Letter from Tsavo: remembering Imp

“It seemed to the elephant that you could tell a lot about someone by the way they carried a secret — by how safe they kept it, how soon they told, the way they acted when they were trying to keep it from spilling out.”

First, the facts.

Ishanga: African savannah elephant.

Current age: 16 years old

Gender: Female

Rescue date: 17 Nov 2010

Rescue location: Tsavo West National Park, Kenya

Date of birth (estimate): 10 Nov 2009

Reason orphaned: Poaching

Age at rescue: 12 months old (approx.)

Current location: Living Wild, reintegrated at Ithumba, Tsavo East National Park

Now, the overview. And herein lies a tale.

Ishanga’s story is one of the most dramatic in the history of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. The trust and its accompanying “elephant orphanage” was established in 1977 in Nairobi, Kenya by the late Dame Daphne Sheldrick in memory of her late husband, David Sheldrick. Sheldrick, born in Egypt but raised in Kenya as an infant, grew up to become a prominent naturalist and the founding warden of Kenya's Tsavo East National Park.

Ishanga was rescued rescued in November, 2010 after being orphaned by ivory poachers.

During her rescue, Ishanga was actively attacked by a lion. A Kenya Wildlife Service ranger had to fire shots in the air to force the lion to let go of her.

Haunted by physical wounds and suffering severe psychological trauma, Ishanga slowly healed at Sheldrick elephant orphanage in Nairobi National Park, the world’s only major national park on the doorstep — literally — of a major urban metropolis.

It was around this time, in early 2011, that, struck by her remarkable tale of survival against the odds, I was one of several visitors to co-sponsor her.

Ishanga transitioned from the Nairobi Nursery to the Ithumba Reintegration Unit in Tsavo East National Park in August 2012, now roughly two years old.

She was gradually integrated into a wild herd over the following couple of years.

Eventually she became truly wild, and was occasionally spotted — though not often — among the wild herds that visit Ithumba on occasion, out of curiosity and to “meet” newly arrived orphans that Sheldrick’s minders hope to release back into the wild one day.

Years passed. Ishanga disappeared off the radar completely and her visits to Ithumba, already infrequent, stopped completely.

And then, a miracle. A minor miracle, it is true, but a miracle just the same.

This past February, Ishanga returned to the Ithumba stockades with a baby in tow. “Imp,” as Sheldrick caretakers named her, was no more than a week old. She was named after her lively disposition and because she was born following unexpected early rains, her arrival likened to that of a mischievous little spirit, or ‘imp.’

Ishanga had returned to show off her new baby to her human caretakers, which may sound odd but is actually fairly common behaviour in rehabituated elephants.

Imp was a miracle baby in many respects, not just because her mom had defied the odds to survive in the first place. Imp was the 92nd wild-born “grand-calf” born to an elephant raised and rewilded by the Sheldrick Trust.

After feeding on Ithumba’s stocks of lucerne, a leafy green forage plant used as farm animal feed and more commonly known as alfalfa in Canada and the US, Ishanga headed back toward the nearby Kalovoto River, Imp in tow.

Few remarkable stories unfold without their share of heartbreak — that’s part of what makes them remarkable.

Just weeks later, on March 13, Ishanga returned to the Ithumba stockade alongside a large group of other ex-orphans.

Caretakers quickly noticed Imp was no longer following behind. Imp was never seen again.

Caretakers quickly noticed Imp was no longer following behind. Imp was never seen again.

Her cause of death is unknown. Whatever fate befell her happened deep in the wild during their weeks away from the stockades. In their eulogy, the Trust noted that “only the elephants can explain what happened.”

There is a silver lining to this tale, though, despite its seeming tragic ending.

Ishanga has been seen since, Ithumba caretakers have reported, and she appears happy and physicially well.

Judging from images taken at the time, she has grown to become a particularly large and self-confident elephant, despite her beginnings as a sickened, badly injured calf.

She will, in all likelihood, have more calves, and this time, as an experienced mother, she will be better adapted to raising them to adulthood.

In the meantime, according to caretaker reports, she has found comfort by helping fellow ex-orphans look after their own wild-born babies. She is showing every sign of being matriarch material — and that alone makes her story all the more remarkable.

Elephants are quiet keepers of secrets.

“The future alone whispers the answer.”

•

https://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org

Summon the Heroes

Every so often a story comes along that inspires hope. And then takes it away. And then gives it back again. This is one such story.

This is a tale about an orphaned elephant calf, found alone and terrified in Kenya’s Tsavo West National Park.

It is a tale about fortuitous timing and a remarkable rescue, and how, just when the situation appeared at its bleakest, fortune — and park rangers with the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage in Nairobi — intervened. The date was 21 November 2010.

Hardly anyone could have known it then it there would be a happy ending — of sorts. Not entirely, but happy just the same. For a moment there, anyway.

Nairobi’s Sheldrick elephant orphanage was already on the world map, owing to a widely seen CBS 60 Minutes segment hosted by veteran war correspondent Bob Simon. The segment first aired in 2006. (A grainy, time-worn video is still up on YouTube, some 20 years later.)

I had visited the Sheldrick Trust from halfway round the world twice, in 2008 and again in 2009. At the end of 2010, I decided to co-sponsor an elephant of my own, and by timing and chance, the elephant I sponsored was that very same elephant who, having been orphaned by ivory poachers, was saved from a group of lions.

Tsavo is a vast, untrammelled region of red dust plains and doum palms that stretches an hour’s drive from the Indian Ocean one side to the Nairobi-Mombasa highway that links Kenya with Uganda and from there to Lake Victoria.

Tsavo was once home to some of the largest elephant herds in Africa and site in the late 1980s of the infamous “Ivory Wars,” a pitched years-long war between heavily armed ivory poachers, many of them from neighbouring Somalia, and militarized park rangers with the Kenya Wildlife Service, then under the direction of palaeoanthropologist turned environmental crusader Richard Leakey.

Kenya’s elephant population was being wiped out to feed the illegal ivory trade across in Southeast Asia, Japan and, most notably, China.

Kenya’s then president, Daniel arap Moi, mindful that Kenya’s tourism industry hung in the balance — poachers had started killing tourists at that point, in robberies gone wrong and to silence witnesses — told Leakey to do something about it.

Leakey, for his part, told Moi that global feel-good wildlife conferences, hysterical op-ed pieces in the New York Times, and cutely designed posters at zoos around the world weren’t going to cut it.

The only thing that would work, Leakey told Moi, was to fight the poachers on their own terms — to meet gunfire with gunfire. At that point, unarmed park rangers were tired of being threatened — and killed — by armed bandits.

Moi was reluctant at first.

African politics are famously volatile, and no leader, democratically elected or not, willingly agrees to arm and equip a fighting force that could conceivably one day pose a rival to that country's actual armed forces.

Moi was taking a gamble, and he knew it. Kenya needed some positive headlines for a change. The tourism trade was hanging by a thread. You’d better not mess this up, Moi told Leakey.

We’ll do our level best, Leakey assured him, but we need the guns and support equipment — and decent salaries — to do it. (This is all detailed in Leakey’s remarkable 2001 book, Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya’s Elephants, a harrowing read if ever there was one.)

The subsequent conflict was bloody, violent, protracted, and long. And decisive.

Kenya’s  wildlife authorities and park rangers regained control of Tsavo; elephants enjoyed a brief respite from being killed for their tusks; and overseas tourists started coming back, a trickle at first and then back to their pre-‘80s levels.

©Alex Strrachan/Strachan Photography

Decades later, poaching is still an issue — the ivory trade in China has never really gone away — but the scale of poaching in Tsavo is nothing compared to what it was then. Today, NGOs like the Sheldrick Trust, named after David Sheldrick, Tsavo’s founding park warden, have boots on the ground, and assault rifles to match. They’re there to do what they can, and conservation organizations like the Sheldrick Trust and the community-owned and run Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya — Kenya’s first large-scale program founded and managed by strictly local communities — help save orphaned elephants, one elephant at a time.

Ishanga’s tale was remarkable from the outset.

The Sheldrick Trust’s Ziwani anti-poaching unit, tasked with finding and removing snares in the deep bush, happened on the stricken  orphan just as lions were eyeing her up for the taking. In moments, a routine poaching patrol turned into anything but routine.

Just as the team circled her, to try and capture her, a lion raced out of the underbrush and grabbed the terrified elephant by the neck. An accompanying Kenya Wildlife Service park ranger fired gunshots into the air and the lion let go of its intended victim — fortunately for all concerned. The elephant calf was now both paralyzed by fear and injured.

The team were able to restrain her while the lion, now joined by companions, circled a safe distance away — “safe” being a relative term.

The elephant, bleeding from its injuries and terrified by what was going on around it, was shepherded aboard a waiting rescue plane  and airlifted to Nairobi, an hour away by small plane.

On arrival, she was rushed to the Sheldrick elephant nursery outside  Nairobi National Park. Veterinarians gave her a 50/50 chance of surviving. They would later admit they rated her chances closer to 20/80 that she would make it through her first night, let alone beyond that.

In the tradition of the orphanage, her new minders gave her a name — Ishanga: a word in Eastern philosophy used to describe that part of the larger universe that invites us to invite grace as a constant presence in our lives.

Ishanga did survive that first night as it turned out, but her early days at the nursery were fraught. She was wild, temperamental, and would not let anyone near her, not even to give her water or milk.

The keepers, for their part, were patient, quiet, and tireless. After a regimen of injections of Selenium, Vitamin B12 and the intervention of an intravenous drip, Ishanga once again found her feet.

More than a few new arrivals to the orphanage succumb from their injuries, shock, an underlying medical condition, or — and this is strangely human — sadness from losing their family.

In an effort to welcome Ishanga into the fold, keepers brought the other orphans to her recovery stockade. Elephants are social, curious and welcoming by nature, even at that age, and the other orphans were eager to meet the newcomer. Ishanga would not respond to people, at least not at first, but she might respond to other elephants, especially those her own age.

She did.

In the following days, she worked up the nerve to leave the confines of her stockade and follow the other orphans into the bush on their daily early morning walks — supervised by orphanage staff — into Nairobi National Park. (Elephants can never be released into Nairobi National Park, because it’s too small to sustain an elephant population over the long term, not even a small herd, but they can explore, during daylight hours and under supervision.) Nairobi National Park, unique because it’s the only real wildlife reserve in the heart of a major metropolis, is home to giraffe, rhinos, zebras, hippos, buffalo, crocodiles — and lions.

But not elephants.

Ishanga’s rescue / ©Photos courtesy Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

It took time, but as the days turned into weeks, the weeks months, and the months a year, Ishanga filled out, regained her confidence and took on a personality of her own.

Her weekly progress reports show it was a slow process, though — she was “desperately thin” in the veterinarians’ own words, during those early weeks, and suffered from nightmares.

(The Sheldrick Trust assigns a specific keeper to each orphan, and the keeper is often in the srockade with the elephant as it sleeps through the night.

The recovery process can take as long as two or three years; it depends on the individual.

The bond between a keeper and an elephant orphan has been shown to play a crucial role, one of many important discoveries the Sheldrick Trust has made since the nursery was first established in 1977.)

With the onset of adolescence, elephant orphans are relocated to Tsavo East National Park, where they’re placed in a “half-way house” at Ithumba Camp, a reintegration centre in a remote wilderness area where newly released elephants are slowly introduced to wild herds, in the hope they will eventually be taken in.

Most are. Eventually.

Space is no longer an issue. Nairobi National Park is a mere 45 square miles (117 square kilometres); Tsavo East on the other hand is 5,300 sq mi (14,000 sq. km).

Big difference.

Once in Tsavo, the rehabilitated orphans will — in theory — lead full, productive lives as self-sufficient adults, capable of fending for themselves and eventually raising their own families.

Some of the released elephants return to Ithumba briefly, to check up on old friends (human and elepahnt); some are never seen again.

In some cases, a returning orphan will bring its wild herd with it. This is a remarkable sight to see in person, and shows just how effective  the Sheldrick program has proven to be in its near 50 years of existence.

Ishanga graduated to Tsavo’s Ithumba reintegration unit in August 2012, some 18 months after being rescued from near certain death. She would have been roughly two and a half years old at the time of her being moved to Ithumba.

It took Ishanga little more than a year to find a wild herd. Keeper reports from Ithumba — the Sheldrick Trust keeps meticulous records of which elephant goes where, and records its movements after that — show that, once she had joined a wild herd, Ishanga was a regular visitor to Ithumba, and would bring some of her wild friends with her. I’m looking at a report from October 2017 as I write this.

Her appearances became fewer and further between in the intervening years, a natural turn of events. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. In one visit, keepers noticed that she had somehow sheered one of her tusks in half. No one knows how or why. It couldhave been an accident, it could have been a joust with a rival elephant, it could even have been an encounter with lions once again. A report from January 2021 showed that, her tusk aside, she appeared to be in good health and now a fully grown 11-year-old.

Then she vanished entirely.

Gone.

No one knows how or why but the assumption was that, now leading the life of a wild elephant, she had simply moved on to the next phase of her time on earth.

Her Sheldrick past was now just that: the past.

And then … a miracle.

That story, told in Ishanga’s Tales: Middle Endings, is next.

Ishanga at Ithumba, 2018 (Photos courtesy Sheldrick Wildlife Trust)

Ishanga, now semi-wild, visits Ithumba, 2021