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Nairobi National Park

Friday March 09 2012
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Photo/Courtesy of Paolo Torchio A residential estate on the edge of Nairobi National Park.

It is the oldest national park in the country established in 1946. It’s a free-ranging park only fenced from the city side.

It used to be 124 square kilometres. Bits and pieces have been hived off over the years reducing it to 117 square kilometres.

It is a rhino sanctuary with 76 indigenous black rhinos and 13 exotic white rhinos.

There are more than 40 lions in the park.

Each lion under the lion ID project is identified by the whisker patterns that are as unique as human fingerprints.

Other predators in the park are cheetah, leopard, jackals, stripped hyena and the aardwolf, which is a rare nocturnal hyena.

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Other increasingly rare species are the Chandler’s reedbuck, Clawless otter and the tiny zorilla.

It is a dry season refuge for the wildlife from the Kitengela plains and the Athi-Kapiti plains.

Once part of a larger ecosystem stretching from Amboseli National Park to Masai Mara National Reserve, it was part of the elephant migratory corridor.

The last time an elephant strayed across the ancient path was in the late 1990s.

The highly endangered African wild dog brought back from the brink of extinction is seen more often in the park with radio collars fitted on them to enable radio tracking.

It had the second largest wildebeest migration until Mombasa Road was built across the Athi plains.

The count was 100,000 wildebeest, which in 1975 fell to 28,000. Today there are fewer than 1,000 in the highly fragmented ecosystem.

There’s centuries-old Rock art in caves inside the park.

However zebra numbers have increased because they are less migratory than the wildebeest.

60 acres adjoining the Nairobi National Park is under community land. The open land under ecotourism, wildlife and livestock, which is a good form of well-managed pastoralism. Livestock numbers are on the increase.

The Nairobi National Park provides for research, ecosystems services such as provision of clean air and water, insect pollination.

The Nairobi Metro 2030 Vision portrays Nairobi as a world-class metro, which will encompass Kajiado district reaching the Tanzanian border.

Nairobi is the only county with a land use plan in the country. It was developed in 2011.

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