by Mary Wykstra
The collaring of Cheetah Jane in August has given us a chance to see a different kind of movement from “Mom” who we tracked in 2005-7.

At first we thought Jane was going to behave similar because she stayed on the Stanley Ranch for about 2 weeks- moving from the hills to the plains. An interesting aspect was that Jane moved a lot at night – often more than 5km. During the day she had smaller movements that appear to be from one shady place to another.

In the 7th day after collaring, Jane had moved into another field where we were trapping. It seems she did not learn her lesson about walking into the trap the first time. This gave us the unexpexcted advantage of checking on her in close proximity to assure the collar was fitting properly before releasing her again to be with her cubs. (photos by volunteer Amber Bengston)

In the 3rd week, Jane took her family 20km northwest into the hills above the Aimi and Malili ranches. This meant that she crossed the highway. She was in the hills for about 1 week, staying in the gullies most of the time. These hills are above our research camp, and because it was drought the hills were among a few areas where night time grazing was frequent. The night grazing was being done mostly by people from areas where overgrazing and lack of water depleted the grassland.

In the 4th week Jane again crossed the highway with her family in the middle of the night. She moved rather quickly across the Malili ranch. Two years ago, prior to the subdivision of the Malili Ranch, the area was teaming with game. This year, with the drought, decreased security to prevent poaching, increased charcoal burning and increased settlement, there was not enough food to keep Jane and her family fed.

The signal from Jane stopped in the end of September near the town of Konza. The last signal came from near a main road that is often used by sand harvesters in the lory transport of both legal and illegal sand. It is also an area of high poaching, thus Cosmas and I feared the worst. We went to the area to find that two days after the last signal, the family had killed some Masai goats at a manyatta about 1km. People believed she moved into the hills in the direction of Namanga. So we waited….