Managed care for the wildest resources

We immediately came upon several Grevy’s zebras, about half the size of the classic zebra. Large vultures stood atop the cactus branches of the prehistoric-looking candelabra tree. Impalas and chestnut-colored water bucks scurried under acacia trees. Then around another bend, less than 15 feet away, stood a mother elephant and her year-old cub, whose thick hide was reddened from rolling in the mud. The little one clumsily tried to find something to eat in the tall grass.

“It’s funny watching a baby elephant trying to use that long trunk,’’ said Fenwick-Wilson.

Not so long ago the elephants would have wandered onto pri vate farms or cattle ranches in these parts and been shot. The rare Grevy’s zebra was skinned for its hide, while impala and water bucks were killed for their meat. During the height of poaching in Kenya in the 1960s and ’70s, at least 30 percent of the meat sold at the Nairobi market was from the bush.

The rhinoceros, slaughtered for its horn, was practically extinct here for most of the 20th century. Chinese and Thai herbalists would grind the hard enamel into a powder and get exorbitant prices for the supposed aphrodisiac. The horn of the black rhino was in such demand that the animal’s population dwindled from 20,000 to a few hundred in less than two decades.

In the 1980s Anna Merz, a septuagenarian conservationist, persuaded Ian Craig to create a rhino sanctuary on his 62,000-acre property. Craig’s family had owned Lewa Downs since the 1920s and managed it as a cattle ranch. But after Kenya gained its independence in 1963, the once-thriving commission boards that were designed to sell the cattle fell into chaos and corruption. This overgrazed land was not nearly as fertile as the White Highlands, Kenya’s hub of agriculture, so large cattle ranchers had to think of another potential source of income, like the travel business.