On the 10th of March 2011, an adult female elephant was killed by poachers at the Nayaa-Korea (Alamach Area). Both of its tusks were missing.
Wilson, the STE scout, found her at around half past seven in the evening, the previous day. The female was found close to the dirt road, in the middle of villages.
Closer investigation revealed that she had several bullet holes on her neck, confirming that poachers had indeed killed her. The Alamach area where she was found dead is generally a very open area. On receiving the information, David Daballen, an STE staff, contacted KWS team, Reserve Wardens Simon and Abdi Boru, and Ian Craig of Lewa Conservancy.
According to the information they received, six gunshots were reported first, then after a short while, six more shots went off rapidly. Wilson, through his community members who were updating us, said they could hear elephants’ screams.
The rangers then quickly rushed to the scene of the crime half an hour later. As the rangers were headed for the site, they could clearly hear the poachers chopping the tusks out. They could not do much since the poachers were well equipped with automatic weapons, which was far from what the rangers had. Unfortunately, before the rangers arrived at the scene, the poachers had finished removing the tusks and had already left. The rangers had no other choice but to spend the night next to the carcass, in-order to track the poachers early the next morning.
Back at the camp, the STE team woke up very early to go and find out who the female elephant was, and get the necessary notes since all they had heard was that she was a huge female. The team arrived at the scene to find that the female was one of our old lady (Hope R13).
They all felt very sad because Hope was another virtue member after Resilience’s tragedy.
After a couple of minutes, the team took notes while keeping Iain informed on what is happening on the group. They then decided to track the rest of the family members to make sure they had not been harmed. Since this was soft soil, it was easy to track them after two kilometers of following their trail. They were all glad and satisfied that none of them had been injured.
The other disturbing question however, was whom they were with, since the team was only able to find tracks of two animals. This is because the medium size bushes sometimes can get tricky either to drive or walk in it. That is when they had to get assistance from Iain who arrived shortly afterwards. After providing him with the directions where the tracks had led to, he was able to quickly spot them. Since he could see much better from the airplane, he directed the team to where the animals were as soon as he was able to locate them.
There were five animals all together. Hope’s 5-year-old and eight year old calves, a fifteen-year-old male and finally an unidentified 15-year-old female who had a young one by her side.
Everyone was very relieved, when they found that, at-least they had joined some other young females and that they were not sitting somewhere on their own. Secondly, none of them had been injured.
At-least this provided all the teams with new hope.