This past week, I renewed my annual adoption of elephant orphan Ishanga with the David Shedlrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi, Kenya. Truth is, Ishanga, now more-or-less fully grown at age 11, is roaming semi-free in Tsavo East National Park with a wild herd, and only occasionally visits the Ithumba stockade where recovering orphans are coached to make the long transition to an eventual release into the wild. Ex-orphans return to the stockade because they are curious to meet the newcomers, who they know may one day join them in the wild.
And Tsavo is wild. It is Kenya’s largest park, by far. It’s rough and untamed. Tourists huddle around a string of lodges atop a tall escarpment that overlooks the southern edge of this vast stretch of semi-arid badlands. Tsavo has a bloody history, replete with remnant tales of the slave trade, man-eating lions — the infamous “Man-Eaters of Tsavo” — poaching wars pitting armed game rangers against Somali bandits armed with AK-47s, and now, in 2021, a terrible problem with wire snares, just one more battle in the unending war against the illegal bushmeat trade. The import of ivory is illegal — Kenya has long been on the frontlines of the war against the ivory trade, and has some of the toughest sentencing laws for wildlife crime on the entire continent — but poachers still try their luck. Park rangers working with the Sheldrick Trust have removed some 140,000 wire snares over the years, and facilitated more than 2,800 arrests, according to a project census in 2017.
Truth is, Ishanga may no longer need my annual stipend, but as Angela Sheldrick, daughter of Dame Daphne Sheldrick, the late wife of Tsavo’s original, first game warden, David Sheldrick — Tsavo was gazetted as a wildlife refuge in 1949 — reminds anyone who has sponsored an elephant orphan over a long period of time, there are many orphan babies, and any excess money is spread to those in need.
Ishanga, you see, is a success story. And not the only one. The Sheldrick Trust has successfully hand-raised more than 200 elephant orphans, and released some 100 of those back into the wild, all of them in Tsavo. The story gets better: Nearly 30 wild-born calves have been born to these elephants returned to the place where many of them were born, but no longer remember their parents, as they were mostly infants at the time they were orphaned
Elephants, you see, are social animals, and lead complex, sociable lives in the wild. They are quick to adopt newcomers, and the matriarchs — yes, elephant society is a matriarchy — know how to spot and weed out the troublemakers. The orphans, once they reach adulty age, tend to fit right in.
The Shedrick Trust, literally a small, relatively unknown, family owned NGO in the beginning, gained worldwide attention after a 60 Minutes profile by the late war correspondent Bob Simon in 2006. I visited the Nairobi orphanage for the first time in 2009, and adopted Ishanga a few years after that because, well, something about her story struck a chord in me.
Her parents were killed by wire snares and she was huddled in a dry mud pit, terrified, when park rangers found her, being marauded by wild lions. She was badly injured, both from her fall and from the lions, but somehow she managed to survive while the rangers fended off the lions and radioed the orphanage in Nairobi for help. A single-engine bushplane flew in a veterinary team — Kenya’s wilderness is massive, and flying is the only way to tend to an emergency in a hurry — and somehow they calmed her, loaded her aboard the plane and flew her to her new life.
Today, she’s back where she belongs — in Tsavo, running with wild elephants.
