Confident elephants nudge into Nairobi
Copyright 2001
The Guardian (London)
August 22, 2001
By James Astill in Nairobi
Emboldened by Kenya's success in stamping out poaching, elephants have started wandering into the suburbs of Nairobi for the first time for more than a century.
Residents found a 25-year-old bull elephant feeding in an acacia forest on the southern outskirts. It was anaesthetised and taken by road 150 miles south to Amboseli national park near Mount Kilimanjaro, where it was thought to have come from. "We'd had several reports of three elephants moving towards the city, but I still couldn't believe it," the director of the Kenya wildlife service, Nehemiah Rotich, said. "Then there it was, feeding happily and bathing in the river."
Elephants had been hunted remorselessly since early British colonial days. Poaching threatened their survival in the 70s and 80s until radical measures, such as patrols authorised to shoot poachers dead and the ban on the international ivory trade, saved them.
Until recently Kenya's elephants were wary, aggressive and rarely seen far from the centre of the national parks, huddled together for protection. Now, with poaching levels so low, Mr Rotich says, they feel safe to wander.
Elephant are extremely destructive to houses and crops, and dangerous when alarmed. The stray bull was therefore anaesthetised with a dart fired from a helicopter, winched on to a truck and removed from the city.
"It was pretty hair-raising," said Mr Rotich. "At one point it nearly ran over someone's cow; then a school child came running into the wood without seeing it."
Although the central highlands on which Nairobi is built are too dry for elephants, conservationists believe that they once migrated northwards across them to the greener Aberdare highlands.
Kenya's elephant population rose through the 90s from 19,000 to 30,500. The amount of damage to villages and farms near the national parks has risen correspondingly.
But unlike South Africa, Kenya has no plans to cull them.