The elephant was alone and dehydrated when villagers
first found her. It was September 2017, and the motherless mammal wandering
near Boromo in Burkina Faso was only 2 or 3 months old.
اضافة اعلان
“She was tiny,” said Céline Sissler-Bienvenu, who is
currently the senior program officer for European disaster response and risk
reduction for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
The elephant must have
been discovered within a day or two of separating from her family,
Sissler-Bienvenu guesses. “She wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”
Many orphaned elephants don’t make it. But with the help of
people in and around Boromo, international conservationists and her best
friend, a black-and-white sheep named Whisty, the scrappy elephant is now about
4 years old and thriving. Children at a nearby school named her Nania, or
“will.”
Getting Nania from elephant infancy to elephant childhood
has meant round-the-clock work for the people involved. And Nania’s rescuers
now face a new challenge: figuring out whether she can be returned to life with
a wild herd of
elephants.
That process has a unique twist for Nania. Just as DNA
technology has reunited human orphans with their biological families, similar
testing this year revealed that Nania’s mother is probably still roaming
nearby, and that one day Nania might join not just any wild elephant herd, but
her original family.
The DNA analysis also showed that Nania and her relatives
are forest elephants. For those working to save them, this project is about
more than just rehabilitating one young forest elephant, but ensuring the
future of her species.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature
recognized forest elephants as their own species, separate from Africa’s larger
and more numerous savanna elephants, earlier this year. It also declared them
critically endangered.
“Because of the status of these animals in terms of how
threatened they are, each individual really matters,” said Ben Okita, a
co-chair of the IUCN’s African Elephants Specialist Group, who is based in
Nairobi. “Every individual is held dear.”
When orphaned elephant calves are rescued, they are usually
found near a mother’s carcass. In Nania’s case, though, no one knew of an adult
that had been killed. Although elephant mothers are extremely attentive,
Nania’s family left her behind for some reason — perhaps at a nighttime river
crossing that the tiny elephant couldn’t manage.
The villagers who found her in 2017 sought help from the
local wildlife authorities, who brought the elephant to a pen outside their
headquarters in Boromo. Locals pooled resources to buy milk for Nania. A
drugstore donated powdered infant formula. But the young elephant’s appetite,
unlike the funds of the humans around her, was bottomless. The humans needed
help.
“They were desperate to know how to handle Nania,”
Sissler-Bienvenu said. The wildlife authorities in Boromo, which is a few hours
southwest of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, reached out to the
International Fund for Animal Welfare for help, and the group took charge of
the elephant’s care.
Rehabilitating a single orphaned elephant is a major
undertaking. Young calves are dependent on milk for two or three years and need
even more time to learn skills and, in certain areas, grow big enough to fend
off lions.
“When you start to do elephant rehabilitation, in some
places you’re signing on for something that could be 10 or 12 years’ worth of
work,” said Katie Moore, deputy vice president for animal rescue at the animal
welfare fund.
The organization saw promising signs for Nania, though. She
had stayed physically healthy, and she didn’t seem depressed.
“We rapidly decided, yes, we can attack this problem and
find a way” to help the elephant return to the wild, Moore said.
Sissler-Bienvenu issued an emergency grant to pay for milk
and then flew to Burkina Faso to meet Nania.
She found that the community had rallied around the
elephant. Schoolchildren visited her every day, and Nania sometimes chased
after them, wanting to play. She got used to the sounds of passing motorcycles
and donkeys and shouting people.
She sometimes barged into the
wildlife authority headquarters to find where her milk was being prepared.
“She became, very quickly, a kind of mascot,”
Sissler-Bienvenu said.
But all that human attention wasn’t going to help Nania
return to the wild. She needed a home where she could learn to be an elephant.
In February 2019, Nania’s new residence was completed inside
Deux Balés, a nearby national park. It included a stable where she would stay
at night, and a large fenced pasture called a boma.
Her loyal friend Whisty also lives there, as do four keepers
who stay with Nania in pairs, a week at a time. This consistency is important,
Moore said. “Keepers really do serve as surrogate mothers and aunties to these
young elephants. They comfort them.”
Nania spends at least six to eight hours every day roaming
the park with her keepers. This helps her map the wilderness in her mind and
learn where to find water and tasty fruits. Nania also enjoys bathing in water
and mud.
And she no longer needs her bottles of milk; she’s been weaned for
over a year.
That means she’s ready to start the process of joining a
wild group. But there’s no simple road map.
Ideally, a young elephant like Nania meets wild elephants
while she’s out walking, becomes comfortable with them and eventually leaves
the boma for good. “The elephants choose when they go,” Moore said.
Helping a lone orphan survive and get back to the wild can
be important for endangered populations, said Shifra Goldenberg, a behavioral
ecologist with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. But being raised by humans
also carries costs for solo animals, Goldenberg said. “You’re meeting their
needs, but they’re not learning from animals of their species.”
Nania might have a chance to join not just any family of
wild elephants, but her own.
Only about 40 wild elephants pass through Deux Balés. The
team from the International Fund for Animal Welfare figured that Nania’s family
was probably among them.
To find out, in 2019 they began collecting samples
from heaps of elephant dung. They shipped 17 test tubes to the University of
Washington in Seattle in October 2020.
There, Sam Wasser, a conservation biologist, analyzes
elephant DNA in his lab. Usually, the samples come from ivory seizures. He and
his colleagues sequence the DNA from little pieces of each tusk to figure out
where the poached elephants lived and track the ivory traffickers.
It can be
heavy work, Wasser said. Using the same tools to potentially help a living
elephant reunite with her family “really is a breath of fresh air,” he said.
The lab found a startling result: One of the sampled
elephants was not just a relative, but almost definitely Nania’s mother.
“There’s no question that we found the family,” Wasser said.
Sissler-Bienvenu was elated. “We were expecting to have a
match with relatives,” she said, but finding Nania’s mother was a dream.
And because the DNA analysis showed that Nania and her
family are forest elephants, the discovery adds to the potential significance
of putting Nania back into the wild.
Moore said that while rescuing an individual animal might
represent a huge investment of resources, it could also save a species.
“I can’t imagine not trying,” she said.
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