Recently, we carried the story of the death of Resilience the matriarch of the Virtues family. The saga of this family continues.
Two weeks after Resilience’s death David Daballen and I took at National Geographic camera crew to Resilience’s body. We found an elephant from the Butterfly family who had come to pay her respects to the remains. This is something we have often seen before, an intense interest that elephants show towards their dead. This elephant was not particularly closely related to the Virtues, but was standing silently over the corpse running her trunk all over the body.
No sooner were we back in camp than the mobile telephone rang and a contact reported hearing gunshots from the village of Attan, to the South East of Buffalo Spring. He said six gun shots had rung out, then silence followed by another six gunshots, and screams and trumpeting of elephants. In the next few seconds David was on the phone to the nearest Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) anti-poaching unit, and within minutes they were on their way to the scene of the report. In the mean time the villagers reported the sound of chopping as the tusks were being hacked out of the elephant.
KWS discovered the elephant’s body lying in the middle of the road with its tusks taken by poachers. At dawn the next morning, STE’s chief field officer David Daballen went to identify the elephant, and discovered it was ‘Hope’, an elephant STE had been studying for some time. Hope had a young calf of approximately 3 years of age, and the question of what had happened to the baby and the rest of the family was worrying.
While the KWS tracked the poachers to Isiolo, David followed the foot prints of the survivors in the opposite direction, tracking 3km into impenetrable bush. At that point he phoned me for aerial support. I managed to spot the elephants from the air and guided David to their location on the ground. Thankfully, Hope’s calf managed to escape the poachers, and was discovered in the care of a breeding female, without any injuries.
This is the sad little remnant of the Virtues family. Hope was one of the last old females from the family, which STE has been studying for the last 15 years. The Virtues have been decimated by poachers, with the chief matriarch, Resilience killed only last week. Resilience was spotted in great distress by tourists in the Samburu National Reserve. Her body had been sprayed with bullets, but she had managed to escape the poachers. Sadly, STE and KWS were forced to put her down because of the extent of her injuries.
The authorities are now on the hunt to catch the criminals, having extracted bullets from the bodies of both elephants.
These recent killings are just part of a spate of poaching in Kenya, and point to the precarious situation facing Africa’s elephants. As part of the Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) program, STE and the KWS work together to assess the cause of death of every elephant in the Samburu area to monitor poaching levels and population health. With the building of a road by a Chinese construction company in the area, we are finding more elephants poached for both for ivory and other body parts, possibly for Chinese medicine. Poachers are becoming far more organized and armed with sophisticated weapons and night vision equipment.
We are deeply worried about this rising trend, and are working hard to reduce the rate of illegal killing, by working with KWS and the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT ) to react to poachers and to record exactly the
scale of whats going on. The rising level of elephant poaching for ivory is a serious challenge to law enforcement.