fully habituated, they are friendly and calm.” But they are typically territorial, and the silverbacks tend to fight over adult females.
“The victor will grab some female adults and add them to his group. Even then, some female adults who are still interested in the defeated silverback will fight against the victor in order to resist separation,” Asasira offers.
Threats, challenges
As well as threats to their lives, rangers grapple with the lack of adequate gear to effectively do their job.
“This is a tropical rainforest which requires us to have rain gear all the time. Due to the thickness of this rain forest, most gear end up getting worn out, especially walkie-talkies, GPS devices, and smartphones. During our patrols, it is very difficult to protect these items if you don’t have a good rain jacket,” Droma says, adding of dysfunctional walkie-talkies: “I could be on top of a hill and my colleague is in the valley. It becomes difficult to know where my trackers are in order for them to guide the visitors. And there is also poor network reception for the mobile phones, which makes it difficult to communicate among the rangers.”
Nelson Guma, the chief warden at Bwindi Mgahinga Conservation Area, says “there is an ongoing procurement process to equip and replenish those that have worn out.”
The challenges for female rangers come in different shapes. Asasira says “climbing steep slopes or hills when one is pregnant” can be quite a handful. Even while not pregnant, the trek can be quite punishing on the female body, she adds.
“We don’t have enough time for our families. We are limited by our routine duties and they are always continuous,” she says, adding: “You find that in a year, you only have a month of annual leave, which makes it hard to plan for your retirement. You can’t put up a business for one month and think it will survive if you are not there to supervise it. The salary is small and you can’t fully depend on it.”
But Noheri says while people were quick to tell her that as a female ranger, her work was cut out, teamwork has helped her “prove them wrong.”
Although Asasira appreciates UWA for constructing staff houses, she laments that there are no schools around their workplaces. “So, it means we have to leave our children in our different home districts in order for them to attend school. In most cases, we work long distances away from our home districts, which hinders very many people from going home until their annual leave is due. When you have an emergency, you will be given only eight days off, which aren’t enough for people who come from faraway districts.”
She adds: “The Uganda Wildlife Authority has provisions for your family to receive your salary for 10 years when you die in the line of duty. There is a programme for paying school fees for your children, and your family will receive your National Social Security Fund benefits as well.”
Toasting to rangers
Guma says rangers play a telling role in wildlife conservation. He notes that “they do patrols to protect wildlife species; maintain integrity of the park by securing boundaries; fight wildfires; educate communities on importance of wildlife; monitor threats to wildlife species; control problem animals to mitigate human-wildlife conflicts; interpret nature to provide experiences sought for by nature enthusiasts; collaborate on trans-frontier wildlife protection; among others.”
Yet even experienced rangers repeatedly face danger each working day. Take Shinini Simel Manyanguri of Honeyguide’s K9 tracking unit in Tanzania, who died early last year following complications from a serious vehicle accident. Deaths from accidents, in fact, comprise a third of all ranger casualties. These include firefighting fatalities and drownings. Human-wildlife conflict caused 26 percent of ranger deaths. Homicides are another major cause of death for nature’s protectors (27 percent of casualties), who are frequently confronted by insurgents or poachers.
Ranger Daniel Bobson was killed in an ambush by armed illegal timber dealers in Ghana. He was 34 years old and left behind two children, including a three-month-old son. Bobson had worked tirelessly to protect Ghana’s endangered rosewood trees—a prized resource that is more widely trafficked than elephant ivory or rhino horn.
In the last 12 months, there have been a growing number of deaths in conflict zones, with 13 rangers killed by foreign combatants and insurgents.
Thin Greenline supported families of fallen rangers in 14 countries last year. Working closely with a worldwide network of in-country contacts, the foundation expects to reach even more in the future.
Ranger Coquinche worked in Peru’s Amazon region. He contracted dengue fever and died during a medevac flight. He was 23 years old, married with a baby girl.
“The celebration of World Ranger Day is to remind the community members that wildlife exists and that conservation is still very important. It also helps community members to learn how to conserve wildlife for future generations,” Noheri tells Saturday Monitor.
The theme of World Ranger Day 2024 was ‘30 by 30.’ This was intended to draw attention to the direct and tangible actions that rangers take every day to reach the global 30 by 30 targets, as set out by the Convention on Biological Diversity.
“To celebrate this year’s World Rangers Day, we cleaned up areas adjacent to the park, especially wastes in town councils to minimise disease transmission to gorillas, with whom we share 98.4 percent of DNA; sensitised the public through radios on the role of rangers in wildlife conservation, and risks they take to ensure survival of wildlife,” Guma says.
Per Droma, “the biggest threat to rangers around the world is insecurity.” He points to the DRC where “rangers are often killed as a result of armed groups fighting each other.”
He adds: “There is the danger of poachers using guns to hunt down our wildlife. For the case of Bwindi, the poachers here mainly have spears and pangas. When we encounter them, we scare-shoot (shooting in the air) in order to arrest them in case they attempt to run away. The poachers here hunt bush pigs, antelopes, yellow-backed and black-fronted duikers, and bush bucks for game meat.”
Asasira says: “The major challenge for rangers worldwide are the risks we take when doing this work. In the forests, we encounter dangerous animals like buffaloes, elephants and gorillas themselves, and they have caused injuries and death of rangers. A buffalo recently attacked a ranger in Murchison Falls National Park and killed him on the spot.”
