Poachers can run, but they can’t hide from technology
They come at night. In the pitch-black darkness, poachers traverse the long Tanzanian border into Kenya and its protected parks and conservancies. They’re hoping to bring back lion, pangolin, or rhino and sell the valuable parts.
“We’re working in total darkness,” Mara Conservancy Ranger Ntayia Lema Langas tells me over breakfast in a cool, brightly lit Austin eatery. “It’s not safe.”
Langas, 30, is making his first visit to America, and his first to SXSW, to help publicize the plight of wildlife in his native Nairobi and the imaging technology he’s been using for the last two years to outsmart the poachers.
As he eats what looks to be his first yogurt parfait breakfast, Langas, who has a broad smile and, to keep warm, is wearing a jacket over his beige Mara Conservancy polo, explains that, until recently, the rangers would rely on intense patrols to catch poachers. Yet, in the continuous cat-and-mouse game, the poachers stopped using spotlights, making themselves almost invisible.
“We cannot see them from far, so the chances of arresting them are so low,” he says. Which means Langas and his park’s 106 other…
