Elephant rescue up close: saving an injured calf in Kenya’s Maasai Mara nature reserve
Baby elephant’s trunk had been nearly severed in a snare poachers had set to catch bushmeat. Helicopter-borne rescuers swoop in to take the injured animal for surgery
I’m in Kenya’s Maasai Mara game reserve with Marc Goss, chief executive of the Mara Elephant Project (MEP), when he gets a call from his team saying they’ve found an elephant calf that’s got her trunk caught in a snare.
She was spotted the previous night and they’ve been searching for her because the snare – set by bushmeat poachers – has ripped through more than half her trunk. She’s still walking around and it will get infected if it’s not treated soon.
Goss, who has worked in the Mara for 10 years, has been showing me how they protect elephants in the region. We head back to headquarters, where we board a small, leopard-print helicopter, and lift off over the fertile green lands of the Mara Conservancy.
Founded in 2011, MEP started out as a 12-man team with one vehicle, responding to complaints from the local community of elephants encroaching on their farmland, destroying crops.
“We’d started getting more and more elephants with spears in them in the Mara,” says co-founder Richard Roberts. “We got a vehicle with a siren, and set up a hotline, so anyone having trouble with elephants – day or night – could call us. Then, that same year, an Africa-wide poaching crisis hit the Mara.”
So they set up an intelligence network across the Mara, and trained rapid-response anti-poaching units. As a result, they successfully managed to curb ivory poaching in the northern Mara: in 2012 they lost 139 elephants to illegal killing; last year they lost eight.
