My 11 year old daughter, Mayian, has set up a fundraising campaign with her dad @francothepapa, to help save the highly endangered Grevy’s zebra of north Kenya, currently suffering from starvation due to the terrible drought that’s gripped the Horn of Africa for the last two years. The link to her Go Fund Me campaign is here: https://gofund.me/e602f691

There are only +/- 3000 Grevy’s zebra left in the wild, so her goal is to raise £1 for each one. The money will be donated to the @grevyszebratrust (GZT) to buy nutritious hay and help fund their emergency supplementary feeding programme of these unique zebra.

In the photos below, Mayian (aged 6) is helping the Trust’s previous efforts during a similar drought in 2017.

Grevy’s zebra are in serious trouble. 

Their biggest issue is habitat loss as their home range is being rapidly degraded through overgrazing by livestock, loss of topsoil, erosion, and failed rains brought about by climate change. 

Everything comes down to the availability of grass in the landscape.  

The grass stalks below were collected by Mayian and her parents in the Maasai Mara in 2021, and represent 13 different species. 

The most nutritious of these grasses is the species found on the far right-hand side of the photo, called red oat grass. 

Unfortunately, livestock – especially goats and sheep – have been devastating the grazing areas of north Kenya by pulling up the roots of the small patches of grass that remain.  It’s been estimated that 70% of the landscape is now on the edge of permanent desertification, which means that only 30% of the area has the ability to repair itself and produce the grass that is so desperately needed by wildlife and livestock alike.

Mayian’s dream is to see Samburu covered in rich fields of grass again one day.  It will take a lot of work to restore the landscape and regenerate the grass, but in the meantime she wants to find ways to help the Grevy’s zebra and the other wild life that depends on grasslands to survive. Her aim is to raise awareness and contribute to raising funds by making Art.

Her sculpture of a Grevy’s zebra in amongst a herd of Burchell’s zebra, up at the top of this post, highlights how different these rare and very special, unique, desert-adapted zebra are to common zebra. The sculpture is for sale in Kenya to the highest bidder and all donations will go to the Grevy’s Zebra Trust feeding programme!

Please spread the word and thank you for your support!

The link to her Go Fund Me campaign is https://gofund.me/e602f691

HOW DO I BOOK? Saba’s tour is taking place this Autumn across the UK. You can book your favourite venue by clicking on the TOUR DATES 2022 icon at the top of the page.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT? The world is changing fast. As the tectonic plates of geopolitics and climate change shift, nature is increasingly threatened by humanity. For elephants the scourge of the ivory trade has diminished, at least for the meanwhile. African elephants are slowly emerging from their safe havens to find a landscape being transformed by expanding agriculture, modern pastoralism, and fragmented by newly built roads and railways.

Born and raised amongst nomads and wildlife in the savannahs of East Africa – conservationist and filmmaker, Saba Douglas-Hamilton – has lived and breathed the battle to save Africa’s elephants from day one, hand-in-hand with her family. Their vehicle, a small but hard-hitting NGO, Save The Elephants (STE) – founded by her father, Iain DH, a pioneer researcher of elephant behaviour – harnesses the minds and fighting spirits of dedicated scientists and local Samburu people defending elephants from ivory trade and conflict.  Saba works in parallel to STE, running a social enterprise – Elephant Watch Camp – that offers an alternative livelihood and training for nomads through eco-tourism, and specialises in intimate encounters with elephants to recruit people that love wildlife to the conservation cause.

 ‘In The Footsteps of Elephants’ is an inspiring and heart warming account of the tumultuous journey and impossible odds faced by a brave alliance saving Africa’s most iconic species. Triggered by pivotal support from Leonardo DiCaprio, Save The Elephants success in raising millions of dollars with their partners, fighting wildlife traffickers, luring super models to the wilds of Kenya to influence opinion in China, and persuading high-end jewellers like Tiffany’s to commit to the cause, has helped turn the tide and won back critical space for this endangered species. 

Saba’s stories of cattle rustlers driven mad by accelerating desertification, the trust of sleeping elephants forced to seek shelter among humans, China’s greatest athlete kick-starting change, and the courage of Africa’s unsung heroes risking their lives fighting poachers, swings from heart-breaking to hilarious in a spirited rebellion against the culture of rogue materialism that is bankrupting our planet.

In The Footsteps of Elephants promises to be an evening of love and loss, happiness and heartache, beautifully illustrated with photographs and film, and told in gripping detail by an arch-storyteller celebrating the synergy and triumph of a committed coalition. With the world waking up to the climate crisis, Saba explores how our planet’s biosphere has never been more important or more fragile.  But in this uplifting and inspiring story, she shows that there is still hope for the African elephant – and for all species – if we continue to work together as a force for change. 

Thanks to you all for joining me this April during my tour, A LIFE WITH ELEPHANTS. It is wonderful to see your passion for Nature and to know that we have so many allies across the world.  I salute you!

What a whirl! So many new faces and places!  Part of the growing alliance of environmentally conscious people that care deeply about the future of elephants and the state of the natural world.  Thank you all for being so warm and welcoming. I’ll be back in 2019!

Nick Nichols – Samburu’s 1000 strong elephants roam freely throughout the Northern Rangelands

The Save the Elephants team in Samburu can individually recognise about 1000 elephants, and have been monitoring them closely since 1997. For ease of reference each family is named after a category, like the Storms, Winds, Acacias, or Native Americans, so individuals bear names such as Tempest, Harmattan, Polyacantha or Sioux. What makes these elephants special is that they are part of one of the biggest remaining free-roaming wild elephant populations in Kenya that come in and out of the Samburu and Buffalo Springs national reserves at will, ranging vast distances across the wild frontier of the Ewaso ecosystem in the Northern Rangelands.

The conservation efforts in north Kenya stand heads above other parts of Africa, because of the collaborative nature of the work that is done by the NGOs, community conservancies, game ranches, government agencies and parastatals based there.  Nothing is achieved in isolation, so for all our successes and triumphs at Save the Elephants and Elephant Watch Camp, I’d like to credit also our partners at Kenya Wildlife Service, Samburu County Government, Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, Northern Rangelands Trust, Ewaso Lions, Grevy Zebra Trust, Milgis Trust and the many Community Conservancies whom we have the pleasure to work with. In addition, from time to time we find orphaned or injured elephants (and other animals), and have to call upon the services of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust who unfailingly answer our cries for help by scrambling a rescue plane or immediately sending in their mobile veterinary unit. Thank you all!
©  STE – the beautiful Babylon, matriarch of the Biblical Towns

Right! Back onto elephants. Today, I’d like to celebrate some of the elephants I love best. Like Babylon, above, from the Biblical Towns, the oldest and most beautiful matriarch in Samburu, so tall and broad in body, that from a distance she looks like a bull. Her wisdom and guidance has steered her family through many crisis, and for over 20 years nurtured the brave but broken bodied Babel, a crippled female with a badly broken back leg and twisted spine.  Sadly, Babel succumbed to the devastating drought of 2009, but Babylon, Jerusalem and the rest survived and are thriving.

©  Saba/EWC – Matt in full musth

Matt is a gorgeous 45 year old bull from the north whom we only see in Samburu reserve when he’s in musth.  This year, after decent rains, he sailed in like a battleship, oozing secretions from his swollen temple glands, that were irresistible to female elephants.  His first paramour was Blizzard’s teenage daughter, whom he guarded and mated  over a three day period. Once he was sure the oestrus window had passed, he moved on to lovers new.

©  Max Hug-Williams – Habiba (collared) and the orphan herd

Habiba is a 14 year old orphan matriarch whose entire (adult) family was gunned down by poachers. Since the age of about 11, she’s been in charge of a ragtag bunch of orphans, all that remains of her once abundant Swahili family. She has a distinctive wrinkle in her right ear, and wears one of our radio collars so that we can track her movements for the PhD study of STE researcher, Shifra Goldenberg. Habiba has developed a special relationship with Cinnamon, the last remaining adult and now matriarch of the Spices family, who tolerates the presence of the Swahili orphans and allows them to tag along with her own family.

©  Saba/STE – Rommel in 2008

The one elephant that made our hair stand on end whenever he came into the reserve was Rommel, infamous for having rearranged one of our research vehicles during a fight with Abe Lincoln in 2002. Rommel was losing the fight, and took his frustration out on the car. The researchers, George Wittemyer and his assistant Daniel Lentipo, were lucky to escape with their lives, and amazingly the car kept on going for a few more years, despite its striking new bodywork! Head of field operations, David Daballen, tried to collar Rommel in 2004, but his neck was too big for even the largest collar. He was last seen in 2008. Now MIA presumed dead.

©  Melanie/EWC – Anwar says hello to an Elephant Watch Camp vehicle

Anwar is a super friendly bull who likes to play with our cars. He’s a bit clumsy and has smashed David’s windscreen twice by mistake. He’ll occasionally rest his tusks on the bonnet, and has even sat on the bumper. It can be quite alarming if you don’t know who he is!

©  Saba/EWC – Sarara hoovering up seedpods at Elephant Watch Camp

Yeager, Sarara, Malasso, and some of their younger cohorts have learnt to make the most of both the Save the Elephants and Elephant Watch camps. They’ve realised there’s a huge advantage to venturing where few others dare – into the centre of human “settlement” – where trees have been protected and thus provide an untapped bounty of succulent seeds. A high risk, high gain strategy that reaps great rewards, and keeps us all on our toes!

©  Saba/EWC – Sarara and Simon Lekalaile at Elephant Watch

© STE – Iain Douglas-Hamilton meets passing Tuareg nomads in the Gourma desert 

Back in about 2001, I travelled to the Gourma Desert in Mali to join a Save the Elephants team removing radio-collars from a handful of elephants darted two years previously.  The collars had been transmitting crucial data on elephant movement between Mali and Burkina Faso. The data showed that the elephants were covering a range of 38,000 kmsq, which lead to the discovery that no other elephant population in Africa has a migration that encompasses such a large area. Now the collar batteries were running out and the transmitters had to be recovered.  It was a brutally hard operation but successful.

© STE – Saba & El Mehdi, the wonderful Tuareg representative of the Min. des Eaux et Forets

The Gourma is truly the back of beyond – south of the Sahara, almost level with Timbuktu – it is exceedingly arid and remote.  At midday, temperatures rise to 51°C in the shade, and beyond the few Tuareg herders that gather around the desert oases to browse their livestock on desiccated trees, there’s nothing else beside these extraordinary desert elephants. The only reason they survive in such extreme conditions is because of their intelligence and their ability to walk long distances between food and water.

© STE – Desert elephants at Lake Banzena

About a year after our de-collaring mission, a researcher from Oxford, Susan Canney, took over the elephant study.  Sadly, recent political turmoil and the incursion of Al Qaeda linked militants into the area forced her out of the field, and, for the first time in decades, these most northern of Africa’s elephants are once again plagued by the horrors of ivory poaching. Since only about 400 elephants remain in Mali, each loss impacts hard on the population.

Last week Susan and I had a chat about community sentiments towards elephants. But the most interesting part for me had nothing to do with elephants.  It was her discovery that most of the livestock she’d assumed belonged to the Tuareg nomads, were actually “prestige herds” belonging to affluent businessmen in distant cities. More often than not, the Tuareg were simply hired hands who owned nothing themselves. I’d not heard the term prestige herding before, but it struck a deep chord with what I’ve seen in North Kenya.

© STE – A Tuareg encampment, by far the coolest way to live in the desert

So much of what we deal with in conservation is the “tragedy of the commons”.  The disastrous over-exploitation of vulnerable species or habitats, often by desperate people scrabbling to put food into the mouths of their children, with no thought of long term sustainability or investment in the future. Sometimes, the people are not desperate at all, just ruthlessly greedy and uncaring. Unfortunately, this heedless rush for resources is often exacerbated by the breakdown of traditional values and lines of authority, and further damned by a lack of alternative systems of management.

It seems so tragic to me that nomadic pastoralists who’ve survived for centuries relying entirely on their livestock, no longer even own their livelihood. In the arid north of Kenya we see a similar situation to Mali. There’s far too much livestock, the landscape is increasingly degraded, and each year things get tougher for both humans and animals. According to Mike Harrison, the CEO of the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) – now of our main conservation partners in Samburu District – a recent study by ICRAF has shown that 30% of the land in the northern rangelands is at or below the minimum organic carbon level necessary to support plant growth. A further 40% is severely degraded. It suggests that we’re witnessing desertification in fast forward, and most of this is thanks to excessive livestock.

Having lived and worked in Samburu on and off for the last 18 years, I have witnessed first hand the changing landscape. Just as in Mali, prestige herding is a big part of the problem.  Rich politicians and traders bank-rolling on the meat business, hustle livestock deep into protected areas to graze illegally. The wild flora and fauna that attracts tourists to the area, bringing in critical funding to the County Governments, is starting to get severely depleted, in some cases even moving towards a threshold of no return.

If this abuse of the wild environment continues unchecked, then inevitably we will witness the slaying of the golden goose. It’s a massive vicious circle fuelled by frustration, desperation, poor management, greed and apathy. Nobody is doing anyone any favours by allowing it to continue, and, as always, the people who suffer the most are the poorest.  So what to do?

We need a radical rethink of how we deal with all this stuff. There are already brave ventures afoot trying to combat it, initiated by the Northern Rangelands Trust and other NGOs, but we need more ideas, more energy, and even more hands on deck.  Above all, we need to stop hiding our heads in the sand.

Nomads are just as open to the benefits of new ideas and technology as anyone else, and the advent of the cellphone is a good example of how quickly things can change. I’m convinced that the solution lies in offering alternative solutions, investments, livelihoods and better education to draw people away from the traditional practice of putting all their savings into livestock. It’s no longer viable environmentally, it fuels inter-tribal conflict, and it is destroying the one resource that really does bring income into the area – the wildlife.

© Sam Gracey – Saba with some of Samburu’s big bull elephants

The more you watch elephants, the more you slip into their mind-scape and begin to see the world through their eyes. Most of what I know about them I learnt by osmosis, growing up amongst them while my parents did their research in the 1970s. Later on, I was able to match my intuitive interpretations with what I read, which opened my eyes to the deep magic of the natural world.

Spending time with elephants you appreciate how tender they are to one another, how independently minded each can be, the daily challenges faced by a matriarch as she tries to persuade her family to follow her lead, or her courage in times of danger. Watching them opens up a window onto the whole world around them, because they are constantly interacting with all the other animal and plant species they live amongst. So you can slip quietly from intense observation of one species to the next, until the inter-connectedness of all things becomes apparent.

Perhaps what I’ve learnt most from growing up with elephants is the importance of this inter-connectedness – the fabric of life upon which we all depend – and of how critical wild spaces are for our sanity. It was perhaps this longing to return to natural “silence” that prompted Frank and I to relocate to Samburu district to bring our kids up at Elephant Watch Camp. Both of us are deeply committed to the cause of saving elephants, but we also felt it was an amazing opportunity to open our kids’ eyes to a very different way of life and give them time to explore their imaginations and creativity while their brains were still uncluttered.

At first they were scared by the monkeys stealing mangos at breakfast or howled when thorns pricked their baby-soft feet, but it was merely a matter of learning the ropes. Pump action water pistols work a treat at keeping monkeys at bay, so the sharpshooters are now locked and loaded in time for tea, and they’ve learnt to scuff their feet in the dust to get rid of most thorns.

© Saba Douglas-Hamilton – Sarara, a common visitor at Camp

More worrisome are the bull elephants that take up residence in camp during the sagaram season. As these nutritious Acacia seeds rain down onto the tents, the bulls hustle in to make the most of it. On one occasion, when one of the twins was being rather disobedient, tromping off on her own not looking where she was going, she almost bumped into the backside of a bull called Sarara. He whirled around with a great whoosh of annoyance and sent her scampering for cover, luckily into the arms of a warrior called Mporian who was keeping an eye on her. It was a very close call that made the hair on my arms stand on end, and afterwards I could feel her little heart fluttering in her chest like a trapped bird. So far Sarara has proved to be more bark than bite, but you can never take elephants for granted.

The fact that elephants come into camp at all is the most amazing show of trust, and is thanks to the protection they get here in Samburu reserve and the gentle touch of the staff at Elephant Watch Camp. Even better is their inclination to seek out comfortable sand banks close to our tents at night and lay down for a snooze, so that you can hear the calm of their deepening breath as they succumb to elephant dreams under the stars. Now and then leopard also pad through camp, which sets the vervet monkeys into a frenzy of alarm calls as they warn us about the presence of civet cats, wild dog, servals, or hyaena which wakes us up quite a lot at night. But since they are our extra eyes and ears it’s always good to listen to what they have to say.

My favourite time of day is twilight, as the Verreaux eagle owls take flight from their perch above Tent Two and disappear like shadows into the night sky. I love the delicious cool of the evening, the balm of a sun-warmed shower, tucking the kids into bed with a goodnight story, and then heading off to sort out dinner for the guests.

© Jez Hunziker – Mayian (above), Frank, Luna (below), Mporian, Saba, Selkie 

But camp is a lot of work, and it isn’t always easy. Trying to keep the standards high is an enormous challenge – vehicles break down, people get sick, nomads go on walkabout, termites gnaw through the infrastructure, and sadly, every now and then we find that an elephant has been killed – but that’s just part of life in this part of the northern frontier.

Samburu national reserve is a pocket-handkerchief of a protected area that’s part of a much greater wilderness that stretches all the way up to the Ethiopian border. Part of Frank’s work at Save the Elephants is to monitor where the elephants go in that wilderness and why. So we don’t often find time to put our feet up. This only happens during the rains when we pack up camp completely and take a proper break, heading down to the coast for a week or two of swimming in the Indian Ocean.

Our favourite place is Lamu, a 1,000 year old town that’s part of an archipelago of Bajuni islands, where we stay with friends or at Manda Bay. It’s a very different kind of wilderness with endless sand dunes and islands to explore, whale sharks, dolphins, and even turtles hatching on the beaches, but one that speaks to our hearts in much the same way. Kenya is simply magical, and while I know that nothing can last forever, right now, I’m very happy with this wild life.

#ThisWildLife #ElephantWatchCamp #SavetheElephants

Today I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, like a cat with hair on-end and claws scraping along the floor, during a day-long tutorial on streamlining social media. It’s been making my head spin. Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, FB, YouTube – each requiring far too much energy and concentration.  And it takes up so much time!  How do people manage?  

For example, I’m now scraping around wordpress trying to find my old blogs … several years out of date and kindly posted here by my husband when my website crashed.  But there’s neither sight nor sound.  So WHERE the HELL are they?????