Laid on a mattress, covered in a warm woollen blanket, his chest rising and falling as he breathes, Murit sleeps soundly. Should he wake, a keeper is sleeping in a bunk above, ready to offer reassurance if he needs it. It’s a far cry from the weak and bruised baby with blood-red infected eyes that The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (The DSWT) rescued in March 2015 after Murit was trapped in a well.

Murit was flown from Northern Kenya in a specially chartered aircraft to Nairobi, and he was one of 28 orphaned baby elephants rescued by The DSWT in 2015 as part of their Orphans’ Project. Permanently on standby, The DSWT swings into action with veterinary supplies, including IV drips and milk, the minute that a call to rescue is received.

Once at the orphanage, a period of intensive care begins as keepers work together to form a new family for the orphan, replicating all the actions that the elephant’s mother or herd would have carried out. The keepers feed the orphans a specialist milk formula – developed over 28 years by Dr Dame Daphne Sheldrick DBE – to ensure they grow strong. As a highly emotional species, the babies receive regular reassurance from their keepers, who even lend their fingers and thumbs for the orphans to suck. The keepers also slather suncream on the youngest elephants and wrap them in blankets for comfort and warmth when it gets cold in the evenings.

The Nairobi Nursery will provide a home to these orphaned elephants for the first three years of their life, and they are cared for by the keepers around the clock. But just as children must take steps to independence, the orphans graduate to one of three reintegration centres, where they take up to seven years to learn how to live as a wild elephant. From meeting wild herds and orphans that are living back in the wild to learning elephant society etiquette, The DSWT’s reintegration centres provide a haven for orphans to make the gradual transition while in the safe presence of the keepers.

Threats facing elephants

Intelligence, teamwork and compassion are some attributes accredited to elephants, the world’s largest land mammal. With a whopping 22-month gestation period, herds that stay together for life, and an impressive memory to boot, it is difficult not to sing the praises of this species.

But the words ‘crop raider’ or ‘problem animal’ might also be heard among those living near elephants. Amongst dealers in China, elephants are described as a ‘source of ivory.’ These phrases are demonstrative of the myriad threats that face pachyderms. The demand for ivory has led to increased poaching activities, and human populations have grown so much that they have expanded into elephant ranges. As a result of these pressures, there are now less than 400,000 elephants across Africa.

Demand for carved ivory was almost negligible 20 years ago in Hong Kong, thanks to a ban on the international sale of ivory in 1989 after a global outcry. However, two ‘one-off sales’ in 1999 and 2008 caused the popularity of ivory to skyrocket, which had a devastating impact on elephants in Africa. Weak penalties for poaching and the misguided impression that elephant tusks can fall out naturally like teeth are also to blame. One hundred thousand elephants were killed for their tusks between 2010 and 2012, causing population declines of as much as two to three per cent per year.

At this rate, and without action, elephants could be extinct from the wild within our lifetime. But the writing is not yet on the wall for this species, and The DSWT has been uniquely positioned for almost 40 years to help save the species. Working tirelessly through projects that encompass anti-poaching, vet units, aerial surveillance and, of course, their world-renowned elephant orphanage that cares for elephant calves whose parents are poaching victims, they’re the first line of defence for elephants in Kenya.

A bird’s-eye view

Flying high over the acacia trees and herds of elephants that roam the Tsavo ecosystem is Neville Sheldrick, one of the pilots that make up The DSWT’s Aerial Unit. It’s a privilege that’s not lost on him.

“While our ground teams understand the situation on the ground, their work limits them to a relatively small area of operation. In the Aerial Unit, we have the amazing opportunity to experience every corner of the Tsavo ecosystem and beyond,” explains Sheldrick.

Tsavo is comparable to the size of Wales or Massachusetts, so the ability to fly is a huge asset when protecting such a vast ecosystem. The unit consists of four fixed-wing aircraft and one helicopter, and they operate daily to look for and report illegal activity, check on elephant behaviour, locate injured wildlife and fly out vets to help them and drive elephants away from communities.

Their role is especially vital when you consider that elephants can roam up to 80km over a day. While scouting for food and water or using traditional migratory paths passed down from female to female, elephants do not discern man-made boundaries where a national park might end and a farmer’s plot begins.

Increasingly, elephants are being forced into direct contact with humans due to communities building on national parks’ borders, small-scale farmers planting in buffer zones, and herders bringing cattle into the park searching for food and water. The consequences of human activity are immense – elephants can be seriously injured, or their calves can be abandoned in the chaos of conflict, while poachers can hide amidst illegal herders.

Bringing elephants back from the brink

It’s a little-known fact that elephants snore. It sounds like a deep rumble. Dr Rono, a Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) vet, would know best as he is part of one of the DSWT/KWS Mobile Vet units. To date, the teams have treated more than 1,800 elephants for wounds caused by poisoned arrows, spears and snares.

Dr Limo heads up The DSWT/KWS Mara Vet Unit, which is one of four DSWT/KWS Mobile Vet Units that cover 15 of Kenya’s national parks between them, in addition to the SkyVet service, which transports on-call vets to emergencies in remote or unattended areas. Thanks to Dr Limo and his colleagues, injured elephants and other wildlife have a lifeline. Each unit is fully prepared to treat any injured animal, thanks to a custom-designed vehicle and all the necessary equipment, including a vaccine refrigerator, dart gun, VHF radios, GPS, camera and binoculars.

Anaesthetic and a good aim (with a dart gun) are vital. Weighing up to six tonnes, a fully grown wild elephant can pose a real threat to anyone who comes into close proximity, especially when dealing with a protective mother, anxious herds or loyal friends hiding out in thorny bushes. Treatment depends on the wound – removing poisoned arrows can be a relatively simple operation, which takes about 15 minutes, whereas treating bullet wounds is a difficult task, as some bullets can become embedded deep in an elephant’s body and be impossible to retrieve.

“Determination and a will to save Kenya’s wild species has pushed my team and I to deliver in even the most challenging situations,” says Dr Limo. “We do it out of determination and a love for these animals. It requires a lot of caution and courage, but at the end of it all, you feel greatly satisfied that you have helped to save one of these massive animals whose kind are dwindling,” he explains.

The fruits of their labour

A little elephant named Wiva is a testament to the fact that protecting, treating and caring for elephants can mean more than just saving one individual. Wiva is one of 18 wild-born calves to orphans that are now living back in the wild, and by giving each infant a second chance, as The DSWT did for Wiva’s mother, The DSWT’s Orphans’ Project also allows elephants to have their own wild-born young, which further helps a population that is in decline.

Wiva’s mum, Wendi, is one of 190 orphaned elephants that The DSWT has successfully hand-reared thanks to the pioneering efforts of their founder, Dr Dame Daphne Sheldrick DBE, who discovered the milk formula baby elephants need and who established the core principles that the keepers follow. This knowledge has also been shared with other orphanages and sanctuaries to help orphaned infant elephants elsewhere. The DSWT’s passion for the species is regularly shared with local communities through community outreach projects, including creating beehive fences to reduce human-wildlife conflict.

The importance of The DSWT Anti-Poaching Teams, Aerial Surveillance and Mobile Vet Units, together with their Saving Habitats project, which safeguards areas of biodiversity importance, is evident. Working together, they provide a safety net for the orphans and their wild kin.

How you can help

All the work of The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust is funded by generous donations from passionate individuals concerned about the future of our wildlife. Whether you donate to a specific project or a particular item like a bottle of milk, your donation can make a difference on the frontline of elephant conservation.

Visiting the DSWT’s Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi National Park is one way to better understand their work. Open every day between 11 am and midday for a small entrance fee of US$7, you can see the youngest elephants have their mud bath and milk feed and perhaps meet a muddy little elephant with whom to exchange hellos. Visitors can opt to stay at eco-lodges in the Kibwezi Forest, which help to fund the DSWT’s projects and are located close to the Ithumba Reintegration Unit. Alternatively, you can relax and unwind at Nairobi Tented Camp – the only accommodation in the national park – and then you don’t even have to leave the park!

But perhaps one of the best ways to get involved is to foster an orphaned elephant. You can choose an infant elephant from as little as US$50 a year and follow their journey through monthly email updates. As the perfect gift for children, wildlife lovers or even yourself, it’s one way to get to know some of the characters at the nursery and be part of their recovery, as well as help protect the species’ future.

Back to the future

The DSWT believes there are few greater rewards than helping one of the world’s most iconic animals. Increasingly, the world’s citizens and governments are coming to this realisation too.

While working tirelessly on the frontline to protect elephants, they’ve been campaigning to end all ivory trade and are happy that some hugely positive steps have been taken in the past year. The most important of which are the recent announcements by China to end its legal domestic ivory trade. This should hopefully pave a new era for the species and if promises prevail, everyone can hope to secure a future for Murit and his wild kin.

Find out about KENYA for your next African safari – find a ready-made safari or ask us to build one just for you.

About the author

Having established and directed The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s UK charity in 2005, Rob Brandford’s passion for wildlife conservation stems from his deep, personal appreciation for nature and wild spaces.

With a particular fondness for elephants, Rob remains committed to educating the world about the species’ crisis so that we can guarantee them a future together.

It was July 2014, and I was in Kenya’s Mara North Conservancy having a cup of tea and a homemade scone (yes, really!) with the manager of one of the Maasai Mara. We chatted about hiking, and he told me how, just that morning, he’d walked for miles through the conservancy. This was a revelation for me.

My experiences of bushwalks in much of East Africa were generally confined to very brief strolls close to the safety of the camp. And now here I was, being told it was entirely possible to hike for hours, or even days, across these wildlife-filled savannahs.

That evening, I casually mentioned the conversation to my wife and to my surprise, she suggested that I return to the Mara area one day to “spend a while walking and staying in Maasai villages and then write a book about it.” It was at that moment that the idea of the Walking with the Maasai project was born to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary Maasai life and the impact of 21st-century trends, conservation, political pressures and tourism on them.

In May 2015, a year after my tea and scones conversation, I set off on a five-week walk across a part of Kenya’s Maasai lands with Josphat Mako, a Maasai friend who worked as a guide in the Mara. Our walk began at the highest point of the Lebtero Hills, which are a densely forested, remote and very traditional corner of Maasailand. From here, we walked westwards along the Kenya-Tanzania border to the edge of the famous Maasai Mara National Reserve. We hadn’t been able to get permission to walk through the reserve itself, so when we reached the edge of the reserve, we veered north and walked through community land until we got to the hot springs at Maji Moto. Here, we turned south-west, then walked clean across the renowned Olarro, Naboisho, Olare Motorogi, Mara North and the Lemek wildlife conservancies, which are essentially private game reserves that together constitute some of the finest wildlife habitats in East Africa. Our walk eventually ended on the banks of the Mara River at the foot of the Oloololo Escarpment.

Enjoying the journey

The point of this project was not so much the walk itself – especially as I don’t know how far we even walked – but rather the opportunity it presented for me to get to know the Maasai people and their culture, as well as the landscapes and animals that they live with. Before I set off on the walk, I vowed not to be tied to walking a certain amount of kilometres a day or sticking religiously to a predetermined route. I wanted to be able to deviate from a path as and when I felt like it to take in as many interesting encounters as possible.

Along the way, we visited and slept in numerous Maasai villages and spent as much time as possible with the Maasai, interviewing them and learning what we could of their traditional culture and their contemporary lifestyles. But it wasn’t all about the Maasai. By walking at a leisurely pace, I hoped also to understand something about the landscapes and wildlife of the region. On the nights when we weren’t guests of the Maasai, we had the excitement of camping in the bush with the animals or, once we were inside the Maasai Mara conservancies, where bush camping is banned. There were no villages to stay in; we stayed as guests at some of the safari camps, which gave me the chance to talk conservation and tourism with camp managers, guides, staff and field workers, and to visit some of their community projects.

A rapidly changing culture

Over the weeks, I interviewed dozens of people, and I always tried to keep my interviewees as broad in interest and conflicting in views as possible. If one day I interviewed a traditional Maasai healer, then the next I spoke to a Maasai doctor working in a clinic. If one afternoon, I sat in the shade of a tree chatting with a hunter then the following day, I would meet someone working in the field of conservation. We met religious leaders, warriors, biologists, activists, scientists, artists, politicians, vision seekers, TV personalities, tourist industry representatives, shepherds, housewives and many others. I spoke to elderly Maasai about days past, and I listened, spellbound, as they recounted tales of cattle rustling and hunting lion and ostrich with spears to prove their manhood. However, I also spoke to an equal number of young Maasai – the ‘Digital Maasai’ as the elders called them – for whom stories of the old ways were as exotic-sounding as they were for me.

If one thing became clear through all of these conversations, it was that Maasai culture was in the process of rapid change and that if I had wanted to catch the last of the old lifestyles, then I was probably ten years too late. Even the famous Maasai moran (warriors) were now almost a relic of a bygone age, and most of those long flowing locks of hair are now made of string, while the lion mane headdresses tend to be hand-me-downs from fathers and grandfathers. In fact, in the whole course of our walk, we only encountered three or four genuine Maasai moran, and Josphat and Patrick, another Maasai friend I was walking with at the time, were so excited at meeting ‘real’ moran that they asked if they could take pictures of them on their camera phones. The moran declined!

For me, this clash of globalisation and its impact on Maasai culture was one of the most fascinating aspects of the walk. Still, of course, nobody can walk across the Maasai lands without wildlife featuring strongly.

Local Encounters

Sometimes, these wildlife encounters were simply fantastic. Walking for hours over the savannah as huge herds of zebra and wildebeest parted for us as we strolled by was undoubtedly a highlight. Walking also allowed us to see all the little creatures we’d have missed in a vehicle – the ants and tortoises, the butterflies and lizards. Other encounters were less heart-warming, though. Meeting the Maasai family who’d lost their three-year-old son to a leopard attack was the clearest such example. There were also the numerous families I spoke with who seemed caught in a never-ending cycle of conflict with hyenas, lions or leopards raiding their cattle bomas at night and elephants destroying their crops.

Over the weeks that we walked, we met dozens of conservationists, scientists and concerned individuals working hard to protect what’s left of Kenya’s wildlife heritage. That they’re doing a sterling job is undoubted. On my many previous visits to the Mara region, I’ve seen the landscapes and wildlife through the prism of a safari vehicle and through the eyes of whichever expert wildlife guide was with me at the time. After driving around the conservancies and the Maasai Mara National Reserve, I had always been left with the impression that these vast spaces were home to healthy wildlife populations.

On the other hand, walking through those same areas opened my eyes to another reality. Protected areas that I had once imagined to be nearly endless suddenly appeared very small when I realised I could walk clean across a conservancy in a day. Human interference, though a part of the environment ever since man’s earliest ancestors first swung out of the trees, was undeniably intense and had an increasingly severe impact. All around the edges of the protected zones, land is being demarcated, fences are going up, development is taking place, wildlife migration routes are being disrupted, human-wildlife conflict is increasing and, close to the Maasai Mara National Reserve itself, resentment against the reserve and conservation is substantial.

The importance of conservancies

However, in and around the conservancies, where local communities are more involved and gain more benefits from safari tourism and conservation, the attitude is generally more positive.

It’s no secret that populations of some species are crashing, and I knew all this before I set out on the walk. However, although I didn’t plan on any daring encounters with potentially dangerous animals, both Josphat and I had expected that we would bump into big cats, buffalos and elephants by walking so many kilometres over these grasslands – whether we liked it or not. But as the Mara River and the end of our walk came into view, I was struck by the overwhelming realisation that we had walked so far but had only encountered on foot one elephant, a handful of buffalo and not a single, solitary cat. When we mentioned this to older Maasai, the reaction was always the same – they shook their heads and told us how when they were younger, they would encounter these animals on an almost daily basis as they walked with their cattle. They invariably told us that they had seen the number of animals falling over the years, but then, without fail, they always expressed surprise and dismay that after five weeks, we had not seen a single lion as we walked.

If one thing became clear from our walk, it was that there were many very concerned people, Maasai and others, working to preserve Kenya’s wild places and wildlife. It was apparent to me that the conservancies could only be a good thing, but it was also clear that right now, they are simply not large enough. If we want to save the wildlife of the Mara ecosystem, then the conservancies need to grow and multiply, and they need to do so quickly, or there will be nothing much left to protect.

Find out about KENYA for your next African safari – find a ready-made safari or ask us to build one just for you.

About the author

Stuart is a writer, photographer and the author of the Lonely Planet Kenya guidebook, as well as numerous other Africa and Asia titles for Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and Bradt.

Once We Were Lions, a book about this walk, the Maasai, wildlife and conservation, will be published in late 2016. At the same time, a travelling photographic exhibition and a series of speaking dates by Stuart and Josphat will take place.