African Asylum: For the love of elephants

Nairobi is the only city in the world with its very own National Park – the main gate to Nairobi National Park is only 10 km from the city centre. The park as a whole covers 117 square kms and is home to rhinos, giraffe, leopard, cheetah, zebra, wildebeest and lions. Being so close to the city, it’s tempting to wonder whether it has not been set up as a tourist attraction, but the animals in Nairobi have been here much longer than the humans. In the early C20th, city residents carried guns to protect themselves from lions. This led the colonial government to start building fences, in an attempt to confine the animals to the west and south of the city, and in 1946 the National Park was established.

The National Park is not entirely fenced, in an attempt to keep open the animals’ migration routes to southern Kenya and the Masai Mara. However increasing human development means the park is now almost surrounded and this poses a serious threat to animals who rely on the migration corridors to access food and water year round. Alongside this, however, the park provides an ideal location for some truly incredible wildlife conservation projects. On Sunday I visited two of them.

The Kenya Giraffe Centre is a large reserve, set up next to the National Park by Jock and Betty Leslie-Melville in 1979. The Centre was originally established rescue and breed the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe – only found in Kenya and distinguishable by the fact that its patterning does not continue below the knee. When the Centre was established there were only around 120 Rothschild’s giraffes in the wild – there are now over 300 and the Centre has reintroduced them to a number of Kenya’s National Parks. In addition to this conservation work, the Centre now provides conversation education programs to Kenya school children – the admission fee (and any money spent in the gift shop!) goes to ensuring these programs remain free and there are huge displays of children’s conservation-related artwork posted around the centre. I love giraffes, and it always amazes how such an oddly designed creature (Dad says they look like they were designed by a committee…) can move with such grace. But equally enrapturing were the warthogs (arguably even more oddly designed!) who rummaged on their knees at the giraffes’ feet during feeding time, snaffling up any pellets missed by the giraffe.

As well as the Giraffe Centre, I visited the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which runs a nursery for orphaned elephants within the National Park’s boundaries. From there it rescues and cares for elephants orphaned by poaching, human encroachment or other causes, before ultimately releasing them back into the wild in Tsavo East National Park. The Trust is named after the late husband of Daphne Sheldrick – Daphne was the first person in the world to successfully rear an elephant separated from its mother in infancy. Working out the right formula for food and care was a rudimentary matter of trial and error and in the early days it involved many failures.

The overwhelming impression I was left with after my visit to the elephant nursery was of the fundamental importance to elephants of family. In the wild, elephants move in large matriarchal herds, usually composed of females and young males. Male elephants only leave the herd at maturity – somewhere between 15 and 20 years. This makes the family, and especially the mother, absolutely crucial to a young elephant’s survival. The keepers at the nursery explain that when a young elephant is found on its own, it is nearly always because the mother has died or been killed – mother elephants never abandon their young. The relationship is even stronger in reverse – the Trust’s website describes the heartbreaking loss of one of its early orphans who, being the first to have been successfully reared using human baby formula, later died of grief when Daphne went away for a week to attend a friend’s wedding. Losing not just one mother, but two, was just too much. The website also tells the story of one of the nursery’s current residents – Rukinga – who was found by a local scout group roaming with a herd of cattle, so desperate was he for company after losing his herd. (You can read Rukinga’s story and even see a video of him here.)

The process of rearing, rehabilitation and reintegration into the wild will take a total of around 8 years. At the nursery, the elephant orphans are attended to by their keepers 24 hours a day – they even sleep with them in specially converted sheds, where they wake every 3 hours to feed them milk. Each elephant sleeps with a different keeper each night, to prevent them becoming too attached to any one individual. When they are between 2 and 3 they will be moved to the adolescents’ reserve at Tsavo East, where they will go out daily with their keepers to visit the wild herds in Tsavo and learn their new environment. This continues until the young orphan is ‘adopted’ by a new herd – a process which can take up to 4 or 5 years. One of the keepers explained to us that a successful adoption depends on a number of factors – including the existing herd’s composition and personality!

When travelling, as well as at home, I usually do my best to avoid animal-related tourist attractions, fearing the conditions that they will be kept in for the sake of human entertainment. So it was such a joy to be able to visit two amazing conservation projects and witness these incredible creatures and know that the money I spent would be used to continue the good work. And now I am off to find out what I have to do to become an elephant keeper…

The Rothschild's giraffe - unlike the reticulated
and Masaai giraffes it has no patterning below the knee.

Young female and male giraffes having a wander... and a stretch!

Maybe I should have a prize for the best caption here....

In the background you can see Giraffe Manor - you can stay here and wake to a
giraffe peering through your window... all for a mere USD1000 a night!

Enter scavenging warthog.

If my favourite animal wasn't already the elephant, I think it would be the warthog.

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust - public access is limited to just one hour a day, the rest
of the time the elephant orphans hang out together and with their keepers.