About the park

The history of Samburu

Name: Samburu National Reserve
Address: Kenya

This is Samburu country first and a protected area second, and the paperwork behind the three reserves is thinner than almost every website suggests. What follows is the documented story, with the gaps left visible: who lives here, when the reserves were really created, which famous events happened somewhere else, and what five failed rainy seasons did to the wildlife.

If you only want the answer

Samburu National Reserve and Buffalo Springs National Reserve were declared national reserves in 1985 under section 18 of Kenya's Wildlife (Conservation and Management) Act, and Shaba was gazetted in 1974. The widely repeated story of a single Samburu-Isiolo Game Reserve dating from 1948 traces back to one published source and to no gazette notice we could find. The land is Samburu country, held as Trust land and administered by county councils, and since 1995 the communities around the reserves have registered their own conservancies. Save the Elephants has studied the elephants here since 1997 and Ewaso Lions has studied the lions since 2003. The Born Free story belongs to Meru, not to this reserve. Joy Adamson was murdered at Shaba on 3 January 1980. Five consecutive rainy seasons failed between late 2020 and late 2022, and Kenya's wildlife institute counted the losses.

Whose country this is

The Samburu are the people of this land, and the reserves sit inside their grazing country. They speak Samburu, catalogued as ISO 639-3 saq, a variety of Maa within the Eastern Nilotic group, which makes the language a close relative of Maasai and of Chamus. The two peoples are distinct, and the shared language family is the reason they are so often confused in travel writing.

On the question of how people live here, the cleanest description comes from a community document rather than from a guidebook. The Sera Wildlife Conservancy management plan, written by the community with the Northern Rangelands Trust, says: our communities are semi-nomadic pastoralists, owning herds of cattle, sheep, goats and camels. Camels matter in that sentence. This is dry country, rainfall around 350 mm a year in two seasons, and camel-keeping is a practical answer to it rather than a picturesque detail.

The 2019 census counted 310,327 people in Samburu County across 21,065 square kilometres, a density of 15 people per square kilometre, and 268,002 in Isiolo County next door. Nationally the census recorded 333,471 people of Samburu ethnicity. Those two numbers are different things and are routinely quoted as if they were the same.

The legal position under which the reserves exist runs straight through this. All three sit on former Trust land, and Kenya's wildlife act defines the competent authority for Trust land as the county council in which that land is vested. That is why these are county reserves today, why the Kenya Wildlife Service does not run them, and why entry is charged under county finance legislation.

Whether anyone was moved when the reserves were created, and whether compensation was paid, we could not confirm. We found no archival or scholarly source documenting removals at Samburu, Buffalo Springs or Shaba. What the record does show is that grazing pressure inside the reserves is treated as a live management issue in the conservation assessments, so pastoral use of this land never stopped.

When the reserves were actually created

Almost every page written about Samburu says the same thing: a combined Samburu-Isiolo Game Reserve was set aside in 1948 as part of a larger Marsabit reserve, and was split later between two county councils. We went looking for the instrument behind that and did not find one.

Here is what is documented. The schedule of national reserves declared under section 18(1) of the Wildlife (Conservation and Management) Act, Cap. 376, lists both Buffalo Springs and Samburu, and the legal notices printed against that schedule include three from 1985. The World Database on Protected Areas, whose Kenyan records come from the Kenya Wildlife Service, gives a status year of 1985 for Samburu and for Buffalo Springs, and 1974 for Shaba. Shaba does not appear in the section 18(1) schedule at all, which fits a declaration made under the older law that the 1976 act repealed while saving what had already been done under it.

The 1948 claim rests on one published source: Bennun and Njoroge's Important Bird Areas in Kenya of 1999, whose site account says the two reserves were established in 1948 as the Samburu-Isiolo Game Reserve, part of the once extensive Marsabit National Reserve. That text is reproduced on the BirdLife and Key Biodiversity Areas factsheets, and from there it has been copied across the travel web until it looks like a dozen independent confirmations. It is one source, and it cites no gazette notice.

The related anecdote, that a senior game warden named Rodney Elliott proposed setting aside the land north of the river, has the same problem in a sharper form. Elliott was real: the finding aid to his papers at the University of Florida records him as Game Warden at Maralal from 1955 to 1971. The story about him appears verbatim on many operator sites with no attribution at all, so we are leaving it as unverified.

The date and the instrument of the split between Samburu and Buffalo Springs we could not establish. Claims range from 1962 to 1985 and none of them carries a document.

One more number needs fixing. Samburu National Reserve is 165 square kilometres, which is what the protected-areas database records and what the 1999 site account gives as 16,500 hectares. The figure of 104 square kilometres that circulates widely appears only in operator copy, usually paired with 65 square miles, which is the conversion of 165 rather than of 104. It looks like a typo that has been copied for years. Buffalo Springs is 131 square kilometres and Shaba is 239.

The conservancies, and the argument about them

The reserves are small. The conservation story of the last thirty years is mostly about the community land around them, and it starts before the Northern Rangelands Trust existed.

Namunyak was founded in 1995 by fourteen elders, nine years before NRT was formed. Kalama, on the Gir Gir group ranch, registered as a community-based organisation in 2002 and as a not-for-profit company in 2013. Westgate, on the Ngutuk-Ongiron group ranch, registered as a trust in 2004 and as a company in 2013. Sera is the one date NRT's own documents disagree on: its management plan says a trust registered in 2002 and a company in June 2012, while NRT's State of Conservancies report for 2019 gives a registration date of 2001. We are leaving that unresolved because NRT has not resolved it.

NRT itself was instituted in 2004, and even its founding is told two ways. NRT's own account credits Francis Ole Kaparo, then Speaker of the National Assembly and chair of the Lewa board, with proposing it, and says the elected leaders of nine community conservancies met and agreed to form an umbrella organisation, becoming its Council of Elders. The Oakland Institute's account says NRT was created by Ian Craig, whose family ranch became Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. Both framings are on the record and the year is not in dispute.

The conservancies have been criticised seriously, and a visitor paying a conservancy fee deserves to know that. The Oakland Institute's report Stealth Game, published on 16 November 2021, alleges dispossession of community land and abuses by armed conservancy scouts, including extrajudicial killings. NRT published a response two days later contesting the conclusions and the methodology while saying it took the allegations seriously, and The Nature Conservancy commissioned a 134-page due diligence report on the same allegations, which is a partner-commissioned document rather than a neutral one.

There has also been a judgment. On 24 January 2025 the Environment and Land Court at Isiolo allowed a petition filed in 2021 by residents of Merti sub-county, declaring that conservancies had been established in Chari and Cherab wards without proper public participation and were operating illegally, and finding the deployment of armed rangers there unconstitutional. The two conservancies named are Cherab and Biliqo-Bulesa in Isiolo County. Westgate, Kalama, Namunyak and Sera were not parties and were not covered by the orders. Campaign groups argue the reasoning reaches further; that is advocacy commentary rather than part of the ruling.

Elsa, and what did not happen here

Tour operators sell Samburu as Born Free country. The story belongs to Meru, roughly 150 kilometres away, and the dates make the borrowing obvious: Elsa died in 1961 and this reserve was declared in 1985.

What happened is this. In 1956, working in the old Northern Frontier District, the game warden George Adamson shot a lioness and found three cubs. Accounts of why he shot her differ: some say she charged him, and one magazine account calls the lioness herself a man-eater. The two larger cubs went to a zoo in Rotterdam. The third, Elsa, was hand-reared by George and Joy Adamson and later returned to the wild in the Meru reserve, which became Meru National Park in 1966. The Kenya Wildlife Service's own Meru page claims the story for Meru in plain terms.

Elsa died in January 1961 of a tick-borne blood disease. George's diary, read aloud in the 2011 BBC and PBS film about her, records that he held her head in his lap, buried her under the target tree and had the scouts fire volleys over the grave. She is buried in Meru, beside the river system in the south of the park. Joy's book Born Free was published in 1960 and the film followed in 1966.

Two details we could not confirm, despite their being repeated everywhere: that Elsa was reared at the Adamsons' home in Isiolo, and that the release site was specifically the Ura river area. The primary text would settle both and we could not get at a copy. What is certain is Meru.

For the rest of George Adamson's life the geography moves further away from here. After a lion from the film injured a child in Meru in 1969, the Adamsons had to leave. In 1970 he moved to Kora in the east, renting 500 square miles from the district council for 750 pounds a year, and released more than thirty lions there over twenty years. Kora became a nature reserve in 1973 and a national park in 1989, the year he was killed by armed bandits near his camp on 20 August, along with two Kenyan colleagues.

Where does the Samburu claim come from? English Wikipedia carries an unsourced sentence saying this reserve was one of two areas where the Adamsons raised Elsa, and the identical sentence appears in its Meru article. The Shaba article's claim that Shaba was the setting for Born Free is sourced to a safari operator. None of that is evidence, and the region does not need it. It has two verifiable stories of its own.

Joy Adamson at Shaba, 1976 to 1980

Joy Adamson's last project was at Shaba, and it was about a leopard. In 1976 she took on a cub called Penny, raised her and released her at her camp in the reserve, and the book that came out of it, Queen of Shaba, was published posthumously in 1980.

On Thursday 3 January 1980 she failed to return from an evening walk near the camp and her body was found a few hundred metres away. She was 69. The first assumption was an animal: the Worldwide Fund for Nature's executive director said publicly the following day that she had probably been killed by a lion, and contemporary reporting mentioned a lion or a leopard. The doubt came quickly too. WWF's conservation director Lee Talbot said he had been sceptical from the first that a wild animal did it, on the grounds that she knew animals far too well.

The post-mortem in Nairobi on Saturday 5 January found puncture wounds to the side and shoulder, probably from a sword-like knife. Those who saw the body reported no claw marks. Her car had been taken. Kenya's police commissioner announced on 7 January that she had been murdered, and former employees were being questioned.

Paul Nakware Ekai, a Turkana labourer who had worked briefly for her, was arrested about a month later and convicted on 28 August 1981 after a two-month trial. Because it was unclear whether he was 18, the court held that a death sentence could not apply and he was detained at the President's pleasure. At the trial he repudiated the confessions he had made in police custody and said he had been tortured and starved; the judge ruled the statements voluntary and truthful. The motive recorded from the contested confession was a quarrel over pay.

In 2004 he gave his first interview since being jailed, to a Kenyan newspaper, reported in The Guardian in February that year. He still said he killed her, and gave a different account of how: that she had shot him in the leg during a quarrel and that he shot her three times in return, disputing the post-mortem finding that she had been stabbed. He repeated the torture claim. The Guardian set out the problems with his version itself, noting that it conflicts with the accepted account that she was walking several hundred metres from camp, and quoted Peres Olindo, a former director of Kenya's national parks, and the elephant researcher Cynthia Moss, both of whom disputed his characterisation of her. What happened to Ekai after February 2004 we could not establish.

Her ashes were placed at Elsa's grave in Meru. Accounts differ on whether they were scattered or buried.

Kamunyak, the lioness and the oryx calves

In late December 2001 a lioness in Samburu National Reserve took an oryx calf and did not kill it. She kept it, guarded it from other predators, and let the calf's own mother approach to feed it before chasing her off again. Rangers and local people called her Kamunyak, reported as meaning the blessed one; the Kenyan sources of the time spell it Kamuniak.

The BBC reported the first episode on 7 January 2002, the day after it ended. She had led the calf to the river to drink, fallen asleep after roughly two weeks of guarding it without hunting properly, and a male lion took it. Accounts of how long that first adoption lasted give 15 days, 16 days and about two weeks.

She did it again. Kenya's own tourist board tracked the sequence at the time: a second calf on Valentine's Day 2002, which rangers eventually removed because its mother had gone and it was starving, sending it to Lewa and then to the Kenya Wildlife Service orphanage in Nairobi, where it was named Valentine; a third over Easter weekend 2002, which she kept near the herd so it could suckle, with rangers feeding her meat to keep her going; a fourth in mid-2002, which returned to the herd; and a fifth on Monday 7 October 2002, a calf five days old.

That is the documented record: at least five calves between December 2001 and October 2002. The figure of six that circulates comes from an unsourced encyclopedia article and we could not confirm it. Nor could we confirm the common claim that several of the calves were taken by a male lion. Only the first one was.

The episode was filmed by Saba and Dudu Douglas-Hamilton as the documentary Heart of a Lioness. We searched for coverage by National Geographic, which is often credited, and found none. We also searched the academic literature for any peer-reviewed work on her and found nothing at all, which is worth saying plainly: this is a well-witnessed event with no scientific literature behind it. The explanation the guides offered at the time was that she had mistaken a tawny calf for a lion cub during a hunt. A wildlife expert quoted by the BBC said animals have an instinct to care for the young and that the puzzling part was how long it lasted. Everything beyond that is speculation.

One detail is consistent across the sources and easy to miss in the sentiment: guarding calves stopped her hunting, and she was seriously undernourished. She was last reported seen in early 2004 and was never confirmed seen again. Even that date rests on weak sourcing.

Two research camps, and why the elephants here are unusual

Iain Douglas-Hamilton founded Save the Elephants in 1993, and in 1997 the organisation built its research camp on the edge of Samburu National Reserve. The camp holds 30 researchers and staff, and the study that runs from it is the strongest thing this reserve has. Individual elephants are recognised by ear shape and tusks, each with a field code, a photograph and a sketch, and the field team has collected births, deaths, oestrus and musth across Samburu and Buffalo Springs, some 330 square kilometres, every day since. The individual-based records begin in 1998.

The published results are unusually detailed for an African elephant population. A 2005 paper found the population growing at an average 4.6 per cent a year between 1998 and 2003. A 2013 paper covering 934 individually known elephants over fourteen years found that human causes accounted for up to half of recorded adult deaths, and that survivorship was lower here than in comparable populations even in quiet periods. Save the Elephants' own monitoring of illegal killing put the proportion of illegally killed elephants at this site at 72 per cent in 2012, falling to 48 per cent by 2014 and 37 per cent in the first quarter of 2015.

The head count of identified animals is given inconsistently on Save the Elephants' own pages, as over 900 in one place and almost 1,000 in another, so treat it as a range rather than a precise figure. For the wider landscape, Kenya's censuses counted 7,475 elephants in the Laikipia, Samburu, Marsabit and Meru ecosystem in 2021 and 9,495 in the count published in the 2025 report. That report contradicts itself, giving 9,360 for the same landscape in a different chapter, and does not reconcile the two.

The lions got their researcher later. Shivani Bhalla moved to Samburu in 2002 and began formal lion research in 2003, which Ewaso Lions describes as the first such study in northern Kenya. The organisation itself was founded in 2007. Its programmes grew out of the communities rather than the camp: Warrior Watch from 2010, Mama Simba and Lion Kids Camp both from 2013.

How many lions are here is genuinely unsettled. Ewaso Lions says it monitors about 50 including cubs across the Samburu and Isiolo landscape plus parts of Laikipia, a study area of roughly 4,530 square kilometres covering the three reserves and eleven community conservancies. Its US partner organisation publishes a different framing, that only 11 lions were recorded in the protected areas of this ecosystem in 2007 and that over 60 now roam the area. Neither figure is dated or defined against the other, so we are not going to average them.

The drought, 2020 to 2023

Five consecutive rainy seasons failed: October to December 2020, March to May 2021, October to December 2021, March to May 2022, and October to December 2022. The March to May 2022 season was the driest on record in seventy years. A sixth failure was widely forecast for early 2023 and did not happen; rainfall returned that spring.

The counting itself was contested at the time, which is worth knowing if you read older coverage. On 28 February 2023 one agency described a five-season drought and another described a sixth failed season on the same day, and Kenya's own National Drought Management Authority never adopted the five-season framing at all. That authority put Samburu and Isiolo in its Alarm phase through October 2022 to February 2023, with neighbouring Marsabit moving to Emergency in February 2023.

The wildlife toll was counted. The Wildlife Research and Training Institute's report The Impacts of the Current Drought on Wildlife in Kenya, dated 29 September 2022, recorded 512 wildebeest, 381 common zebra, 205 elephants, 51 buffalo and 49 Grevy's zebra dead. A figure of 12 giraffe appears only in the updated version released to the press on 4 November 2022, so it belongs to that release rather than to the September report. The period covered is given three different ways in the sources: February to October 2022 in the report itself, nine months in one news agency's account and ten months in another. The report names Amboseli, Tsavo and Laikipia-Samburu as the worst affected ecosystems, with Amboseli and Laikipia-Samburu together recording more than 70 elephant deaths.

Grevy's zebra took the sharpest species-level hit here, because almost the whole world population lives in this landscape. The Grevy's Zebra Trust ran supplementary feeding inside Buffalo Springs, Samburu and Shaba from 5 July to 18 November 2022 with the wildlife service's permission, feeding an average of 500 animals a day, trucking in 24,000 bales of hay and driving 34,000 kilometres to do it. Its own mortality figures do not agree with each other: its 2023 drought report says roughly 10 per cent of a target population of about 1,000 died of drought-related causes, while its 2022 annual report records 120 deaths that year with 43 per cent attributed to drought. Different periods and different denominators are probably the reason, and the organisation does not explain the gap, so the two figures should not be merged.

One claim we want to knock down, because it is repeated a lot: that the Ewaso Ng'iro dried up. We could not confirm it from any dated source. Save the Elephants' 2022 annual report says the opposite in a photo caption, noting that during drought, when there is no rain in the reserve, water can still flow into the river from upstream. What is confirmed is the reverse event a year later: on 2 November 2023 the river burst its banks and the dry luggas ran hard.

The drought also left a mark on behaviour that is still visible. Ewaso Lions reports that since 2022 the lions have begun forming larger prides inside the protected areas, and suspects the severe drought of that year, by forcing them into smaller areas, is part of the reason. This was the region once described as the only place on earth where lions live alone.

What you can see of this history today

Very little of it is signposted, which is the honest answer. There are no monuments here and no visitor centre telling the story.

What you can see is the river. The Ewaso Ng'iro is the only permanent water in this landscape, and everything in the history above turns on that fact: the elephant study exists because the herds come to the river, the reserves were drawn along it, and the drought was survivable for some species and not for others depending on how close they could stay to it. Watching a herd cross in the late afternoon is the most direct contact with this history that the reserve offers.

Across the bridge in Isiolo County, Shaba is the quietest of the three reserves and the one where Joy Adamson worked and died. Nothing marks the camp site.

The rest of it is around you rather than in front of you. The conservancies you drive through on the way in, and whose fees you pay if you sleep in one, are the current chapter: Westgate, Kalama, Namunyak and the others, registered between 1995 and the mid-2000s, and still arguing out in public what community conservation should mean.