Sunil Sethi: A day on Lake Naivasha

Nairobi: About an hour’s drive northwest of Kenya’s capital is Lake Naivasha, a 120 sq km water body, the country’s largest freshwater lake and the only one in Africa’s Rift Valley. It is host to a variety of fauna, from a population of hippos bobbing up in one corner to a colony of the speedy and spectacular African fish eagle that builds its nest along the shoreline. Naivasha is also notable for having been the home of naturalists like Joy and George Adamson, famous for raising Elsa the lioness in the bestselling book (and later film) Born Free, who lived at Elsamere. Both the Adamsons came to a sticky end — Joy was killed by a servant in 1980 and George by poachers in 1989. But their lakeside home is preserved as a modest non-profit lodge to fund a field research centre for conservationists.

Last week, I spent a day at Elsamere in the company of a young Kenyan of Indian origin, 24-year-old Shiv Kapila, who is making the study of raptors (birds of prey such as vultures and fish eagles) his life’s work. Bearded and of stocky build, Kapila has a quite pugnacious manner; coming from one of Nairobi’s leading legal families, he should, by rights, have been a lawyer. Instead he took a postgraduate degree in conservation science from University College, London, and spends his days marking and monitoring Naivasha’s families of fish eagles.

Kapila took me out on the lake to demonstrate his daily job. It was exciting, dramatic and seemingly dangerous work under a clear blue sky. On the small motorboat, he was equipped with a camera and a small cargo of dead fish stuffed with papyrus to keep them afloat. Fish eagles are large, vivid birds (brown, white and yellow-feathered and measuring 2.2 metres in flight) blessed with sight eight to 16 times sharper than human vision. Spotting distant birds in high trees, Kapila flung a fish out and made whistling sounds. The raptors swooped down from heights of up to 300 metres to take the fish, wheeling in graceful arcs, making sharp sorties and sometimes locking talons in territorial fights. He photographed their every turn and appeared to recognise most eagles and their individual nests by sight. By hooding their eyes in moments of careful capture, he has managed to ring three of them with lightweight solar radio transmitters. Kapila estimated there were about 114 fish eagles in current residence. “Establishing a detailed record of an apex predator like the African fish eagle is a very good indicator of the health of an ecosystem,” he explained.

By such a yardstick, his recent experience of observing Indian raptors was deeply unsettling. On a field trip with specialists from the international Peregrine Fund to observe vultures in the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur region, the team was forced to confirm that a population of eight million birds recorded in the early 1990s had dwindled to a few thousand. This was primarily due, Kapila said, to the widespread use of an anti-inflammatory drug in cattle. It attacked the digestive system of vultures feeding on carcasses and, as a result, they were perishing in vast numbers from renal failure.

My thrilling morning on Lake Naivasha with Kapila ended on a depressing note as he described what would happen if Indian vultures were wiped out. “Vultures are the most incredibly underrated of raptors. The Indian long-billed vulture, the white-backed vulture and the Egyptian vulture are critically endangered. They could be extinct in five years.” A disappearance of vultures, according to Kapila, means an explosion in the population of stray dogs feeding on carcass dumps and the spread of rabies. “Haven’t you read reports of dogs attacking children in India?”

Such a ghoulish prospect is being fended off by remarkable naturalists like Mumbai-based Rishad Naoroji in his fight to save the Indian vulture. Still, if the battle is to be enjoined by younger researchers, you could bring Kenya’s Shiv Kapila home.