Stories

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Last week, during one of our LTM drives with Shifra and Jerenimo, we noticed that the matriarch of the sporadic Rivers family- Euphrates- was bleeding, from what looked like bullet wounds on her left foreleg and right hind leg. She was limping and...

Today I witnessed my first elephant mating. A young female from the Zodiacs family was in estrus. Somehow all the males in the area knew it, and had come for a piece of the action - there were at least 10 bulls in the immediate vicinity...