MARTIN Clunes is on a mission to rescue endangered big cats
Martin Clunes and a lion called Mugie, Friday, 9PM, ITV[ITV]It’s so fantastic that Prince William has championed African wildlife. He’s putting his back into it – and one thing the royal family is brilliant at is getting people to cough up
Fast forward several decades and Martin, now a patron of the Born Free Foundation, made his first animal-themed documentary in 1998 about an elephant called Nina, rescued by conservationist Tony Fitzjohn, who worked with George Adamson for decades.
Martin has remained friends with Tony and this week’s documentary sees the actor back in Kenya helping rescue an orphaned lion cub, Mugie, and rebuild Adamson’s camp in the Kora National Reserve. The camp was burnt down in 1989 after Adamson was murdered by Somali bandits. By then, Tony was running a black rhino reserve in Tanzania. Not only would Kora be rebuilt but Mugie would be its first lion for 25 years, so it was a momentous occasion. Martin recalls Tony’s emotional return to Kora. “The first time flying there, Tony was like an excited kid.
It was a massive thing for him,” says Martin. “He has a lot of unfinished business, thinking he should have been there to protect George when he was killed.” But now they had the opportunity to give another lion cub a chance. Mugie had been washed up on a riverbank 140 miles away and Tony and Martin went to collect him. “He was labrador-sized and as sweet, cuddly and playful as you’d expect, although even then you could see those paws were pretty big,” says Martin.
Back at Kora, they began training the orphaned lion to be wild. “You do that just by walking with them,” Martin says. “Cats have an instinct to chase squirrels, for example. They learn to get downwind of their prey – all that stuff is in their DNA. Tony is there to make sure they’re safe from other predators.”
Martin admits he was nervous on the day he took a walk with Mugie. “He was full of beans – he was just looking at me. We were all mindful of it, but I did get to have a walk,” he says. Rebuilding Kora and repopulating it with lions is a much trickier prospect today than it was in Adamson’s time. The population in the Kenyan countryside has grown and the area is full of itinerant Somali herdsmen who will shoot or poison wild animals threatening their herds. “There are a lot of people there now and the last thing the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) needs is to free a lion and have it eat a poor farmer,” Martin says. “But Kora is a great educational tool for Kenya. Tony and the KWS hope people will go and study wildlife and see why it is such an amazing spot.”
But time is running out for the lions. Poaching and destruction of the natural habitat are sounding the death knell for much of Africa’s wildlife and it is thought Kenya’s population of about 2,000 lions faces extinction in less than 20 years. The way forward is to create habitats to keep lions in and poachers, predators and farmers out. “It’s a sad reality, but it’s got to be done,” Martin says. “They’re not like walls. They’re huge areas of land that will protect farmers’ livestock from lions.” One hopeful sign, he says, is Prince William’s commitment to conservation. Since 2005, the Duke of
Cambridge has been patron of conservation charity Tusk Trust and last month unveiled his own charity, United For Wildlife. “It’s so fantastic that Prince William has championed African wildlife,” says Martin. “He’s putting his back into it – and one thing the royal family is brilliant at is getting people to cough up.”
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