NAIROBI, Kenya — For veteran wildlife ranger Joseph Kimojino, the traditional tools of his trade — binoculars, off-road jeep and a rifle — have been supplemented by Twitter, Flickr and a blog.

A ranger in Kenya’s acclaimed Mara Triangle wildlife park, Kimojino is a member of the Masai tribe. He first learned how to click a computer mouse in November. Now he blogs about the Mara Triangle and posts wild animal photos on Flickr nearly every day.

Kimojino’s online outreach is an effort to raise awareness and money for the park, and it’s urgent: Without the funds he raises online, his employer, the Mara Conservancy, would go broke. Admission fees from park visitors are the conservancy’s primary source of revenue, but tourism dropped to almost zero during Kenya’s post-election violence, and hasn’t snapped back.

But the park’s online efforts are working. Despite relatively modest traffic, the blog raised $40,000 from donations in March. Kimojino’s Facebook page drew about $2,000; and a handful of safari companies bought advertising on the blog in exchange for sponsoring rangers.

“All the rest has been from single donations from individuals around the world, from donations as small as $5 to our biggest, which was $5,000,” says William Deed, the experienced blogger behind the park’s online outreach effort.

Kenya’s wildlife is seriously threatened by poaching, except in parks like the Mara Triangle, which employs rangers to protect animals. The rangers’ salaries are paid from park fees, but tourism has dropped 90 percent. To keep the conservancy running, the park’s online outreach needs to raise $50,000 a month until the tourists return — a job that’s fallen into Deed’s lap.

Two years ago, Deed, 28, was an office temp in Rotherham, England, “a really shitty, shitty town near Sheffield,” he says. Deed was so bored with his lot, he started a blog about the banalities of waiting in line.

The blog became popular, and within months, Deed was recruited by the conservationist blog network WildlifeDirect, brainchild of famed Kenyan conservationist Richard Leakey and his son-in-law, Emmanuel De Merode.

Deed’s assignment: Help wildlife rangers set up blogs about mountain gorillas and other animals in the Congolese guerrilla stronghold of North Kivu.

Eastern Congo was much less boring than Rotherham, Deed found. After surviving more than a dozen evacuations and being ultimately driven out of the park by Laurent Nkunda’s rebels, Deed found a more peaceful but no less adventurous assignment with the Mara Conservancy.

Now Deed is the producer of the conservancy’s expanding online presence, always looking for compelling storylines about animals and rangers, and coaching Kimojino on the possibilities of online communication tools. Deed likes to text in news from ranger patrols to Twitter, like this message from April 9: “Three poachers have been caught, found with dried meat from a hippo.”

The duo’s blog, Flickr page and tweets from the savannah make for an unfolding plot, like a reality television show — with ads asking for donations. It’s the kind of material that earnest animal lovers eat up.

It’s more dangerous work than most bloggers are used to. In late April, Kimojino’s blog reported on an hourlong gun battle between cattle rustlers and park rangers. One ranger was shot twice during the raid and had to be airlifted to a hospital in Nairobi, where his life was saved by an infusion of four pints of blood.

Most of Kimojino’s work is a little less violent. A gentle man devoted to the animals of the park he works for, Kimojino takes a drive every morning at 6:30 to check on the predator population that has been attracting tourists and documentary filmmakers to the Triangle for more than two decades. Kimojino notes the weight and behavior of lions and cheetahs that his sharp eyes spot in the vast fields of tall grass, and takes photographs.

On a game drive one morning, the ranger stops his car in front of a herd of antelopes and whips out a camera. “I have never had a Coke’s Hartebeest on Flickr,” he says, taking a picture.

The publicity project started in February when the conservancy’s purse emptied of emergency buffer funds. The first month, Deed says the blog had only five to 10 hits a day, but through frenetic online promotion and press, Deed says the audience has grown to 450 unique visits per day.

Kimojino’s Flickr page has more than 520 contacts from the world over. Before he finishes tagging and naming his pictures one Sunday in April, there are already adoring comments from a woman in the United States about his pictures of cheetah cubs. Flickr’s analytics report that he had 1,688 views the previous week.

Getting online has not been without its risks for Kimojino. He explains that for him to be speaking about the park to the public, instead of his boss, breaks traditional Kenyan decorum and was at first difficult for him. But he got used to being the public face of the Mara Triangle.

Deed mentions that after a few months of this online activity, Kimojino went to the optometrist — he was worried the computer would damage his eyesight, hindering him from spotting, for example, a leopard in a tree two kilometers away, as he did during my visit. (I couldn’t even see the spots with an 84mm zoom lens.)

Will Kimojino keep blogging after the tourists return? “If I stop as soon as we have enough money, people will say — these guys, they were just doing it for the money,” he says. “I must continue.”

Wired.com