Nairobi National Park
 “The elephant’s trunk hit me so fast that I didn’t even see it coming. The next thing I knew I was lying in the grass and couldn’t move my arm. Then I saw that she was coming for me again and I was sure it was all over.”
You get used to hearing such narrow-escape stories from hardened bush-guides but it was difficult to imagine this sweet, white-haired old lady on the receiving end of an elephant charge. She wore a long powder-blue dress and fiddled with a pair of reading glasses as she recounted a story that has obviously been retold more than once. But there are few guides in Africa who have spent so many difficult hours with African elephants, or who understand their temperament as well as does seventy year old Daphne Sheldrick M.B.E.
“It was my own stupid fault,” she continued with a magnanimity born only of thirty years working with elephants, “- I thought I recognised her as one of our released orphans but she was quick to remind me that she was a wild elephant and that I was being extremely presumptuous in fondling her trunk.”
Since her husband David Sheldrick (founder warden of Tsavo East National Park) died in 1977, Mrs Sheldrick has dedicated her life to orphaned elephant, rhino and buffalo. She was the first person to successfully hand-rear new-born elephants and has since released a dozen black rhino and almost forty elephants into the wild. But the job of caring for them can be as heartbreaking as it is fulfilling.
 “Last week we lost eight-week old Jipe,” she told me as we stood on the veranda of the trust’s HQ in Nairobi National Park. “He seemed to be a perfectly strong, healthy young elephant then suddenly he just died, for no apparent reason. Baby elephants are exceedingly fragile; they can be fine one day, and dead the next. We lost three others last year but they were all too far gone really - from spear wounds and malnutrition - to save when they arrived. It’s particularly hard on the keepers when we lose an elephant that seems to be getting stronger.”
Sensitive human keepers are the key to Mrs Sheldrick’s elephant survival strategy. “To a baby elephant, the family is all important,” she says. “The babies are always severely traumatized on arrival, having witnessed the violent massacre of their elephant family at the hands of poachers, or human conflict situations, or else having been separated from the herd during the panic of a stampede. Some grieve so painfully for their lost family that they just give up the will to live. Others can be nurtured into a new life only if they can be convinced that there is a loving new family for them.”
When Mrs Sheldrick had to disappear to welcome the hordes of visitors who would soon be arriving to watch the elephants’ afternoon bath, I went with one of the keepers to find the orphans. Felix Micheni had been with the herd that morning and had a good idea where they were feeding, but even so I felt slightly vulnerable as we sauntered off into the thick bush of Nairobi National Park.
“Don’t worry, the elephants are also very nervous about lions,” laughed Felix. “We’d probably hear them trumpeting a warning well before we saw any cats. Probably.”
Eventually we stepped out into a clearing in the bush to see a herd of the smallest elephants that I had ever seen in one place. Three-month-old Nalitu was the baby of the group, while four month old Lauleni was just beginning to stand up to her boisterous older brothers. The youngest were covered in blankets (tied on with ‘belts’ made of ladies’ tights) to protect them from pneumonia, the greatest danger to a young elephant that is deprived of the body-heat and sheltering bulk of its mother.
“Elephants can’t sneeze or cough,” Mrs Sheldrick had explained, “so we don’t get any warning until mucous starts streaming from the trunk…then we might only have two hours at best. Imagine if you had a three foot long nose - you’d have to be pretty far gone before it started running.”
Felix laughingly fended off the probing trunks of two of the youngsters who immediately rushed up to greet him and I held back to give them time to get used to my scent. I need not have worried; these remarkably gentle creatures - some already as tall as ponies - were soon nuzzling my camera-bag, sucking my fingers and pulling my ears with sensitive trunk tips. There were eight baby elephants here with eight keepers who wander with them all day and sleep in their stables at night (on a rotor basis so that the elephants do not become too attached to a particular human). Heartfelt affection and constant caresses are facets of herd life that must be duplicated if these elephants are to grow to be well-balanced members of a wild herd.
It is no cliché that an elephant never forgets. “They form strong bonds that last throughout their lives,” Mrs Sheldrick had told me. “Eleanor was one of our earliest orphans. Shortly after she was born in 1958 her mother was killed by poachers in Samburu National Reserve. She is now the matriarch of a Tsavo herd yet when one of our old keepers went to the park two years ago she rushed up to greet him without a moment’s hesitation. It was 37 years since she last saw him!”
Nairobi National Park is not big enough to sustain a wild elephant herd so the older orphans are eventually moved (with their ‘human family’) 150 miles to the trust’s centre in Tsavo National Park.
Tsavo National Park
Joseph Sauni, the Sheldrick Trust’s manager at Tsavo, took me to meet the orphaned elephants at the waterhole. The brash adolescents, that stampeded towards us in a cloud of red Tsavo dust, were a far cry from the infants that I had seen at Nairobi. At five years old these elephants were already big enough to run over me without noticing and with twenty-six of them splashing and play-fighting in and around the waterhole it was important to keep a line of retreat open as I tried to get close with my camera.
Joseph pointed to one four year old with a strangely misshapen ear. “That’s Burra,” he said. “His herd were notorious crop raiders and the Sheldrick Trust hired a helicopter to drive them away from Bura village and into the park. But this little elephant was left behind and we realised that he had almost severed his right ear trying to escape from a snare.”
Snaring is a huge problem in Tsavo these days. The usual victims are dik-dik and impala but bigger game often finds its way to the butcheries of nearby Voi town or Nairobi. Some estimates say that a million wild animals may have ended up in the pot last year alone, and a recent study by the Born Free Foundation revealed that up to 51% of Nairobi butcheries are selling illegal bushmeat.
 Isaac Maina is the leader of ‘Burra Team’ (named after the maimed elephant) the first of Sheldrick Trust’s five anti-snaring patrols. In a store-room at the Tsavo compound is a steadily growing heap of snares: thousands of treacherous little ‘cheese-wire’ dik-dik loops and larger snares, made from telephone wire, capable of bringing down zebra, wildebeest or eland. Biggest of all, and somehow most horrifying, are the snares (from vehicle winch-cables) that kill giraffe or elephant. In the last four years the Sheldrick Trust has collected almost 50,000 snares around Tsavo.
“We’ve sometimes found over a hundred snares in one four-hour patrol,” Isaac told me the next morning, as we struggled through the bush with his team and two armed guards from Kenya Wildlife Service. We peered into bolt holes and along game paths and within minutes found a shred of grey-brown fur that was all that remained of a once alert and wide-eyed dik-dik.
Bigger game presents more complex distribution problems but Isaac’s team once came across a poaching camp where an adult giraffe had recently been butchered. The meat had been dried on the trees until it was ready to be transported down to the highway on bicycles.
The Trans-Africa highway, linking Nairobi and Mombasa, cuts right across the migratory route between Tsavo East and Tsavo West national parks. Wildebeest graze on the roadside and ‘zebra crossings’ here take an unusual, and highly unpredictable, form. Presumably these animals prefer to take their chances with the heavy trucks than with the voracious lions of Tsavo, but many of them fall victim to the gangs of commercial poachers for whom the Trans-Africa acts as an ideal ‘conveyor belt’ to the capital.
“Bushmeat is going to be Kenya’s next big natural disaster,” says the normally quietly-spoken Isaac. “A busy team of poachers can take as many as a hundred antelope in a night. We managed to fight back from the massive elephant and rhino slaughters of the ‘70s and ‘80s but even Kenya’s great natural wealth won’t be able to stand the sort of exploitation that we’re seeing now.”
What is happening around Tsavo is being repeated around every park and reserve in the country and Mrs Sheldrick believes that unless the poachers are stopped “East Africa could follow West Africa in becoming a faunal vacuum.”
The 13,000 square mile Tsavo National Park was founded in 1948, not primarily because it was a phenomenally rich wildlife habitat (which only became clear afterwards) but because it was an arid thirstland, devoid of grazing and infested with tsetse, malaria and periodic rinderpest. As such it was of little use to man. In the ‘60s there were 45,000 elephants in the park but in the ‘70s and ‘80s the world was shocked by images of massacred Tsavo herds with their machete-hacked faces covered in flies. The elephants were intelligent enough to look for security close to the growing villages, where the AK47s could not reach them so easily…and many were subsequently destroyed as crop-raiders and ‘problem animals.’
Only now are the elephants beginning to return to the centre of the park but the current total population of 10,000 is insufficient to re-open the grasslands that are the lifeblood of the grazing animals. Far from being a purely destructive influence on the habitat, elephants are necessary to combat the impenetrable thornscrub that would soon cover the entire park in their absence. Tsavo needs elephants and this huge park is the only one in Kenya that offers sufficient space for growing herds.
 As such it is the ideal location for the Sheldrick Trust’s orphan release programme. The team of keepers here, who accompanied this group of orphans from Nairobi HQ, also have the benefit of two experienced ‘overseers.’ Emily and Aitong are two ex-orphans who, though now totally independent, have chosen to remain as matriarch and nanny to the youngsters. They escort the herd between the foraging areas and the great iron Jurassic Park night stockade, which protects them from predators.
When Joseph and I arrived at the stockade an English couple were waiting for the arrival of the herd. The Tsavo orphanage is not open to the public but Janet Wilkinson and Kevin Griffiths were privileged guests who had travelled from the Isle of Wight to meet the young elephant that they had ‘adopted’ through the trust’s website. By a strange coincidence they happened to be Burra’s ‘foster parents’ and Janet, already visibly emotional when we arrived, was moved to tears when Joseph told them the story of Burra’s abandonment.
Now, however, the young elephant is strong and feisty. He goes out with the herd every day and they often mingle with wild elephants under the guidance of Emily and Aitong. He will never be turned out of the shelter but one day he will simply decide not to come back to the stockade.
In one way I imagine that this must be a sad moment for the human keepers but Joseph corrects me: “No, it makes us very happy. When a young elephant decides he doesn’t need us anymore and that he’s happy to go back to the wild then we know that we’ve done our jobs well.”
‘For information on how you can help The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust - from US$50 you can become a foster parent to an orphaned elephant -
visit www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org or telephone +254 20891996.’
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