Ivory
‘The elephant never gets tired of carrying its tusks’
– African proverb
It’s over six years since we left Kenya.
While we were living there, we got the chance to visit the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi. It was a memorable day.
One cannot fail to be impressed by the work of the trust and its dedicated keepers, who take care of all the wildlife. They are renowned for their conservation work with elephants. We watched as the keepers fed the baby elephants with their giant bottles of formula. And soon after that visit, we gave the gift of an adoption to PKP’s niece and nephew, an elephant called Mashariki.
Several years later, we’ve just adopted another elephant, Kelelari. We recently celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary, Ivory. This was a perfect anniversary gift.
We read that Kelelari was about four years old when he was orphaned on the plains of the Masai Mara, a result of poaching. Apparently park rangers had hoped that Kelelari would be able to survive without his mother and assimilate back into his family herd, to continue life in the wild. His story was unique. “Kelelari went on to live an isolated life on his own. Lodge owners in the Mara and their guests would watch this little lonely elephant for months, hoping that one day he would be scooped up, but it never happened.” *
Reading Kelelari’s story, we were reminded of another elephant that we saw on our first trip to Chobe National Park in Botswana, almost twenty years ago. There, from a small, river boat, we watched a tiny, lone elephant, by the shores of the Chobe River, struggling with a broken leg. We wondered why the family herd had not kept him with them, to protect him from predators. Our river guide told us that the herd had probably abandoned the baby elephant, as he would have slowed them down. There was nothing we could do to help.
Kelelari has been luckier
….”the months passed, and in that time he would remain close to the properties and people for protection, painfully aware of his vulnerability without the protection of his herd, in an area with plenty of predators… Soon he became a target for lions, and he survived three separate lion attacks, two times saved by a herd of buffalo who he chose to hang out with for company, who stampeded when the lions attacked, causing the lions to think again. His most recent attack left his behind chewed up and him without a tail, with significant wounds from claws and teeth in his back. For everybody who had to witness his struggle, it was time to move mountains in order to save him, as he was orphaned unnaturally in the first place, with his mother killed at the hands of humans.” *
The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust became aware of Kelelari’s plight and began to make a plan to fly the elephant to Wilson Airport and then transported to their nursery in Nairobi. “Now totally healed, he has turned into such a gentle and loving boy, with absolutely no pushing and barging behavior evident, and despite being the biggest in the Nursery fold at the moment, he has been no problem at all. He has grown to love his Nursery elephant family, his Keepers, the visitors and absolutely understands events defining his life, embracing his new home and the second chance he has been afforded.” *
Kelelari was given the chance of a new life. And this is just one example of the invaluable work that the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust does. The staff called the elephant Kelelari, which means ‘loner’ in Maa.
Have you found out about great conservation work, somewhere in the world?
© Maggie M / Mother City Time
