My Elephant Orphan Just Turned 11 — and She’s Back in the Wild

This past week, I renewed my annual adoption of elephant orphan Ishanga with the David Shedlrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi, Kenya. Truth is, Ishanga, now more-or-less fully grown at age 11, is roaming semi-free in Tsavo East National Park with a wild herd, and only occasionally visits the Ithumba stockade where recovering orphans are coached to make the long transition to an eventual release into the wild. Ex-orphans return to the stockade because they are curious to meet the newcomers, who they know may one day join them in the wild.

And Tsavo is wild. It is Kenya’s largest park, by far. It’s rough and untamed. Tourists huddle around a string of lodges atop a tall escarpment that overlooks the southern edge of this vast stretch of semi-arid badlands. Tsavo has a bloody history, replete with remnant tales of the slave trade, man-eating lions — the infamous “Man-Eaters of Tsavo” — poaching wars pitting armed game rangers against Somali bandits armed with AK-47s, and now, in 2021, a terrible problem with wire snares, just one more battle in the unending war against the illegal bushmeat trade. The import of ivory is illegal — Kenya has long been on the frontlines of the war against the ivory trade, and has some of the toughest sentencing laws for wildlife crime on the entire continent  — but poachers still try their luck. Park rangers working with the Sheldrick Trust have removed some 140,000 wire snares over the years, and facilitated more than 2,800 arrests, according to a project census in 2017.

Truth is, Ishanga may no longer need my annual stipend, but as Angela Sheldrick, daughter of Dame Daphne Sheldrick, the late wife of Tsavo’s original, first game warden, David Sheldrick — Tsavo was gazetted as a wildlife refuge in 1949 — reminds anyone who has sponsored an elephant orphan over a long period of time, there are many orphan babies, and any excess money is spread to those in need.

Ishanga, you see, is a success story. And not the only one. The Sheldrick Trust has successfully hand-raised more than 200 elephant orphans, and released some 100 of those back into the wild, all of them in Tsavo. The story gets better: Nearly 30 wild-born calves have been born to these elephants returned to the place where many of them were born, but no longer remember their parents, as they were mostly infants at the time they were orphaned

Elephants, you see, are social animals, and lead complex, sociable lives in the wild. They are quick to adopt newcomers, and the matriarchs — yes, elephant society is a matriarchy — know how to spot and weed out the troublemakers. The orphans, once they reach adulty age, tend to fit right in.

The Shedrick Trust, literally a small, relatively unknown, family owned NGO in the beginning,  gained worldwide attention after a 60 Minutes profile by the late war correspondent Bob Simon in 2006. I visited the Nairobi orphanage for the first time in 2009, and adopted Ishanga a few years after that because, well, something about her story struck a chord in me.

Her parents were killed by wire snares and she was huddled in a dry mud pit, terrified, when park rangers found her, being marauded by wild lions. She was badly injured, both from her fall and from the lions, but somehow she managed to survive while the rangers fended off the lions and radioed the orphanage in Nairobi for help. A single-engine bushplane flew in a veterinary team — Kenya’s wilderness is massive, and flying is the only way to tend to an emergency in a hurry — and somehow they calmed her, loaded her aboard the plane and flew her to her new life.

Today, she’s back where she belongs — in Tsavo, running with wild elephants.

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Ocean Conservationist Enric Sala’s Lifelong Search for ‘Pristine Seas’

Enric Sala, the renowned Girona, Catalonia born-and-raised oceanographer,  marine conservationist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, hadn’t intended to seize the spotlight during a Zoom call last week with TV reviewers, but there it was.

Sala’s documentary Pristine Seas: The Power of Protection, a semi-biographical account of his lifelong campaign to persuade world leaders to set aside vast stretches of ocean as marine protection zones,  makes its global debut Monday on NatGeo WILD. 

And while other marine researchers and National Geographic filmmakers were in on the call, when someone asked Sala if the oceans are in as much trouble as some scientists — Sala included — say they are, he rose to the bait.

“Just last week there was a scientific study that shows the ocean has become really noisy, because of our activities,” Sala said. “Seismic testing and boats and the noise from ports — all the noise we are making underwater — is making it very, very difficult for whales and other creatures in the ocean to be able to communicate, to be able to reproduce, to be able to survive. Our impact is huge.”

Sala grew up on Spain’s Costa Brava coast, where he developed a lifelong passion for the sea. He earned a Bachelor of Science (Biology) from the University of Barcelona, and followed that with a Ph.D in ecology from the University of Aix-Marseille in France.

He went on to become a professor in his own right, taught at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Five years later, he moved back to Spain, where he was appointed director of marine conservation and ecology — the first person to hold that post — for Spain’s National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).

Sala felt unfulfilled though. While at Scripps he established the Scripps’ Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. 

“What I was doing was simply writing the obituary of the ocean,” he says now. He felt he  needed to do more.

He changed course, and became a crusader for the environment rather than a witness after-the-fact. He was inspired in  large part by National Geographic Explorer Mike Fay’s groundbreaking MegaTransect of the Congo Basin in 1998 and ‘99 — an expedition that took Fay 465 days to cut his way through 3,200 kms (2,000 miles) of equatorial rainforest.

The distance covered and the discoveries made along the way wasn’t what struck Sala, though.

What struck Sala was that Fay’s expedition convinced then-president Omar Bongo of Gabon to establish 13 national parks. It wasn’t just about adventure, in other words. It was about conserving what was left.

Sala thought, why not do the same for the world’s oceans?

Sala was named a National Geographic Fellow in 2008, where he initiated the Pristine Seas project, a global program to explore, map, document and protect the last wild places in the ocean.

His partner in the project, James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron), was appointed a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence in 2011. Since then the two have campaigned hard on behalf of the world’s oceans.

Fast-forward 10 years. To date, the Pristine Seas initiative has helped establish 6 million square kms (2.3 million square miles) of marine protected area. That may seem a lot  but it is by no means enough, Sala says.

“Today, only seven percent of the ocean worldwide is protected from fishing, oil, drilling, mining and other damaging activities. The science is telling us we need at least 30%  of the ocean protected by 2030.

“The good news is that we know that when we give space to the ocean, the ocean comes back spectacularly, marine life returns. The ocean has this amazing resilience, this amazing ability to come back.

“In the last ten years, as you can see with our Pristine Seas film, we have worked with local communities and governments to protect 23 of the largest marine areas in the ocean, covering twice the size of India. And some of these places are still pristine, (which means) you jump in the water and you are immediately surrounded by sharks.

“Other areas are not so pristine. But we see that after a few years, fish and other species can come back. We don't have enough of the ocean protected, but what we have seen in the last ten years gives us hope.”

Pieonane/Pixabay

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Photographer Brian Skerry Recalls Close Encounter of the Third Kind with Killer Whale

Brian Skerry was a boy from a small Massachusetts town with a big dream, to one day explore the mystery and natural beauty of the world’s oceans with a camera. Forty years, 28 National Geographic assignments, a Peter Benchley Award for Excellence in Media and some 10,000 hours underwater hours later, one could be forgiven for thinking he has seen it all.

Then came his underwater moment with an orca off the coast of New Zealand last September while filming Secrets of the Whales, a four-part event series for the Disney+ streaming service that bows on April 22nd, Earth Day.

Skerry was one of several National Geographic explorers and filmmakers at a Zoom session, “Underwater Storytelling,” with TV reviewers last week. Skerry joined Enric Sala, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence whose upcoming program, Pristine Seas: The Power of Protection, premieres Monday next week on NatGeo WILD; Valerie Taylor, one of the world’s pre-eminent shark experts and a deep-sea diver and ocean photographer in her own right; marine biologist and shark expert Melissa Cristina Márquez; and Janet Vissering, the executive in charge of natural history program development and production for National Geographic’s global network of TV channels .

“These animals have to let you into their worlds,” Skerry recalled. “So many things have to line up. The sun has to be out, the animals have to let you close, they have to be  doing something interesting, the visibility has to be good —  all those things. You need almost divine intervention, everywhere you are.

“I had this moment, off New Zealand, where I was hoping to see this population of orca who have figured out how to eat stingrays. I jumped in the water and was swimming toward this family of orca that were hunting in a shallow harbour. And this female was coming toward me with a ray that she had started to eat.

“As I got closer, she dropped it in front of me, and I swam down to the bottom.  It was only about 30 or 40 feet deep.  I knelt on the bottom next to that dead stingray, wondering if she would come back. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw her swimming around my back.  She came around my left, got directly in front of me and then just hovered there.

“Then she looked at me, looked at the ray, looked at me, and looked at the ray again, as if to say, ‘Are you gonna eat that?’ When I didn’t, she just gently picked it up and brought it up.  I was able to make a picture of this ray in her mouth, and then she turned and shared the food with her family.

“It’s just extraordinary to think that animal may have been, I don’t know, offering me dinner. And when I chose not to partake, she went on her way.

“That’s just a brief glimpse into the world of these animals, enough to make us realize how much we don’t know.”

If Skerry has one hope with Secrets of the Whales, it’s that it will touch the popular nerve.

“I like to think the work we do is about giving voice to the voiceless,” Skerry said. “We're just at the very beginning of trying to figure these things out.

“What we can see and what science is showing us is that these animals have rich lives, much like our own. They babysit; they have food preferences, depending on where in the world they live; they have singing competitions; they share parenting ideas; and they mourn for their dead.

“My hope with all these shows is that we’ll celebrate the celebratory aspect of the ocean, but also sound the cause for concern.”

Photo by Chris Amos on Pixabay

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Photo Ark Records Its Milestone 11,000th Species

Siberian tigers, giant pandas and polar bears are the poster animals for the worldwide conservation movement, but it was a considerably less glamorous creature that went into the record books as photographer Joel Sartore’s 11,000th species in his global Photo Ark project.

The Photo Ark is a National Geographic project to assemble a gallery of portrait photographs of every remaining animal species on planet Earth.

The hope is that the project will galvanize people to action, but it also has a more sobering aim — to record, possibly for posterity, all the animals that are disappearing forever in the looming Sixth Mass Extinction. We’re living in the Anthropocene era, the first epoch in geological time defined by human existence.

In the short time — a blink of an eye, in geological terms — since Sartore first started crisscrossing the globe for his Photo Ark project, 12 years ago now, a dozen of his portrait subjects have gone extinct.

That fate may yet await his milestone 11,000th portrait subject, but the odds may yet turn in its favour. The long-toothed dart moth, aka Dichagyris longidens, is so rare and mysterious it’s believed it had never been photographed alive until a Photo Ark expedition last September.

Sartore found his subject along the banks of the Pecos River, just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. He captured his image using lights, at night. The moth was captured, photographed and then released back into the wild, in keeping with Sartore’s mandate to leave as light a footprint on nature as possible — one reason why he chooses to take many of his portrait photographs in zoos. His first image for the Photo Ark was of a naked mole-rat at the Lincoln, Nebraska children’s zoo. Sartore is from Nebraska originally, and has lived much of his life there.

Sartore says he will stay with the Photo Ark project for the rest of his working life. He estimates he could have as many as has 15,000 species yet to go. They’re not all glamourous.

“There was a little frog, one of the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frogs, from Panama,” Sartore recalled in a recent National Geographic conference call with TV reviewers. “We all knew he was the last one. They’ve been wiped out by a fungus and habitat loss. Climate change may be helping that fungus along.”

The Rabbs’ tree frog officially went extinct in 2016.

“Things stick with you all the time. “The Bornean rhino, again, maybe the last one in the world. We’ll see. These are animals that are near and dear tome, obviously. They’re special because they’re quite rare, but aren’t they all special? Don’t we need to pay attention to all of them? The very last Bornean rhino I think I’ll ever see in my lifetime . . . and maybe everybody’s lifetime.”

Sandid/Pixabay

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Pandemic Fatigue's Unexpected Upside: a Burst of Creativity

No surprise: The latest coronavirus lockdowns have been harder to deal with than the early ones, and psychologist from the UK to the US report that people are showing more signs of sustained stress than during the first wave of lockdowns, almost a year ago to the day. “The new COVID-19 variant is spreading fast,” an electric sign warns a passing jogger in London. “If you go out, you can spread it. People will die.”

Alarmist or not, most people are following the rules. That doesn’t make it any easier, though. Stress has a way of seeping into one’s core being, unless one thinks of ways to combat it.

There are ways to cope.

And one way is to look for good in the environment. Terry Waite, an author and  humanitarian who was held hostage for four years in Lebanon — while trying to negotiate a hostage release himself, ironically enough — told the Guardian newspaper this past weekend that his life changed dramatically after he was released from captivity. He had believed his time in captivity had been a waste of time, but he later realized it had not. Even though he was deprived of books, newspapers and natural light during his five years in solitary confinement, he wrote his first book in his head. “I was discovering creative abilities that I did not know I had,” he told the Guardian. “This current situation” — the Covid lockdowns — “may seem a waste of time but is not if you can draw on it at a later stage.”

Sheltering-in-place over a long period of time can cause one to become introspective. Introspection often causes us to peer inside both sides of our  personality, the light and the dark. If one dwells too much on the negative side, one can fall into a deep depression, Waite noted.

The key, Waite found, is to find a degree of inner harmony between the two sides that we all have.

Nature, wildlife and conservation photographers, for example, ordinarily used to travelling long distances to some of the world’s most pristine and remote wilderness areas, have adapted to shelter-at-home rules by poring through old images, many of them forgotten, taken years or even decades earlier. New advances in apps and restoration technology means many images, cast aside and assumed to be lacking in some way, can be rescued, as if new.

Wildlife photographers often say they can never find the time to properly edit their work — one notable, world-changing image can represent thousands of frames that never saw the light of day — and the ongoing lockdowns have freed up that time.

Poring over forgotten images from past travels is a way of reliving the original experience, too. I’ve done it myself.

It’s strange. Editing images from expeditions dating as far back as 10-20 years ago can make it seem as if it happened only yesterday.

“I’ve made a point of going out walking every day and resetting my expectations of what I’m likely to experience,” My Life as a Hermit author Neil Ansell told the Guardian this past weekend. “I have refocused my attention on the smaller things — wildflowers and butterflies and fungi, learning as I go.

“I believe a lot of people have found that a locked-down life has given them a much greater appreciation of the natural world.”

Truth.

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