Kenya mounts a game plan to cut elephant counts

Kenya's elephant population bottomed out at about 16,000 in 1989, when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species imposed a ban on selling ivory. Since then, the number of elephants in Kenya has almost doubled.

Meanwhile, the number of people in Kenya has swollen by some 9 million to 30 million people. With poaching all but eliminated, wildlife experts say the biggest threat to elephants is conflict with farmers.

During the heyday of poaching, elephants tended to stay in protected areas. But that has changed, creating another source of conflict with humans, explains Omondi. "Elephants are feeling much more secure now, and are trying to re-establish their old ranges. We are seeing them in places where we haven't seen them for 15 years." In August, game wardens had to chase away an elephant that had wandered into a suburb of Nairobi.

Shimba Hills was once a flashpoint for such conflict. The park's elephants migrated into an adjacent area called Mwaluganje, which had been settled by members of the Digo and Duruma communities.

"People were being killed and their crops were being destroyed," says Mr. Litoroh, the research scientist. "They were not harvesting much because of the elephants. People couldn't venture out because of the threat from the elephants."

"They came in and swept through, they felled all the productive trees we had, " recalls Abdalla Mwakanzere, who grew up in Mwaluganje. "When they invaded the farms, they even started killing people."

Rather than try to fight the elephants, community leaders decided, instead, to try to profit from them. They moved off the land and collaborated with KWS to create a community-owned elephant sanctuary. Now they charge admission, and the 400 former landowners share regular dividends.

Mr. Mwakanzere, now a sanctuary guide, says people spend the money on things like school fees. "When they get the dividend, educating their children becomes much easier."

Despite the sanctuary's creation, Shimba Hills still has too many elephants. Even the contraception project - if it works - will merely stabilize the population.

The remaining solution is translocation - the difficult, expensive, and sometimes dangerous job of moving elephants to a place that can support them.

A game warden shoots a tranquilizer gun from a helicopter, dozens of workers secure each sedated elephant, and a seven-ton truck - named Hannibal - lifts each tranquilized animal onto a regular truck for transport.

KWS needs to move about 200 elephants from Shimba Hills and stabilize the remainder for the park to be sustainable, says Omondi. Translocation on that scale would cost about $500,000, and it won't happen unless donors provide the funding.

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