RW: I was 20 years old when I went to Kenya for the first time, and it wasn’t just my first time being in Africa or East Africa. It was also my first time seeing a wild animal, taking a hike, pitching a tent, having an outdoor experience.
LA: What was it like seeing that wildlife for the first time?
RW: Oh my gosh, yeah. People go to Kenya to go on these epic safaris and see all these bucket list animal species, and remember just traveling from the airport in Nairobi down to our campsite, which was in Southern Kenya outside of Amboseli National Park. And we did not need to go on a safari. We did not need to enter a national park. Just from the highway, I remember seeing a Marabou stork was the very first animal that I saw, my very first wild animal ever in my life. I remember thinking to myself, no one’s ever told me about Marabou stork. I thought I was going to see an elephant.
But from where I was in the car and where it was on the landscape, Marabou storks can be five feet tall. I mean, there are these huge, huge birds, and it looked like a dinosaur. It looked like a velociraptor walking around the landscape. And I remember thinking, talk about mysteries, right? I was like, no one told me about this. I’m already seeing something I didn’t even expect. What could be next? We would drive through national parks. I remember one of the first ways that my little group of students were trained was to look at a group of wildebeest say, at a distance, and to be able to estimate exactly how many, and then we’d drive and look at a group of zebras. And the challenge would be to estimate how many are there.
LA: You have stories in the book about the ways in which the wildlife interact with the Maasai villages, and I mean, living on the Maasai means that lions are a part of your daily life. In the brief time I spent there, some of the people I met were telling me all sorts of stories. Could you share a story or two from your book about the wildlife that you encountered there?
RW: I was living and working in central Tanzania studying lions. One day I was with just one of the researchers, who was a local Tanzanian guy, and he was from the Maasai community, so he had this really special relationship as a trained ecologist, but representing the people that were adjacent to the landscape. And one day we were together studying lions, and we got a call on the radio that poachers were afoot. And I freaked out. I thought poachers mean machine guns, and we better get out of here because I am not trying to die today.
And instead of leaving the bush, my colleague decided to go to where the poachers were. And I said, “Okay.” And we drove off-road in our little vehicle to the site where the poachers were. And by the time we got there, the wildlife authorities had captured these men and they were handcuffed and they were looking very ashamed. They were seated. And next to them was a huge female giraffe, and she was dead. They had killed her.
