Stories

Mating Pandemonium – Shermin de Silva

Male elephants continue to grow throughout their lives, getting bulkier and broader. Older males enjoy a greater competitive advantage and higher reproductive success. Many have a characteristic time of year when they are seeking mates, and as they...

Where have all the big boys gone? – Shermin de Silva

“It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf...

A job well done!- Christina Toms

Happy New Year!  What an adventure this has been so far.  I realize now how lucky I am to be volunteering at Save The Elephants in Samburu National Reserve! I’m Christina Toms, an MFA student in Film Production and Creative Writing at The...

Death of Changilla

On December 26 I came back from the field to find about eighty elephants milling around close to camp, right next to the rangers' post. As with any large group of elephants, not everyone is doing the same thing at once, though because it was in the...

Christmas and Kwaheri

Christmas in Kenya was yet another fascinating cultural experience. We were fortunate enough to join people at Elephant Watch to celebrate the event with them. Festivities began with a sundowner soda and plenty of goat meat with chappati. Once the...

Excited elephants everywhere!

Driving along as usual, on the lookout for elephants one afternoon, we heard a lot of excited trumpeting not far from where we were. Heading to the source of the noise, we came across numerous pairs of juvenile and sub-adult males play-fighting...

Tracked elephant found dead

One of the 87 elephants currently being tracked by Save The Elephants in Northern Kenya has been found dead. Her body was found on Tuesday morning with a bullet hole in the head in the Nasuulu community conservancy. Dvorak, an adult female from the...

David’s Church Wedding, and Sapache Mountain

Well, it’s my last week here in Samburu. I’m getting sentimental already, and trying to absorb every last bit of what I experience. In addition to our usual elephant outings with Shifra, we had two special extra’s happening this week – last...

The other elephant

My name is Shermin de Silva, and I’m a postdoc with George Wittemyer. I actually study Asian elephants. You know, that other elephant; the one seen in circuses, tourist camps and trekking operations. But there is a wild counterpart to those...

A visit from the doctor

Most of my elephant sightings so far have been happy ones – frolicking about in the safety of the park amongst the abundance of food and water that has come with the rains. But yesterday we came across a female elephant with gun shot wounds, and I...