The Land Rover bounced down a yellow dirt track, carrying three khaki-clad European tourists streaked with sweat, exhilarated after an elephant-spotting expedition. By the roadside, farmers sitting on fallen tree trunks complained that a herd of elephants had broken through electric fences yet again, wreaking havoc among their plots of cassava and fruit trees.
”Since I planted my fields I haven’t tasted a single banana, because the elephants have eaten them all,” said Mohammed Gaphunze (25). ”They can strip a mango tree of all its fruit in one night. These wild animals will make people turn to stealing because we can’t get anything to eat.”
Once in danger of being wiped out by poachers, Kenya’s elephant population is now growing so fast that in places such as Shimba Hills, a national park near the Indian Ocean coast, the animals are increasingly coming into conflict with local subsistence farmers.
Now wildlife authorities, anxious to protect a lucrative source of tourist dollars, are planning their biggest-ever animal relocation to ease the tension. Starting on Thursday, Kenya Wildlife Service plans to round up 400 of the 700 elephants in Shimba Hills and transport the animals to Tsavo East, a much bigger park in southern Kenya.
Marksmen will fire tranquilliser darts at selected animals from a helicopter, before the elephants are secured and loaded into a giant steel crate for the 320km journey.
The strategy has been tried once before. In 1996, wildlife officials moved 30 bull elephants from Shimba Hills to parkland about 65km away. The disoriented animals trekked back towards the coast, eventually reaching another forest reserve further north.
This time, to lessen their sense of shock, animals will be transferred in family groups. The wildlife service hopes to track the relocated elephants using GPS collars, which will be fitted to the matriarchs who lead each family.
Rangers hope they will help to repopulate Tsavo East national park. In the 1960s, the elephant population numbered 40 000 — poaching has since slashed it to fewer than 7 000.
The operation, which will cost about $2,8-million, has been welcomed by villagers, who complain that elephants regularly stray from the park to raid their crops.
On Saturday night, Gaphunze was roused by fellow villagers’ cries to discover seven elephants crashing towards his vegetable plots. Lighting a fire of palm fronds, he grabbed a sling of plaited grass and started firing stones into the air to scare them off. His fields were spared, but his neighbour’s grove of coconut palms was uprooted.
”The elephants are coming out of the forest because there are many of them now,” said Gaphunze, a father of three. ”If you planted a crop, weeded it many times, then came back to find everything gone , how would you feel?”
The fence around Shimba Hills runs near the fields — villagers pointed to sections where the wooden poles had been knocked down and to elephant footprints and dung nearby. They also admitted, however, that local people sometimes vandalise the fence to enter the park and chop down trees for firewood.
Conservationists have expressed concern about Thursday’s operation to shift the elephants from the forested coastal reserve of Shimba Hills to the very different climate of Tsavo East, a dry expanse of scrubland,saying that it could be harmful.
Daphne Sheldrick, who runs the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, said: ”The enormous amount of money that has been set aside for the relocation of the elephants would be far better used to put up a proper barrier fence.
”Tsavo is a very dry area. I think it has about 10 inches of rainfall a year. Taking elephants from a lush environment like Shimba Hills and dumping them in Tsavo in the middle of the dry season, I think it’s madness.”
But the Kenya Wildlife Service argues that unless overcrowding is eased, elephants will continue to break down barriers. Officials say that the elephants’ traditional migration routes have been blocked by human settlements, reducing the range available to them, and forcing them to raid crops.
”Shimba Hills is like an island surrounded by people,” said Patrick Omondi, coordinator of the elephant programme. ”We constructed an electric fence around Shimba Hills, but elephants are very intelligent animals and they know their tusks do not conduct electricity. They’ve learned how to pull up the fence. The fence is not a permanent solution.”
The resurgence in Kenya’s elephant population follows decades in which the animals were nearly wiped out by ivory poaching.
In 1973, Kenya had an estimated elephant population of 167 000. But by the late 1980s, gangs of ivory hunters armed with automatic rifles had reduced the herds to about 16 000. Numbers have since recovered to around 32 000 after a crackdown on poaching, accompanied by a worldwide moratorium on the ivory trade.
But the growth in the elephant population has brought the animals into conflict with a growing human population which still depends chiefly on subsistence farming for survival.
Conservationists hope that the income from tourism will help local people see elephants as a resource rather than a rival. Alongside the national parks, there are now a number of community-run animal sanctuaries in Kenya.
One such scheme operates on land adjoining Shimba Hills. At the Mwaluganje elephant sanctuary more than 200 local farmers who gave up their fields to give the animals more room are paid an annual dividend from tourism receipts. – Guardian Unlimited Â