Jumbo task, handled with care

Aakash Mehrotra

Off in the distance some figures in bright green coats and crumpled safari hats were calling out names in high, shrilling tone: ‘Kitirua’, ‘Alamaya’, ‘Reo’ ‘Lasayen’ and slowly one by one, baby elephants come out of the bushes in a single line, trolling and trumpeting, following their keepers — a procession of brown-faced eager elephant orphans, flapping their ears, wearing a hypnotic grace and fiddling with their curious long trunks, while visitors line on both sides of the route, ready with smiles and cameras to greet the wild orphans.

This is the Nairobi nursery of David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, world’s most successful orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation centre. This nursery is home to orphan baby elephants from all over Kenya, many of them are victims of poaching, who are then raised here until they are no longer milk dependent. They are then moved over a hundred miles away to another nursery in the Tsavo National Park. There, at their own pace, usually taking six to eight years, these elephants make a gradual transition to the wild.

The rampant poaching and wildlife conflicts have claimed many lives and left many wild orphans. It sounds ironical that elephants’ greatest enemies have turned their only hope. This tricky reality of the wild moved a lady Daphne Sheldrick to establish this nursery back in 1987. Daphne Sheldrick is the wife of great naturalist and wildlife warden of the Tsavo National Park Sir David Sheldrick. After his death in 1977, Daphne took the charge of extending services to wildlife, she has reared wild buffalos, dik-diks, impalas, and zebras but elephants have beguiled her the most. 

The centre opens for an hour (11:00 am to 12 noon) daily for visitors during when the calves are brought for their mud-bath, a talk is also organised in this hour.

 Raising an orphan elephant isn’t easy. In the wild, calves depend on mothers for milk for two years. Finding a correct formula that can match the nutritional qualities of elephant’s milk is difficult. Over years, the trust has learnt important lessons in raising an orphan elephant and preparing it for a smooth transition into the wild. This could take up to 10 years and requires a lot of caution as elephants, being social animals, develop emotional bonds with their keepers. To overcome this, shifts of keepers, who nurse babies’ keeps changing and babies are allowed more to mix up with each other. The success of the trust is exemplified in the fact that many of the babies raised in the nursery, are now a part of herds in wild and are raising their own kids. 

Standing amid a group of orphans, I was struck by their distinctive personality. The talk was on, and the keeper was talking about the elaborate social fabric in which elephants live. ‘They have a very good memory and are extremely social animals. They know to be submissive before the elders and are instinctively social and caring. When we get a new child here, others will come and lovingly put around their trunks on its back. Acceptance in a group is necessary for the baby to tide over that difficult phase of life,’ he told the audience as the orphan babies busied themselves in mud-bath. Some look curiously at the visitors. The experience is like standing with some precocious schoolchildren, who are trying to find out the standing of the newcomers, they have seen. Often the babies would come close to the visitors, lift their trunks, sniff visitors, with curious, intense gaze and at times, even touch the onlookers with their trunks as if trying to establish a relationship.

Like human beings, elephants too have social and emotional traits. Scientists have seen herds visit the grounds where some member of the group had died, for days, and at times, for months. The calves, who have seen their family getting slaughtered, often suffer from sleeplessness and nightmares and demand great care and love to get settled emotionally. Often they develop erratic behavioural swings, which need to be treated with utmost care.

The orphanage also encourages the adoption of baby elephants by human parents at a yearly cost of at least $50. Foster parents are allowed to visit the babies at 5 pm when they return from the park and get ready for their evening meal of the milk formula in their individual bottles. While the older elephants are given a picket wood fenced enclosure with generous space, the younger ones live in more enclosed enclosures, often with their keepers. Foster parents are even allowed to feed milk to their adopted babies. 

These are sad and perilous days for the largest land animals. The growing demand of ivory in the South Asian, especially the Chinese markets, is spelling a doom on these giants. Unlike the Asian elephants, both female and male African elephants have tusks and since males lead a solitary life, it is always easier to poach a female.

Standing among these orphans, feeding them leaves and watching them struggle handling their bottle in their trunk or rolling over mud or just flapping their ears; makes you come closer to the biggest force of nature that binds us all the carbon based life — compassion. 

The writer is a proud foster parent of a baby found struggling for life in a ditch prepared to trap elephants