One bright spot in the usually bleak world of wild-animal conservation emerged last month as Ajok, an 18-month-old elephant orphan, left his nursery at the Nairobi Game Reserve to take up residence with a group of elephants in southern Kenya.
The closing of the animal nursery, which opened five years ago, shows that Kenya's anti-poaching efforts and the two-year ban on ivory are working, says Daphne Sheldrick, naturalist and founding game warden of Tsavo East National Park, where Ajok will make his new home. No elephant orphans have appeared on their doorstep since 2-day-old Ajok, whose name means "hello" in the Turkana language, was brought here in May 1990, a month before the ivory ban went into effect."Our mission has been accomplished," said Sheldrick, who has spent most of her 56 years raising orphaned wild animals of all types.
Ajok is the last of 12 elephants that were brought to the nursery, which more than 300,000 tourists have visited. Five elephants died, while the other six lived to join a group of orphaned elephants in southern Kenya. The five that died were unable to survive the trauma of separation from their elephant families or were milk-dependent infants at a time when no human-made formula was available to keep them alive.
"One thing that defeated me for years was raising infants. It was always considered impossible," said Sheldrick, whose home overlooks the broad golden plains of Nairobi National Park. When Wyeth Laboratories in England developed a formula for sensitive and premature human babies, an unintended benefit was saving the lives of infant elephants. The vegetable-oil formula, which Wyeth donates to the wildlife trust, contains no cow fat, which baby elephants cannot tolerate.
The other lesson that Sheldrick has learned concerns the psychological health of infant elephants: They need families to survive. When the person who takes care of an elephant leaves, the animal may go into a serious depression and die. Sheldrick discovered this 17 years ago when a young elephant she alone cared for in Tsavo East National Park became listless and died while she was on a trip, even though it had a competent stand-in.
"You have to replace the elephant family," said Sheldrick. "There have to be enough people around to be a family."
Ajok's "family" has been six men in green coats. Elephants recognize those in the green coats as family members, said Sheldrick, who manages the nursery and the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust with her daughter, Jill. Two men in green coats are with Ajok continuously.
Mishak Kyumwa, 25, one of Ajok's companions, has been working with Sheldrick for three years. He took turns with the other keepers sleeping side-by-side with the newly arrived Ajok on the hay-covered floor in his stall. When the elephant became too large to sleep next to safely without fear of being crushed if he rolled over, Kyumwa and the other keepers moved to a raised bunk bed. The bed is close enough to Ajok so he can touch them with his trunk when he needs reassurance.
"He is like a human. We play football (soccer). We teach him to know his food," Kyumwa said as he pointed to a plantthat Ajok finds particularly tasty. As he described a typical day with a baby elephant - walking through the bush of Nairobi National Park, playing in dirt baths, showing him elephant-edible plants, and, for two hours every afternoon, entertaining visitors - he followed Ajok around the Sheldrick compound as a father follows a rambunctious 2-year-old.
The keepers bottle-fed Ajok on demand, two gallons of milk every 24 hours, until he was 3 months old. Susceptible to pneumonia, Ajok had to be kept dry and warm, occasionally covered with a blanket. They smeared his tender pink ears with sunblock to protect him from sunburn his first six weeks. They supplemented his diet with bits of fresh dung from other elephants so that proper stomach bacteria would develop. At 9 months, he was drinking seven gallons of milk a day. Today, Ajok supplements his grass diet by gulping three one-liter bottles of milk three times a day and once at midnight. He will be weaned at 2 years but will continue to have supplements of coconut and skim milk until he is 5 years old.
Sheldrick raised her first orphan - a baby antelope - when she was 3 years old at her parents' farm in the Rift Valley near Nakuru, where wild animals roamed freely. After she married David Sheldrick, she raised two human daughters and dozens of adopted offspring, including 24 buffalo, eight black rhinos, three zebras, 14 elephants and a host of elands, dikdiks, kudus, gerenuks, ostriches and warthogs.
Ajok hasn't been alone at the nursery. His companions have been two zebras and Scud, a baby rhinoceros found last February guarding the body of its mother. Sheldrick doesn't know how the adult rhino died. Scud got her name because she charged back and forth across her enclosure like a Scud missile used in last year's gulf war. The baby rhino eventually will live in Nairobi National Park. Every day, the keepers escort her through the park, where 65 other rhinos live - more than any other park in Kenya. At night, Scud sleeps and feeds in an enclosure near Sheldrick's home and adjacent to the quarters of two other rhinos, Sam and Amboseli, who came to the park when they were 6 weeks and 5 months old, respectively. Now 5 years old, they are slowly assimilating into the park as they roam free during the day and voluntarily come back at night.
The zebra will live on a private ranch that has no elephants, lions or rhinoceroses, otherwise they're likely to be killed, said Sheldrick. "Because they've been brought up with Scud, they'll go rushing up to any rhino they see and think it's a friend," she said. "Relocation is the most difficult part. There are lessons that we can't teach them, that they must learn from their own kind. They've very disadvantaged, being raised by humans."
Although the nursery will close, Ajok and the six other orphaned elephants will be cared for at Tsavo until they reach puberty, at about age 15. The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust will pay the salaries of the men in the green coats for the next 13 years, or until Ajok and the other elephants are ready to join a herd.
Meanwhile, the trust continues to support other wildlife conservation efforts, including transport of rhinos threatened by poachers to safe parks, anti-poaching equipment for park rangers, and the establishment of a rhino sanctuary in Tsavo.
But, if necessary, Daphne and Jill Sheldrick will open the nursery again. They hope that won't happen and are working for the continued ban on ivory, which is to be reviewed in March by the 103 member nations of the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species. Six African countries - South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe - are lobbying to lift the ban. South Africa wants to sell ivory because it culls its elephant herds as a way to manage their numbers. The skin and meat are sold, and South Africa argues that the ivory should be sold also to help manage and protect the elephants.
But the Sheldricks are afraid that a renewed ivory trade will reduce the African elephant population even more. Thirty years ago, 100,000 elephants roamed Kenya. Now only 15,000 live there. In 1978, the African continent boasted 1.5 million elephants; today, only 500,000 remain.
Daphne Sheldrick disagrees vehemently with culling, believing that the number of elephants should be allowed to ebb and flow naturally, as they have done in Tsavo East National Park. The elephant population see-saw is an integral part of the cycle of the park, in which grasslands give way to shrubs and trees, and back again, as elephants increase from what Sheldrick thinks is a normal low of 10,000 to a high of 45,000, when they begin to die off naturally as food supplies dwindle. Because of poaching, only 6,000 elephants remain now.
"Kruger (Park in South Africa) is the same size as Tsavo, and they say it can't hold more than 6,000 or 7,000 elephants," she said. Nature's way of starving elephants to death - she says they merely become sleepy and die - is better than inducing terror in the babies who are destined for zoos and circuses by shooting their parents.
"After all, we have human overpopulation and we don't talk about human culling," said Sheldrick, who is convinced that elephants suffer as humans do at the loss of their family members. "You have to look at it like that."