Nairobi’s lions are almost encircled by the city. A Maasai community offers a key corridor out | Conservation

NAirobi National Park in Kenya is the only big Wildlife preservation zone To fall inside the capital. It is destroyed in three aspects by human development, and it is disrupted only on its southern borders – this gap provides a decisive corridor for wildlife, and the garden animals are connected to other residents of wildlife and the wider genetics basin.

However, this gap is also home to the small Masai community, where farmers face a painful choice between protecting livestock and providing space for predators that prey on their livestock.

Despite the risks, the majority choose to leave spaces of their lands open, allowing wild animals to avoid what scientists call “environmental extinction” through the gathering of shrinking genes.

“Our ancestors found wild animals here,” says Ishaq Oli Kishoyan, 55, a resident of Empakasi, a small settlement overlooking Nairobi National Park. “There was enough prey before people built permanent settlements around the garden.”

Now, Wildbests and Impalas are no longer migrated from the south, he says, and lions find that its cows are easy goals. “But we still want our children to enjoy the same brutal heritage as we did.”

Kishoyian did not control a small part of his 12 -hectare plot (30 acres). But lions still penetrate. A few weeks ago, Asad managed to enter the livestock pen while Kishoyan was far away.

He says: “I heard my wife the uproar and the lion’s fear is far away before one of my cows was killed,” he says.

Less than a mile from the Kishoyan house, the 68 -year -old Felis Enoa plays with her great grandson outside her iron home. Like Kishoyian, Enenoa left most of its 11 hectares of its field, and its four cows graze along with the brutal red, and Impalas and Wildbest sometimes.

Assad’s scenes are repeated around her home, and her intentions are always clear. The delusive thorny fence around the house could not barely prevent hungry predators, which were responsible for the loss of 10 sheep and three cows.

“Look at the Lions,” she says, referring to one of its cows, which survived an attack about two weeks ago. “I don’t know how much time you will survive in this case.”

Black is waiting for the right time to hit. While we are walking along a narrow dirt road near a house, we freeze where our guide refers to the shadow of the Akassia shrub less than 10 meters away, where the butter lies without mobility, and the eyes of the amber fixed on us.

Before the beginning of the last century, the pastures south of Nairobi, including the current Ambosli National Park, were all interconnected, providing enough wild animals to wander. However, the growth of human settlements, infrastructure, commercial activity and land fragmentation has prevented this movement, and largely restricted wild animals to 117 square kilometers (45 square meters) Nairobi National Park.

Conservation specialists say that every lost corridor throughout the park restricts more fresh genes, which leads to isolated herd breeding with “cousins” instead of distant strangers. Smaller genes gathering produces less than wildlife animals, which makes hungry lions chasing more livestock.

Dr. Joseph Auguto says of the features of survival for thousands of years, “says Dr. Joseph Auguto is a feature of survival over thousands of years. Hohenheim University In Stuttgart, Germany, which led wildlife researchers to publish reports on the collapse of animal migrations in Africa.

“The marriage of relatives can shorten age, achieve fertility and weaken immune systems, leaving animals less the ability to move in dehydration, disease or urban noise,” he says.

Every cub is designed [in the park] He added, “It is deprived of the opportunity to intermarry beyond the tightening of the evolutionary engineers,” warning of “environmental extinction if the genes that were flowing once through the savanna are open to stagnation.”

Augoto, a single adult lion, requires up to three tons of meat annually – equivalent to 14 Wildbests, but the garden only carries a few hundred accidents other than Boufalo and the giraffe.

One of him Search papers “It decreased from 30,000 animals in 1978 to less than 1000 today,” said Wildebests who migrate between Nairobi National Park and ATHI-Kaputiei. As the prey wilderness shrinks, cattle in nearby houses becomes easy choices for predators, with black hunting “on hunger nights, risking confrontations with people.”

But the residents are ready to tolerate this unstable coexistence by leaving the remaining corridors open and abandoning economic activities that are not in line with the preservation of wildlife, such as cultivation of crops or preserving large cattle herds, if government organizations and wildlife intensify compensation for their loss with financial compensation to protect biomedod.

with 65-75 % of wild animals In Kenya that lives outside the preservation areas, the government relies on private land owners to host and protect wildlife. that it Review Laws of wildlife to consolidate a more approach that society leads to memorizing.

“If people have no benefits to hosting wildlife on their soil, they will transfer [the land] For other uses. “

In April 2025, 256 land owners, including those adjacent to Nairobi National Park, Amboseli and MAAI MARA, received more than 100 miles, $ 175,000 (129,000 pounds), the first annual batch acquired from a pilot program that pays land games to maintain more than 14,000 hectares (35,000 master). Each landowner will be paid for $ 5 per acre every year, a modest amount that hopes hope will increase with more joining the program and attracting more funding.

“I got 6000 shillings [£34] “For me on an area of ​​20 acres of herbal lands,” says Daniel Parsuri, 35. The amount was not much, but … if we open the land, we can all get enough grazing areas and help in increasing wild animals so that black can eat enough food and reduce attacks on livestock. “

The program uses remote sensing techniques that were developed by Andrew Davis At Harvard University to measure the extent of biological diversity within a specific area and create “biodiversity credits” for sale to protect it. Supporters of this program say it is a more direct and immediate form of nature financing, to motivate individuals who protect such biological diversity directly every day.

Ferraj Sikand, co -founder of EarthaacreAnd a local startup company finds financiers of biological diversity and monitoring how capital reaches local communities, saying: “Unless these payments are delivered directly to the landowners, all lands will go.”

According to Ogutu, and without stakeholders recovering the two teams outside the garden and re -connecting the roaming methods, predators will remain both “victims and bad guys in a drama of our work.”

He says, “The option is blatant,” he says, “Feeding black with working ecosystems, or watching them, feeding on livestock so that they cannot continue.”