Broken Ground

Protecting giant ground pangolins in a fragmenting landscape

Words and photographs by Georgina Goodwin

At night, Nyekweri Forest reveals itself only in fragments. Torchlight catches wet leaves and narrow paths as pangolin monitors move beneath the canopy. Somewhere ahead, almost invisible in the darkness, a giant ground pangolin moves through a landscape changing around it. Nyekweri, the most biodiverse area in the Mara, is home to Kenya’s only known population of the species.

Nyekweri lies along the western edge of Kenya’s Greater Mara ecosystem. It is forest, grazing land, farmland and home: a living landscape shaped by people, livestock and wildlife. Yet land subdivision, agriculture, settlement and fencing are breaking connected habitat into individually owned plots.

For families, a boundary can carry the promise of security, inheritance and a future. For wildlife, that same line can fracture the routes on which survival depends.

Dependent on forest cover and abundant ants and termites, the giant ground pangolin must navigate cultivated land, shrinking corridors and new fences. Some fences are electrified to protect crops and livestock, creating another threat for an animal whose instinct is to curl into a defensive ball.

Through round-the-clock monitoring, research, land leasing and the de-electrification of lower fence wires, a new initiative is offering this rare species a chance to survive. The work is a testament to what sustained cooperation can make possible.

But the wider battle is far from won. With less than ten per cent of the original forest left, protecting these pangolins requires the ongoing commitment of community landowners and Kimintet Forest Trust Conservancy, alongside Kenya Wildlife Service rangers and The Pangolin Project’s rangers, monitors and wider conservation team. The protection effort continues day and night and depends on substantial donor funding.

You may never see a pangolin, and Nyekweri may never appear on your itinerary. Yet every journey into the Greater Mara reaches beyond the road beneath your wheels. Where you stay, what you support, the questions you ask and the stories you carry home can ripple into places you may never visit. Regenerative travel begins with the belief that a landscape should be stronger, not simply less harmed, because we passed through it.

That means choosing tourism businesses that invest transparently in conservation, asking how communities benefit, and supporting organisations protecting habitat beyond reserve boundaries. The Mara is more than its famous grasslands and wildlife sightings. Its future also depends on the forests, corridors and communities beyond the places most visitors see.

Nyekweri is not untouched wilderness. Children herd livestock through clearings that carry the memory of trees. Families weigh what the land must provide today against what can be preserved for tomorrow. At night, monitors search for an almost-invisible animal that few people will ever encounter.

What happens next in Nyekweri, as in wild landscapes everywhere, will be decided by those whose lives depend on it, those working to protect it, those entrusted with governing it and those who come to experience it. Their choices and their impacts overlap within the same living system.

The ground may be divided, but its future remains shared.

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