Game Changer. Glen Martin
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the headlights of approaching vehicles. Everywhere are piles of soccer ball–sized turds—elephant dung.
After crossing the river, the track wends along a small flat, where brilliantly hued lilac-breasted rollers preen on acacia branches. The road then veers up a steep hill, skirts a ridge, and terminates abruptly at Sungelai, the home of Laurence Frank—a research associate of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California and one of East Africa’s foremost predator researchers.
The structure is literally built into a cliff: a sprawling assemblage of native stone and lumber, with great plate glass windows that overlook the Ewaso Nyiro gorge. It is easy to spend an entire day on the deck beyond the windows, glassing the river course and miles and miles of surrounding hills for game. Nor do you have to look far. Hyraxes have established themselves in the rocks below the house and often lounge on the deck’s railing, importuning handouts. Elephants drift in front of the home almost daily, their utter silence both eerie and intimidating as they pad across the rough, scrubby land. And a small herd of Cape buffalo forages in the immediate area; one old lone bull, with a gigantic boss and wicked, majestically curved horns, typically beds down about a hundred yards from Frank’s bedroom door. At twilight, several hundred white-winged bats stream into the sky from the rafters of the house for their nightly round of foraging, providing a dramatic spectacle for guests enjoying preprandial cocktails.
Sometimes the wildlife does more than display itself in picturesque fashion beyond the plate glass. A few years ago, Alayne Cotterill, a biologist who works with Frank on his predator projects, was sleeping in a bedroom with her two children and her dog. As she often did, Cotterill had left her sliding glass door open to access the cool night breeze that sweeps down the Ewaso Nyiro gorge. She was awakened in the early morning by the frenzied barking of her dog. Turning on the light, she found a large leopard contemplating the family tableau from the foot of the bed. After a moment, the cat turned and walked back out the bedroom door. Because African leopards seldom attack human beings without provocation, Cotterill feels the cat was drawn by her dog. In any event, she now sleeps with her bedroom doors closed.
This is Frank’s headquarters, though he is often away for days or weeks at a time, overseeing predator conservation projects across Kenya. It is his redoubt, the place he uses to work up data, recharge, perhaps even relax a little. Now past sixty, Frank is six feet tall and big-boned, and he still carries a lot of muscle. He has tangled, thinning hair, large eyes that stare fixedly from behind thick spectacles, blunt features, and a prognathous jaw that creates an impression of latent aggression. And indeed, he can be aggressive, a quality that doesn’t necessarily ill-serve him in Africa. Most of the people who know Frank highly respect him, and a few fear him, including some of his own research associates. Normally low-key, even diffident, he quickly gets his back up when encountering stupidity or ineptitude. On more than one occasion, he has not shied from physical confrontation. He characterizes himself as “a putz, a puppy dog, somebody who is all thumbs.” But anyone who has seen him at work—setting snares for lions, engrossed in laboratory procedures, tearing apart a Land Rover transmission, repairing a handgun—can only consider his self-evaluations false modesty. By any consideration, he would seem one of the most competent people on the planet.
In predilection, Frank seems a man from another age. His diction is precise, and he speaks in complete thoughts; his conversation somehow seems meticulously punctuated, down to semicolons, hyphens, and parentheses. Though he is not Scottish, he deeply enjoys the bagpipes and the smokiest, most phenolic of single malt scotches. His manners are almost courtly, though he also is capable of blithely interjecting rude, shocking, or scabrous comments into genteel conversations. He is a lifelong insomniac, a great fan of British spy fiction, an avid duck hunter with indifferent shooting skills, a man who is capable of bivouacking in the bush over his snares for days at a time, augmenting his meager diet with meat salvaged from his “bait”—carcasses of zebras, elands, or camels that have been dispatched by lions or hyenas.
Many things disturb Laurence Frank. He is upset when forced to spend long periods of time away from his five daughters because of his work; the red tape involved in transporting animal specimens from Kenya to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley; his intense chronic lower back pain induced from four decades of pounding around East Africa in Land Rovers; the Byzantine politics of Kenya; the opinions of both opponents and friends; and the general vagaries of fate. But perhaps nothing upsets him more than the decline of his beloved predators.
Frank made his academic bones through seminal research on spotted hyenas, focusing largely on social organization and the role masculinizing hormones play in female development and group dynamics.
He is a cofounder of a captive spotted hyena project at the University of California, Berkeley, initiated to investigate their endocrinology and behavior at close range. The project is ongoing, with the animals housed in spacious compounds at a site in the Berkeley hills; on still nights, their hoots and gibbering resound down the slopes and vales. Spotted hyenas, Frank avers, are among the most intelligent and socially sophisticated of animals. Some of the animals that reside at the Berkeley compound he has raised from cubs. It is an alarming experience to see him casually clamber into a compound with a large dominant female hyena and playfully wrestle her, knowing her jaws could snap his femur with a casual twitch of her masseter muscles. He bars visitors from sharing his fun. “She knows me,” he said when I asked one time if I could join him with one of the animals. “She grew up with me. Her reaction to you would be—unpredictable.” Frank’s eyes glow when he’s with his animals. A man who inveighs against anthropomorphism, he nevertheless loves—deeply loves—hyenas.
Over the course of the past three decades, Frank’s professional emphasis has shifted from ethology to conservation biology, a change he credits as a logical response to empirical observation. “When the world around you is dying, you can’t simply accept it,” he says, referring to Kenya’s wildlife crash. “You have to act, whether or not it makes a difference.”
Frank has established several predator projects in Kenya, all roughly based on the same template: monitoring the number of lions and hyenas through tracking, telemetry, and local contacts; minimizing depredation of livestock through the promotion of boma (thorn-wood corral) construction and other intensive husbandry methods; and hiring local moran (young warriors) to serve as trackers, community liaisons, and educators. Frank would characterize his success as moderate at best, but others are more generous, particularly in Laikipia, where his work with ranchers on private holdings and with Maasai elders on communal tribal homelands has resulted in a generally stable population of lions and spotted hyenas. On Mugie, a forty-nine-thousand-acre ranch that combines cattle and sheep production with ecotourism on the northern Laikipia Plateau, lions have become a profit center; not coincidentally, Mugie’s ranchers are active participants in Frank’s program. Mugie supports about ten to fifteen lions along with its rich assortment of other wildlife species, and the interaction of the big cats with their prey is a major attraction for visitors. It’s easy to see why: observing lions is a much more intimate experience at Mugie than it is on the Serengeti or Maasai Mara, where you have to jockey with ten to twenty minivans to catch a glimpse of a pride. During one trip to Kenya, I passed a couple of days with Frank on Mugie, and much of the time was spent with the lions. On one occasion we observed them, at close quarters, gorging on a zebra kill; on another, we darted a young male and fitted him with a telemetry collar. Besides Frank and me, there were just a couple of his associate researchers, the ranch manager Claus Mortensen, and the wildlife. The experience is an indelible and treasured memory.
FIGURE 3. Laurence Frank takes tissue samples from an anesthetized lion at Mugie Ranch, Laikipia. Note the firearms: attacks are always a possibility during fieldwork with lions. (Glen Martin)
Still, frustration is part of Frank’s job description. A few ranchers continue to evaluate lions, hyenas, and leopards according to the old Game Department definition of “vermin” and eliminate them remorselessly. And in southern Kenya among the Maasai, the fierce opposition to predator conservation has been daunting. But even while trying to change hearts and minds in Maasailand, Frank says he understands their position.“The