Day 347- Part One Of Elephant "Foster Mom"

Daphne Sheldrick with baby elephant Aisha. Photograph courtesy the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Orphaned elephants “can be fine one day and dead the next,” says Daphne Sheldrick, a Kenyan conservationist and expert in animal husbandry.

She knows. To date, she has fostered over 250 calves, first in partnership with her husband, David Sheldrick, founding warden of Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park and a legendary naturalist, and later (following his death in 1977) as part of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (DSWT), which she founded in his memory.

Many are victims of poaching, like one-year-old Lima Lima, who was found weak and dehydrated. When she arrived at DSWT in February, Lima Lima was very thin and sickened from browsing on the invasive prickly pear plant (which can be poisonous) during her abandonment.

Lima Lima took milk from a hand-held bottle and was warmly greeted by the other elephants at the nursery, but she mourned for her lost family and often secluded herself, which is natural behavior for an older orphan who has gone through such trauma.

This year Kenya has lost some 250 elephants, with many infants and young left behind. Just in 2013, DSWT has taken in at least six calves orphaned by poachers, and another half dozen for reasons unknown (but likely poaching victims too).

Raising rescued elephant calves is challenging, and mortality rates are high. Part of the difficulty is that infants are fully dependent on their mother’s milk until they’re two years old and are not fully weaned until around four or five.

Baby elephants can’t tolerate the fat in cow’s milk. Finding a suitable substitute for elephant milk took Sheldrick 28 years of trial and error before she hit on a formula that contained coconut oil—likely the nearest replacement for the fat in elephant milk.

But as Sheldrick has seen time after time, raising an orphaned elephant requires not only meeting its physical needs but also its social and emotional ones.

Many are severely traumatized by what happened to their elephant family and “just want to die,” Sheldrick says. That’s why each new rescued elephant becomes part of a new “family” of keepers and other elephant orphans at DSWT.

Sheldrick talked to me about her experiences raising orphaned elephants and returning them to the wild. While best known for this work, she and DSWT do much more, including raising the orphans of other species, such as rhinos, helping with anti-poaching efforts, advocating against the ivory trade, and providing medical care to injured animals in the wild.

Sheldrick’s memoir, Love, Life and Elephants: An African Love Story, tells more stories about her life and the orphans. The DWST website provides current details and videos about the organization’s work with the orphans. You can also read National Geographic’s recent article about Orphan Elephants.

~Laurel Neme

National Geographic

December 6, 2013

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