Every so often in monitoring Africa’s continental elephant population, there is a milestone that sticks out. This happens when key elephant populations with a long term history get counted like in Tsavo in Kenya, Selous in Tanzania, the Kruger in South Africa and many others. Between the 6 and 12th of February a huge elephant count was completed in Kenya. Nine airplanes and 100 personnel fanned out over the huge Tsavo ecosystem of 46,437, square kilometers including the adjacent Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania, and counted the elephants. The Tsavo count is especially significant at a time when the price of ivory and elephant poaching is reported to be on the increase all over Africa and Asia. The Tsavo count is important as hard figures are all too rare.
The count estimate was 12,572 elephants, and that that the 20 years of increases since the ivory trade ban continues. It was a remarkable collaboration between the KWS and private conservationists and NGO’s.
At a time of anxiety and rumor, the count shows that the Tsavo National Park is still maintaining the line against the poachers. It is far from the rampant catastrophe of the 1970’s and 1980’s when about 45,000 elephants crashed to about 6000.
Nevertheless, as new nations like China enter the market for ivory the risk is that increasing demand related to new affluence may lead to new levels of ivory poaching. The Tsavo count also revealed that the carcass ratio in this year’s count has jumped up from less than 1% to 4.3%, indicating a high level of mortality in the past four years. Conservationists needing to monitor elephant population changes and this well conducted count is a major milestone.
A pair of record tusks weighing 124.7 pounds a side was found from an old bull who died of natural causes. This has been identified as a “great tusker” known as “Murembo” which was photographed by Johan Marais and appears on page 155 of his beautiful book “In Search of Africa’s Great Tuskers”. Great tuskers are amongst Africa’s most threatened elephants and animals bearing 100 pounds of ivory or more per tusk are extremely rare on the continent today. In general they symbolize the vulnerability of elephants throughout most of their range.
Tsavo’s great tuskers living today show that protective measures are working, enough to allow some big bulls to live out their natural life span.