Meet the family

Issue 29

Fancy getting on first name terms with the elephants of Samburu? The reserve's resident zoologists would be more than happy to make the introductions. Geoffrey Dean reports on a safari with a difference. When the big bull elephant named Hekkim was killed last year in Samburu National Reserve in central Kenya, the Samburu tribespeople were devastated. "All the Samburu were crying, as he was such a nice elephant," Oria Douglas-Hamilton recalled. "They were so upset that they shopped the killer, who was a Samburu himself, to the warden. He got nine years." Only a decade ago, the community's response would have been far less emotional, and the culprit might never have been exposed. Thanks to Save the Elephants, a scientific research project set up by Oria and her husband Iain, attitudes are very different. Oria runs elephant-awareness training sessions for local people - both employees and non-employees - at Elephant Watch Camp, the Douglas-Hamiltons' Samburu base. For a start, the effect of giving a name to every elephant in Samburu once it reaches ten or twelve years of age has been huge. "It's extraordinary what interest a name creates when an elephant is 'baptised' - it becomes somebody," Oria revealed. "In Samburu custom, you don't name your child until it is two years old, whereupon it becomes a member of the community. It's the same with elephants." More than 300 male and female elephants have been named since the process began in 1996. Apollo, Garcia, Jefferson, Napoleon, Nero, Thesiger, Winston, Eleanor and Grace are but a few. My stay at Elephant Watch Camp was a unique experience. It is the only place in Africa where, as a paying client, you can observe elephant behaviour with zoologists conducting research into the species. A few days here provides the perfect opportunity for anybody - whatever their interests, experience or level of fitness - to get up close and personal to Africa's greatest mammal. I spent the whole of my three days in the company of resident researcher Henrik Rasmussen. We shared story-filled meals with Oria, herself a leading authority on elephants. "What we do here," says Oria, "is spend in-depth time with an elephant family, getting to know it intimately; how elephant society works, how that family works. You might sit with elephants by the river and, as new families come down, we watch and explain the sensitive behaviour patterns between relatives, what bonds there are, how the teenagers look after the babies. It's putting all the pieces together." Henrik, a Dane who had been in Samburu for four years working towards an Oxford University doctorate, had spent all his time with the bull elephants and could recognise each one almost instantly. The biggest bull was fittingly called Mungu ('God' in KiSwahili); his best friend, Kenyatta, was tuskless, very rare for a male. To subscribe or order this issue click here "They're always together when not in must," Henrik informed me when we saw them one morning. "I know that because over a two-month period when we had GPS collars on them, and recorded their positions every hour, they were no more than 30 metres apart on average." This remarkable concept of "bull association" is only a very recent discovery. By fitting either radio or GPS collars on some twenty males and females, the team can locate individual elephants. Needing a new dung and urine sample from one bull, Picasso, to assess his hormone levels, we tuned into his frequency, got a fix on him and set off across Samburu's rolling terrain. Any samples we could collect would be sent off for analysis. It took less than 30 minutes to find Picasso, but another hour before he gave us what we wanted. Henrik said his record wait had been seven hours. "See the mucus on the dung. That gives us an individual DNA reading and can tell us which elephant has sired which calf." Meanwhile Henrik was keeping a careful eye on Picasso. Fresh in his mind was the recent demolition of a Save the Elephants vehicle by another bull. Samburu's resident elephants are familiar with the vehicles, but Picasso was just passing through the reserve and was unused to them. "Some of our bulls are very aggressive when in must. Take Pretty Bumbum, who got his name because he created a bum-bum noise when walking by bouncing his trunk off the ground. He charged my vehicle 15-20 times when in must, over a two-month period. I had to scan the bush whenever I went out, simply to avoid him." One bull, Clinton, had to be shot in self-defence by a park ranger. Some of the thirty or so bulls I saw were nervous, keeping their distance. Samburu has been heavily poached in the past, and MIKE, the Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants, has one of its fifty or so sites in the reserve. But none of the elephants I encountered actually gave us any trouble. Today Samburu is flourishing, as a fine example of how man, wildlife, science and tourism can all interact positively. It's clear that this is thanks in no small part to Iain and Oria's respect and affection both for the elephants and for the community at large. Geoffrey Dean's Elephant Watch Safari was organised with the assistance of Elephant Watch Camp and Air Kenya.

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