The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Conservation: an elephantine task in Africa
As an anti-poaching summit ends with the burning of ivory in Nairobi, Brian Jackman visits a camp in Kenya which has led the field in protecting elephants
Today, heads of state from all over Africa will gather at a public ceremony in Nairobi to watch Kenya torch its entire stockpile of elephant tusks. Convened by President Uhuru Kenyatta as a dramatic finale to the Giants Club Summit, a gathering of leaders committed to anti-poaching measures, the burning comes at a critical time for Africa’s elephants. Conservationists are predicting their virtual extinction within 10 years.
A century ago Africa had as many as five million elephants, but decades of poaching fuelled by an insatiable demand for ivory has reduced their numbers to no more than 500,000 today. In the past three years alone, poachers have killed more than 100,000 and the species has now reached a tipping point with more being killed than are being born.
When the burning ceremony takes place in Nairobi National Park, more than 120 tons of ivory representing well over 4,000 dead elephants will go up in smoke, confirming Kenya’s zero tolerance towards poaching and sending a message to the world that the Kenyan state will never profit from the illegal trade and that it believes elephants are worth far more alive as a major tourist attraction.
Nowhere is this truer than at Elephant Watch Camp in Samburu National Reserve. The Maasai Mara may be Kenya’s top tourist destination but the country’s soul lies in the north, where the green highlands fall away into an arid wilderness the size of Britain and the proud Samburu people, a desert tribe of warrior nomads, still follow their herds across the surrounding rangelands.
Sharing their land are the beautiful dry-country animals that make Samburu special: reticulated giraffe, beisa oryx and Grévy’s zebra. There are predators, too: wild dog, lion, leopard and cheetah. But above all, Samburu is elephant country – hence the presence of Iain DouglasHamilton, the world authority on elephant behaviour, and the headquarters of Save the Elephants, the organisation he founded in 1993. Iain DouglasHamilton introduces the young Saba to the matriarch Virgo, above; the sitting room at Elephant Watch Camp, below Elephant Watch Camp itself is set on the banks of the Ewaso Nyiro just a few miles upstream from Iain’s office and was created by Oria, his Kenyan-born Italian wife.
“It all started in 2001,” she told me. “I built it with dead trees the elephants had knocked down, and the spot I chose was the place our bulls [male elephants] loved to frequent. Gorbachev, Mungu, Kenyatta and Roosevelt were always there. No one ever chased them away.”
Shaded by giant river acacias, the camp is exquisitely beautiful, a fusion of luxury bush-living and Bedouin bohemia, and is entirely open to the comings and goings of the animal world. At breakfast time Verreaux’s eagle owls mutter to each other from the treetops. At night, shy spotted genets, catlike mammals with long slender tails, wander among the dining tables, and in a park overendowed with big, noisy lodges it is by far the nicest place to stay.
Today it is Saba, Oria’s eldest daughter, who has taken over as the glamorous chatelaine of Elephant Watch Camp and it is hard to think of anyone more suited to the task. When she was just six weeks old her mother decided she should meet her first wild elephant, a matriarch called Virgo, one of the 400 animals her father was studying in Tanzania’s Lake Manyara National Park. “Although far too young to remember it, I was told that when Virgo saw me she stretched out her trunk and took a good, long sniff to get my scent,” Saba says. “Then she brought her own calf forward as if to introduce it to my mother.”
One year later Saba’s sister Dudu was born and the pair of them ran wild in Manyara, learning bush-lore from the Tanzanian rangers and bathing near the elephants in the Ndala River.
“Everything in our lives from the very beginning was about elephants,” says Saba. “All my toys were elephants, all my books and my earliest memories – especially the scary ones, like the time when, at the age of maybe three or four, I was charged by a big bull called Casimir.”
After university she worked with the Save the Rhino Trust in Namibia before eventually joining Save the Elephants as her father’s chief executive in 1997, and it was then, while working for STE, that she was talent-spotted by the BBC natural history unit and embarked on a career as a wildlife film-maker.
In 2006 she married Frank Pope, a former Times correspondent and marine archaeologist, and the couple now live at Elephant Watch Camp with their three girls: Selkie, aged six, and the twins, Luna and Mayian.
“Unusual names seem to run in our family,” she says. “My name, Saba, means ‘seven’ in Swahili because I was born on June 7 at seven o’clock in the evening and happened to be the seventh grandchild.”
On my first night in camp I was awoken in the small hours by the cracking of branches. An elephant was feeding just outside my tent, the first of many I would encounter during my stay. Nowhere else in the world, I discovered, can you be on first-name terms with so many wild elephants. In the course of her father’s research it was necessary to get to know Samburu’s elephants as individuals, since when 900 have been named and separated into families. Early the next day, we drive out to meet them. I ask Saba if she has any favourites. “I’m very fond of Yeager,” she says. “He’s the bull who came into camp and woke you up last night. It’s an incredible privilege to have a wild African elephant feeling so secure in our presence. And then there is Babylon, one of our oldest surviving matriarchs. She is very canny and exquisitely beautiful, a grand old dame who guides her family wisely and proves by her sheer longevity what an exceptional creature she is.
“There is an etiquette to approaching elephants,” says Saba. “You never encroach on their space. Instead you let them make the decisions and allow them to feel confident enough to ignore you. It’s something I acquired from my father, learning how to read the nuances of animal behaviour and then reacting appropriately.”
I hope she is right, because standing right in the path of our vehicle is a
To find out more about Elephant Watch Camp see elephantwatchportfolio.com.
To donate to Save the Elephants, see savetheelephants.org.