Refuge makes strides, one baby elephant step at a time
KAREN, Kenya -- Some baby elephants lose their parents to poachers. Some are simply abandoned. Then there's Taita, who earlier this month wandered off by himself only to find trouble.
The baby elephant fell into a giant septic tank and nearly drowned.
Fortunately for Taita, elephant keepers at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust were 60 miles away. Taita had fallen through a rusted-out manhole cover at a private reserve; the sewage was 7 feet deep, forcing the elephant to swim for hours without rest.
After workers cut a hole in the septic tank and tied ropes around Taita's torso, the keepers pulled out the exhausted 9-month-old. His mother was nowhere to be found, so they brought him to the trust's elephant orphanage.
"It certainly was a very unusual and difficult rescue," said Daphne Sheldrick, who runs the trust named after her late husband, a naturalist and founding warden of Kenya's vast Tsavo East National Park. "But Taita is doing fine here. So far, so good. He is very comfortable with his keepers. After all, they are his mothers now."
In a country struggling to emerge from nearly a quarter-century of virtual one-man rule that has left a legacy of human misery, elephant orphans in Kenya have a home with humans. On the outskirts of Nairobi, in a town named after the author Karen Blixen, who wrote the classic book "Out of Africa" under the name Isak Dinesen, the trust not only raises the young animals and reintroduces them to the wild, but also carries out an active educational campaign to save the continent's elephant herds.
Although Africa's elephant populations have made significant comebacks in the past two decades, poachers still prey on herds to harvest ivory, and the trust has campaigned against recent initiatives that allow short-duration elephant hunts.
Now the trust, the first to hand-raise baby elephants and reintroduce them to the wild, cares for seven orphans. Keepers watch over them as mothers would, never leaving their sides, feeding them bottles of milk, and sleeping all night next to them in stalls.
The orphanage began in the mid-1970s, when poachers had killed thousands of elephants at the Tsavo park. Daphne Sheldrick took in a baby elephant in 1974 and raised her for six months. But when Sheldrick went on a trip, the elephant died "of a broken heart," she said.
It was one of the first key lessons for her: For an elephant, family is the most important thing, so if Sheldrick was to continue hand-raising orphan elephants, the elephant would need a larger family than just her.
She said it was never her intent to open an elephant orphanage, but since that initial experience, the elephants continue to come from Kenya's national parks. In the past quarter-century, the center has taken in about 75 orphan elephants, keeping them until they are 1 or 2 years old, then releasing most into Tsavo park, which covers more than 8,000 square miles in southern Kenya. Of those orphans, 53 have survived -- with 29 roaming in Tsavo.
The orphanage receives most of its money from foundations and from hundreds of donations of $50 each given by people all over the world who become so-called foster parents for the orphans. The foster parents receive updates on the elephant's progress. Raising a baby elephant is similar to raising an infant. Keepers walk with them every day into Nairobi National Park and return in the late afternoon to the trust, which uses stalls for the elephants' beds. The keepers sleep on a mattress, and their elephants lie next to them in the hay. Often, a keeper awakes with the elephant's head in his or her lap. The keepers rotate to avoid an elephant's getting too attached to one person.
"Elephants mirror humans in many ways, particularly in memory," Sheldrick, 70, said one day recently at the trust. "They have sort of a human intelligence. A 10-year-old elephant is like a 10-year-old child. A 6-month-old baby elephant is like a 6-month-old child, except they are much smarter at an early age than their human counterparts."
The trust has raised nearly every sort of animal -- 12 black rhinos, 23 cape buffalos, all kinds of antelopes -- and the grounds include a pack of curious warthogs and a menagerie of birds. Every day, from 11 a.m. to noon, the trust allows the public to come in and see the baby elephants.
Andrew Mwepu, 40, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, was amazed at the sight. "This is the first time I have seen an elephant, and I've even touched one," he said excitedly.
Next to him was Toy Josue, also from Congo. "This is a wonderful animal," he said. "You can tell it's intelligent by the way it is eating, . . . even the way it is playing."
Late in the afternoons, the trust also opens its gates to families who pay the annual fee of $50 to be foster parents. Mandy Kovacs, 39, takes her children, Yasmin, 11, and Zak, 9, to the trust twice a month to see the elephants. For the children, it is one of best parts of living in Kenya; their father is a British aid worker.
Yasmin and Zak climbed on the stable gates to get a closer look at a baby elephant named Wendi.
"They are like babies, or puppies," Zak said. "They always want to play with you. Wendi doesn't want to go to sleep. And she always wants to suck stuff with her trunk, like the man's shirt."
Yasmin, who has been coming to the trust for about a year, said that if a person gets close to the elephants, "They remember you."
"Suppose you like to blow in their trunk, like this," she said, demonstrating on Wendi's trunk. Wendi's trunk danced like a snake, and her head bounced up and down. "When you come back, they will give you their trunk, and expect you to blow in it the same way," Yasmin said.
Standing nearby, Mandy Kovacs watched her children with the elephants. "This," she said, "makes you feel like you're living in Africa."
When Taita arrived after his swim in the septic tank, he was extremely aggressive. Keepers put him in a more spacious stall typically reserved for rhinos.
By the third day, Taita had markedly calmed down, and keepers introduced him to the six other orphans. The others immediately made him feel part of the gang, Sheldrick said.
"The other elephants are what calm down the new ones," she said. "They can pass messages to that one, like, `It's OK.' And the little one sees the other elephants being comfortable with their keepers. Taita loves his keeper now, just as they all do."
For more information on the trust, including how to become a foster parent to a baby elephant, look at www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org. John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com. 