in the frame
Anticipation mounts as the baby elephants career across the landscape, causing plumes of red dust to dance off into the bush. Now they’re chasing each other around a clump of trees – trunk to tail. There’s a splishing and splashing of water as they career through a muddy pool. They’re like any other children on earth – only larger. A place of sun-baked earth, rust-red dust, scrubby thorn and vast, theatrical skies, Northern Kenya lies far from the well-beaten tourist track. Its empty vastness rolls away, unchecked, all the way to Lake Turkana and glances only fleetingly off the boundaries of the much more famous Samburu National Reserve. Not many visitors make it out here. At first glance, you could be forgiven for wondering why they come at all. The landscape appears inhospitable in the extreme. But for all this, Northern Kenya shelters a rare and magnificent wildlife cast. Here, in this desiccated region, roams the rare reticulated giraffe and the critically endangered Grevy’s zebra. Here too patrols the rare blue-shanked Somali ostrich and the bizarrely long-necked gerenuk. This is also an increasingly popular hideaway for the dangerously threatened wild dog or ‘painted wolf’. And finally, the wild reaches of the land once known romantically as ‘the Northern Frontier District’ provides sanctuary for one of the largest and most nomadic elephant populations in Kenya.
Top: Samburu warriors enjoy the spectacle of feeding time at the sanctuary Above: The conservancy wardens stand ready with milk bottles in hand Right page center: Reteti is also home to an orphaned baby rhino
14 WHY I LOVE KENYA March-April 2018
Due to the paucity of food and water, the elephants are always on the move. Their ceaseless wanderings take them from the chilly moorlands bordering Mount Kenya to the volcanic uplands of Marsabit. Along the way, they pass through parchment-dry acacia scrub and bone-dry river gullies before eventually reaching the dripping-wet, mist-wreathed forests of the mountain ranges. It’s a journey of hundreds of kilometres, and it forces them to encounter hazards ranging from humans to fences, and from wells to roads. Inevitably there are mishaps along the way, and numerous baby elephants are left orphaned every year. These are the denizens of Reteti Elephant Sanctuary.