There are almost no animals left – but we’ve been here before

You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at the gym in stripey spandex stretched around plump buttocks. Pastures vanished long ago and our plains resemble Sudan’s Batn-el-Hajar – the Belly of Stones desert – so that I cannot even recall what they were like when they were last thick with green grass. The zebra foals are dying, the elephants are thin, while the buffalo disappeared a while back. The dry has killed quite mature trees which now shudder with the sound of termites and crash to the ground. To the north of us, horned skulls and dried carcasses litter the trail where the cattle-keepers trekked their animals vast distances in search of rain. Up there the countryside is silent. There are almost no animals left.

We had good rains until October 2020, then conditions changed. The late-year short rains failed completely that year. All our rains failed through 2021 and we received about half of what we’d hope for in a normal year. This year we have had a quarter of the long-term average so far and predictions based on the cycles of warming and cooling in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans suggest that we may not get adequate rains until April next year. That thought makes me sweat a bit. No rain until next year!

Two years ago I filled our big barn with hay and the bales are almost exhausted. For a year we have been giving the cattle extra stuff to help them get along. On top of the hay we bring in feed and I spent the price of a small car to buy a quantity of silage that arrived in large white plastic bales. At the farm salt store we mix a brew of minerals, molasses and urea with which we aim to stimulate rumen bacteria in the cows, so that stalky grass and browse can be converted into protein just to keep them alive.