Samburu

Simeon and our Samburu guide running into a family of elephants. Photos by David Lansing.

Late this afternoon Pete and I went out with Simeon and a Samburu moran looking for game. It didn’t take us long. Five minutes from camp we came across an open woodland where at least two families of elephants were feeding. Even though there were lots of totos in this group, the elephants weren’t the least bothered by our presence. We sat in our open-air vehicle while the cows with their calves passed within feet of us. Simeon was able to identify most of the elephants.

“They all have different characteristics,” he said. “Some are playful, some are cranky, some are mischievous.”

There is Baby Breeze, he told us. “Do you know Baby Breeze?”

We didn’t know Baby Breeze. Evidently Baby Breeze is almost as famous as Dumbo. Last year Iain Douglas-Hamilton and his daughter Saba were involved in a BBC documentary called The Secret Life of Elephants which shadowed several Samburu elephants and their struggle for survival. Two of the stars were Baby Breeze and his mother, Harmadon. Baby Breeze was born during the bad drought of 2009 and the question in viewer’s minds was, Would Baby Breeze survive? Well, he did. And now people come to Elephant Watch Camp just to see Baby Breeze and his mom, along with other members of the Winds family.

Is this Baby Breeze or Miro? Who knows.

I should explain about the whole elephant family thing. Iain and his staff at Save the Elephants have named all the elephants and put them into families. So there’s Chagall and her calf Miro who are members of the Artists family, Baby Oscar Wilde who is from the Poetics, and, of course, Baby Breeze who is from the Winds family.

This all makes me a little uneasy. I can see how, if you’re studying elephants or any other animal, it is necessary to distinguish amongst them, but anthropomorphism is always a slippery slope, particularly with wild animals. First we give them names, like Chagall or Breeze, and then we give them human characteristics, like this elephant is playful but not very bright and that one is a trickster, and then we turn them into cartoon characters and they stand up on their hind legs and start singing “Hakuna Matata” like Timon, the “no worries” warthog from The Lion King (Timon, by the way, is Swahili for “absentminded or careless”). And then they’re just like people, aren’t they? Or maybe they’re better than people because they’re “simpler” or “purer.”

How do you make rational policy decisions regarding wildlife once they’ve taken on human characteristics? An old bull elephant may be raiding the shamba of a Samburu manyatta and destroying the crops that feed an extended family of 100 people, but who is going to give the order to cull Pretty Bom Bom, a notoriously bad-tempered bull elephant in Samburu?

So here’s the dilemma people like Iain Douglas-Hamilton face: His organization depends on the generosity of donors, most of them Westerners and primarily from the U.S., to support his research. In order to get people to cut him a nice big check, he has to do more than just shout, “Save the elephants!” He has to make a Disneyfied documentary that gives elephants names, like Baby Breeze, and then write a heart-breaking narrative about the Winds family struggle for survival and accompany it with a moving score and the whole thing has to make you feel that if you don’t send a big check off to Save the Elephants today, Baby Breeze just might die.

Now if you do all that, and your funding depends on donors who are now invested in Baby Breeze and want regular updates on how he is doing, how do you ever make logical, scientific decisions that might call for the culling of some animals?

Here’s what Iain Douglas-Hamilton said to me: “I’m not universally opposed to hunting as a form of wildlife conservation in Kenya. I have to say that it depends. And what it depends on is whether it could be a controlled policy and with the proper profitable land use. But it could never be used with elephants because elephants are smarter than other animals.”

Are they? Or, in giving them names and families and human characteristics do we just like to imagine that they are? I mean, have you ever heard of the Save the African Wild Dog organization? Well they’re out there. And African wild dogs are much more endangered than elephants. They’re just not as cute. They have a reputation for being ruthless and vicious and pests. So they don’t get the financial support that Save the Elephants does. But are they really less worthy of our attention? Are elephants “smarter” than African wild dogs and should that really determine which species gets saved and which one doesn’t? Anybody up for Save the Hyenas?

David Daballen. Photo courtesy of Save the Elephants.

I should have mentioned that joining us for lunch yesterday was David Daballen, the chief field researcher for Save the Elephants. I know a bit about David. He’s a Kenyan who grew up near Lake Paradise on Mount Marsabit and last year he and seven other crazy individuals walked from Marsabit across the Kaisut Desert to the Mathews Range following a nomadic bull elephant named Shadrack. Actually, not all of the eight men walked across the Kaisut Desert; some gave up and had to be evacuated. But David Daballen, along with his brother Teteya, completed the trek.

So why did David walk across one hundred and thirty miles of Kenyan desert following an elephant? They wanted to see what it did when it crossed the road. No, that’s not correct. David and the others followed Shadrack because they were trying to learn something about the elephant’s habits. They wanted to learn how he knew where to go. And how he survived what David calls “streaking”—covering immense distances from one safe spot, like Marsabit National Reserve, to another sanctuary, like Samburu. As Iain told me, “Streaking is when an elephant runs like hell, usually in the middle of the night, over open land because he knows he’s not safe.”

David knew that Shadrack was a streaker because two years ago, they’d put a GPS collar around his neck and monitored the big bull elephant leaving Mount Marsabit in May and heading south, across the Kaisut Desert, traversing the same inhospitable stretch of lava fields, dry riverbeds, and thick bush we’d just covered from Lake Paradise before eventually reaching the elephant-friendly Ngeng, a river valley in the Mathews Range. He’d covered 129 miles in five days.

What David Daballen and the other researchers at STE wanted to know was: How did he navigate his way to the Mathews Range? Was he following some unknown and ancient elephant pathway? How close had he come to people? And they figured the best way to get those answers was to walk behind Shadrack. For as long as it took.

The only problem is that when elephants streak, they generally tend to sleep very little. In order to keep up with Shadrack, David and his team needed to cover over 25 miles of desert a day—for five days. Which, they discovered, just isn’t possible. “We could keep up with him during the day,” he told me, “but he’d walk all night long too. That’s where he lost us.”

Anyway, I mention all this because David was sitting down at the far end of the table during the somewhat heated discussion between me and Iain and a couple of times I looked down at his end of the table and tried to get him involved in the conversation, curious to know what a Kenyan who grew up near Lake Paradise thought about some of these issues on animal conservation, but each time I did, I’d see him look nervously at his mentor and then defer to him. I think he was afraid to speak up in front of Iain. Which was a shame. I really would have liked to hear what he thought about all this.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and all of us, particularly me, are too stuffed to do anything other than sit back on the couch and watch a football game. Or, in my case, watch a family of elephants not far from the appropriately named Elephant Watch Camp here in Samburu. So rather than me going on and on about what we saw and what the guide, Simeon, was like etc., etc., here’s a very brief video that you can watch on your laptop while burping away on the couch.

As far as I know there are no words for “Happy Thanksgiving” in Swahili. Or for turkey, for that matter. But they do have some lovely guinea fowl here and Pedro was so hungry today that…well, you can see from this photo how he just ate this beast right down to the bone.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my readers!

The Douglas-Hamilton's plane at the Samburu airstrip. Photo by David Lansing.

So we drop Hardy and Fletch off at the airstrip and then head back to camp, thinking we might do a little game-viewing along the way, but it’s midday and, sensibly enough, all the animals are taking a nap in the bundu so there’s really not much to see. After a 15-minute drive we’re just about back to Elephant Watch Camp when our Samburu driver notices a plane coming in low over the camp. It’s Iain and Oria arriving.

Now the sensible thing to do, since we’re only a few minutes away from camp and have already made two trips back and forth to the airstrip, would be to drop us off and go back and pick up the Douglas-Hamiltons, but obviously Iain or perhaps Oria has put the fear of god in their Samburu staff and although our driver apologizes prolifically, he announces that he must turn the vehicle around and head back to the airstrip because the Douglas-Hamiltons do not like to be kept waiting when they fly in from Lake Naivasha where Oria has a farm (and a private game sanctuary called Olerai House).

He jerks the car around and we fly out to the airport, going twice as fast as we’d gone originally to take Hardy and Fletch out there, bouncing over the potted dirt road, dust flying everywhere, a panicked look on the Samburu’s face. When we arrive at the airstrip, Iain and Oria are standing there, bags at their side, waiting.

I should mention at this point that Pete is old friends with the Douglas-Hamiltons. His parents have helped sponsor Save the Elephants and Pete is practically a godson to Iain and Oria (which, really, is why we’re here). In addition to that, Iain and Oria have two beautiful daughters, Saba and Dudu, one (at least) of whom Pete was enamored enough of that he proposed to her (we won’t say which one). Saba, by the way, is Swahili for “seven” and was so named because she was born on June 7, 1970 at 7 o’clock under the sign of Scorpio (you can see that, in a slightly different locale, Iain and Oria would have ended up either running an incense shop in San Francisco or traveling in a VW bus around the country following the Grateful Dead—or both).

Dudu was born Mara Moon but was nicknamed Dudu because, her mom says, “she was such a little buzzing bee when she was small.” Dudu, by the way, is Swahili for insect.

So hugs and kisses are exchanged between Pete and his faux-godparents and eventually we get back in the car and, for the third time today, leave the airstrip for Elephant Watch Camp, this time with Iain driving. Which is not necessarily a good thing. Even though he’s almost 70 these days, he’s still a bit of a Mad Max and Oria, from the back seat, tells him several times to slow down or watch out for the potholes or, on one occasion, to try not to impale all of us by driving right through the overhanging branches of a thorny acacia tree.

“Good lord, Iain,” Oria wales, “do you want to kill our guests before we even get back to camp? Can you not see that you just drove needlessly into that tree?”

Iain stops the car but doesn’t turn around to look at Oria. Instead, he takes a deep breath, smiles at me, sitting beside him in the front, and, in a very low voice, says, “Yes, dear.”

I guess living in the bush for as long as the Douglas-Hamiltons have, they’ve both developed their own survival techniques. It will be interesting to see if I develop some as well.