Protecting Lions in Uganda

DSWF support ground-based conservation partners working in two of Uganda’s national parks protecting Uganda’s last lions. In Murchison Falls National Park there are 30 community scouts helping our partners protecting wildlife. The scouts are arresting people on a daily basis for wildlife crimes and poaching, often snaring which is the most common form of poaching in the area. The scouts are a vital support to rangers as the national park only has one third of the rangers necessary to provide adequate protection to its wildlife.

There continue to be limited resources and escalating costs for the team on the ground at the same time as levels of poaching and snaring are increasing. Snaring remains a huge problem and these indiscriminate traps, set to capture smaller animals for illegal bushmeat, frequently kill lions. With the support of community scouts over 24,000 snares have now been removed from the national park since the project was implemented.

Improvements in the park’s communication network and the increased coverage this has allowed, in addition to the new ranger stations has helped mitigate the impact of the low number of rangers in relation to the size of the park. All rangers have been given smart phones enabling much improved communication between ranger posts. The use of Earth Ranger technology is also providing to be extremely impactful tool for the monitoring of lions and the deployment of a ranger response unit in the case of potential incidents.

Collaring of lions however remains challenging in Murchison, with only two lions currently collared with a further four lions identified as viable candidates for collaring. Vet teams and drugs are not readily available to support collaring exercises (there is currently only one vet in the whole of the National Park). Sustained rainfall has also made lion monitoring difficult in recent months due to the tall grass and roads becoming inaccessible, now the conditions have improved GPS monitoring and collaring work has now resumed.

The strategy of our partners on the ground is to reduce poaching to a level where the number of animals killed is not enough to stop overall population numbers of all species recovering. This strategy is proving effective considering the risks of poaching are so severe. Each snare, wheel trap, spear, boat etc that is seized by our team costs the poacher community money and reduces their opportunities and deters them to carry on poaching.

Thanks to our work wildlife populations continue to slowly recover, and although we are waiting for the next wildlife census, it is believed lion populations have stabilised and are likely slowly increasing. The lions of Murchison are the largest population left in Uganda. Our ambitious and important aim is to eventually achieve a doubling of the lion population in the country. Key to this will be ensuring that the lion’s prey species continue to recover. Our project partners on the ground have had huge success in restoring the numbers of Ugandan kob within the protected area, with the population of kob increasing from 40,000 to 150,000. Rothschild’s giraffes have also bounced back to a population of around 2,000, from a low of 400. Efforts this year will continue to focus on anti-poaching efforts and on the habitat restoration of the park to increase these populations further and to long term species stability.

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