The old man, the dead pangolin, and 134 kilometres of lowered wire

Peter Ole Tompoy was walking his stretch of the Nyekweri Forest in Kenya when he found the body of a pangolin beneath a livestock fence. He is 73, and he has spent the years since persuading his neighbours to switch off the lowest strands of wire. 134 kilometres of fencing have now been made survivable.

For decades the giant pangolin was presumed gone from the country. Then camera traps in the Trans Mara area of Narok County caught one moving through the dark, and a species written off returned to the ledger. Fewer than 30 are now thought to survive in Kenya, which makes each individual a measurable fraction of everything left.

One of them was a female the researchers called Naserian. She carried a GPS tag and was followed for years — her routes, her resting places, the slow nocturnal business of breaking open termite mounds. She was found electrocuted under a livestock fence. Of the 15 pangolin deaths recorded since 2022, 14 came from the wires.

The arithmetic behind those deaths is straightforward. Four-fifths of the Nyekweri Forest has been cleared for farms and ranches in twenty years, and about 268 kilometres of electrified fencing now runs through what remains. A pangolin walks at ankle height. The bottom strand is where it dies.

Tompoy's solution asked nothing dramatic. Disconnect the bottom two or three strands, leave the upper wires live. Lions still keep their distance; a pangolin passes underneath. Naisenya Rakita did it. Ben Sulel, secretary of the conservancy, did it. Others followed, voluntarily, until half the fencing in the area had a gap at the ground.

Michael Koskei, conservation monitoring and data manager at The Pangolin Project, watches the rest from a screen. He runs the GPS pings from seven tagged animals against digital maps of the fence lines on the EarthRanger platform, and when a pangolin drifts towards a live wire, rangers are told where to go.

The persuasion, though, happens between neighbours. Ole Manguyo, a farmer who had no particular feeling about the animals one way or the other, now repeats the figure that changed his mind: a single pangolin eats up to 70 million insects a year. More than 6,000 hectares of private land here have since been placed under conservation agreements, some permitting up to 90 percent habitat restoration over fifteen years.

It is a small mechanical adjustment, repeated across a landscape by people who owed the pangolins nothing.