LAND AND LEGACY: LAURENCE ELLIS

In Kenya’s Amboseli ecosystem, a corps of Maasai women take up ranger posts, defending both wildlife and the communities bound to it.

By Megan Liu

Amid the savannas of Southern Kenya, where acacia trees split the horizon and elephants roam, women in deep green uniforms stand ready to protect. For the women of Team Lioness, these lands have never been distant. Daily life tuned them to the terrain—fetching water from seasonal springs, marking when rivers thinned to dust, tracing grazing grounds passed from one generation to the next. They learned to read signs of change: a lion skirting the edge of pasture, an elephant’s passage pressed into soil. This inheritance made them guardians long before they wore the uniform.

Team Lioness formed in 2019, marking a turning point in Amboseli. Backed by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), eight Maasai women pulled on ranger uniforms for the first time, stepping into roles once reserved for men. Chosen for their quickness of mind, endurance, and ability to hold ground—both in the community and in the field—they became the first in their families to secure formal employment in one of Kenya’s first all-female ranger units.

Joining the Olgulului Community Wildlife Rangers (OCWR), a force of 87 men, the team, which has since grown to 17, quickly became an emblem of defiance and possibility. At the wheel of patrol vehicles, they cut new lines across the grasslands; with rifles slung on their shoulders and radios in hand, the choices in the field were now theirs to make.

Their patrols stretch across the borderlands of Kenya and Tanzania, where Amboseli National Park gives way to Maasai rangelands that encircle nearly 40,000 hectares. The work is urgent: deterring poachers, calming herders after lion attacks, protecting elephants, giraffes, and cheetahs whose survival depends on coexistence. A single patrol can cover 20 kilometers on foot, scanning tracks to identify animal movements, mapping sightings by GPS, relaying coordinates over radios, reading the land as closely as the animals that move across it.

Once, they came upon a poacher bent over a young giraffe, killed in the night. He was held until the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) arrived. When lions take livestock, Team Lioness is often among the first to intervene, helping ease tensions before retaliation can follow. They have doused accidental bushfires and cut poaching attempts short, stopping harm before it spreads.

Amboseli itself is fragile. Beneath the gaze of Kilimanjaro, climate shifts, grazing pressure, and human expansion continue to narrow the corridors through which wildlife moves. In this tightening arena, coexistence becomes as critical as enforcement. Team Lioness embodies both: they carry conservation into council meetings and classrooms, even founding a wildlife club at a local primary school with 14 active members. Their ties to the community allow them to build trust, showing again and again that conservation is as much about people as it is about wildlife.

To see women at the frontlines of conservation is to recalibrate what guardianship looks like. It is to recognize that the survival of Amboseli’s wildlife is bound not only to soil and sky, but to the courage of those willing to protect them.

Laurence Ellis turns his lens to these women and the lands they inhabit, capturing care, strength, and possibility, entwined with the animals they defend. Conservation endures because it’s shared. The lioness, after all, is never solitary; her strength lies in the pride.