Kahindi Samson slips through the dense underbrush of the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, gracefully lifting his sandaled feet over a tangle of vines. This is familiar territory for the 23-year-old Kenyan. At age 12, he began stealing past the "No Entry" signs at the border of the forbidden forest, setting wire snares to catch small antelope and felling slow- growing trees for timber.
Poaching was the best work Samson could find on Kenya's impoverished coast, and it helped feed his five younger brothers and sisters. But this risky business came at a cost. Whenever forest guards caught the scrawny youth, they would whip his bare skin with branches or march him to the police station to pay a fine.
The forest paid an even higher price. Muhuhu and other prized trees that once dominated the canopy have become scarce, their place taken by other, less valuable species. And snares have decimated the local population of Ader's duiker, Africa's most endangered antelope. Though one other population of these tiny ungulates clings to existence in Zanzibar, the handful of survivors in Arabuko-Sokoke are the last of their kind on the African mainland.
Today, however, neither Samson nor the endangered mammals and trees of the forest have anything to fear. For he no longer enters Arabuko- Sokoke illegally armed with saws and snares, but rather with a license and a butterfly net. Eyeing a green-banded swallowtail fluttering above him, Samson takes a running leap and with a deft swoop of his net catches the iridescent butterfly. "Ah, this one is pregnant," he notes, ogling her swollen abdomen.
After her eggs hatch in a cage outside Samson's mud-daub home, the caterpillars will become his livestock, which he will fatten with leaves gathered from the forest. Within four weeks, each resulting chrysalis-destined for butterfly display houses in America and Europe- will earn him more shillings than he used to make for a snared animal. For Samson and 550 other butterfly farmers in the area, these lucrative winged creatures now provide a reason to protect, rather than destroy, Arabuko-Sokoke. Butterflies have become the guardians of the forest.
In 1993, when butterfly farming was first introduced to the surrounding communities, Arabuko-Sokoke itself had a noose around its neck. Eighty- three percent of the farmers in the area wanted some of the forest cleared for cultivation; more than half hoped to see it cut down entirely. Thousands of squatters were threatening to stake their claims in the forest, confident that they had the backing of President Daniel Arap Moi. The understaffed Forest Department was losing the war against poachers.
This state of affairs alarmed conservationists, who knew that Arabuko- Sokoke was no ordinary patch of trees. The forest may be dwarfed by Kenya's more famous reserves (Tsavo National Park is 50 times bigger), and it doesn't even rate a mention in some tourist guidebooks, but Arabuko-Sokoke is one of East Africa's most precious natural assets: the largest remnant of the great coastal forest that once stretched from southern Somalia to Mozambique.
It is also a final refuge for animals that once moved freely along a great swath of the now densely populated coast. Ornithologists have ranked the reserve as the second most important forest in Africa for bird conservation. Clarke's weaver, for example, a golden bird wearing a black balaclava, flies nowhere else. On the ground, Arabuko-Sokoke harbors not only Ader's duiker, but also the vast majority of the world's remaining golden-rumped elephant shrews, cat-sized mammals with snouts worthy of a pachyderm.
One of the forest's worried observers was Ian Gordon, a specialist in butterfly ecology, then lecturing at the University of Nairobi. "I'd had the repeated experience of having collected in an area and then going back to it and finding it devastated," he recalls. He saw Arabuko-Sokoke and its 250 butterfly species heading in the same direction.
But what to do? Along with conservationists throughout Africa, he believed that the old-fashioned approach of "fines and fences" was failing. "You can't hope to conserve an area of biodiversity importance without the support of the local people," he argues. So with assistance from the National Museums of Kenya and a $50,000 grant from the Global Environmental Facility, administered by the United Nations, Gordon founded a project he named Ki-pepeo, which means "butterfly" in Swahili.
Potential butterfly farmers were chosen from among people with properties adjoining the forest and their immediate neighbors. Significantly, these were the community members most opposed to the forest because they had suffered most from baboons and elephants that raided their crops. Gordon intended to convert them into the frontline of the forest's defense. In February 1994, 133 skeptical butterfly farmers began selling chrysalises. For the first time in their lives, they could make money-legally-from the forest.
Last year, the Kipepeo Project exported more than 36,000 butterflies- in-waiting. At Samson's farm, a Kipepeo representative shows up every Monday and Thursday morning to collect his chrysalises, which range in color from mottled brown to lime green with flecks of metallic gold. By the afternoon, the pupae are packaged and on their way to the coastal city of Mombasa, to be shipped by air express to Britain and the United States. The following week, they will take wing in places like Florida's Cypress Gardens, where tourists pay to walk through a greenhouse flittering with more than a thousand colorful butterflies from around the world.
Display houses pay up to $2.50 for one chrysalis, of which about a dollar will go to Samson. In a good week, he earns the equivalent of $40, five times as much as he used to make for a hard week of construction work. The income has helped him buy flour and clothing for his family, and, he self-consciously admits, a stainless-steel watch for himself. A recent survey found that Kipepeo farmers earn more money from butterflies than from mangoes, cashews and coconut products-their main cash crops-combined.
At first, however, locals considered the idea more like a joke than a jackpot. "We thought they were kidding," recalls Samson, "because sending butterflies to America, who could imagine that?" The local Giriama language doesn't even have names for the different butterflies of the forest.
"Here in Africa, there's no importance in butterflies," explains butterfly farmer Priscilla Kiti. "We don't touch them normally." But Kiti is now a believer, even ignoring the traditional wisdom that pollen carried by butterflies ruins fingernails. "I can hold even 10 butterflies in my hand," she chuckles. Today both she and Samson rattle off Latin names for their breeding stock as though they had degrees in entomology.
Before Kipepeo, mixing farming with the forest was a recipe for nothing but grief. Those who plant corn, cassava and other crops within sight of Arabuko-Sokoke typically lose more than half of their harvest to baboons and elephants. In a sandy plot pocked with footprints the size of dinnerplates, Samson surveys what remains of a field planted by his parents. Two weeks before, forest elephants spent a night stripping the field of what would have been a six-month supply of cowpeas for Samson's family. "This big area from that mango tree up to that tree, all of this place was full of cowpeas," he sighs. "Now what remains are the stems and leaves."
With such unfriendly wildlife ambassadors about, the newfound devotion that butterfly farmers feel toward the forest seems all the more remarkable. Today, only 16 percent of Arabuko-Sokoke's closest neighbors want part of the forest surrendered to farmland. Sitting in the shade of a coconut palm, while her five children roast cashews over an open fire, Kiti explains that she now sees the forest as more than just a launching pad from which baboons mount raids on her crops. "We used to wish the forest would go away," she says, "but these days we earn our living mostly in butterfly farming, so if they cut the forest, things are going to be very difficult."
Surveying opinions is easier than measuring changes on the ground, but some observers believe the butterfly farmers are beginning to drive away poachers. Eight years ago, recalls Francis Mang'ee, the forester in charge of the eastern section of Arabuko-Sokoke, "You could not finish a day without arresting somebody, but nowadays you might even finish a month without arresting anyone."
