Amy Bennett and Millicent Wanjiku
International & Local Interns

We accidentally overslept and had a speedy breakfast, running to the car with tea still in our hands.  Jerenimo had received a call about an elephant carcass and we had to leave to check it out.  We had to discover the position of the dead elephant and this meant stopping and talking to many local people.  Eventually we got to the 4x4 camp near the West Gate of the Samburu Reserve.  A moran from the camp directed us to the river where we had to cross!  We tried not to think about hippos or crocodiles and the water was so brown that we wouldn’t have seen them anyway!

Jerenimo and Daud had the “bright idea” to leave their shoes near the car and were planning to go barefoot on the other side.  Little did they know about the boiling sand and thorny burs that awaited them.  Another joke came when Amy asked the moran what to do if she saw a lion.  The answer was just to stand still.  Amy and Millicent thought it would be a much better idea to hide behind the moran as (with his sharp machete) he thought the lion was just a dog.  Luckily we didn’t have to test this theory.

When we finally came across the huge carcass the atmosphere changed and there were no more jokes.  It was about three weeks old and majorly decomposed and very stinky.  Our first aim was to try and identify the elephant.  This proved impossible as not only had the face been hacked off by poachers, the ears had been chewed and were unrecognisable, there was no tail.  All we could tell was that when it was alive it must have been one enormous bull.  We set about looking for cartridges from the gun or bullets that had been left in the body.  There were several bullets in the elephant’s collar bone but we could not remove them.

We trekked back to the car, through the Ewaso and just as we were getting excited about showering off the dead elephant stench we got stuck.  The car was sinking fast into the wet sand.  Daud tried “digging like a mongoose” but it didn’t work.  It took us over an hour (as there was no cell phone network) to be rescued by Elephant Watch who responded to our radio call for help and pulled us out!

What an eventful day