What's in this issue:
- All Things Wild Turns 10!
- Rehabilitating Baby Elephants
- Wild and Free
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It's Time to Celebrate,
All Things Wild Turns 10!
It may be hard to believe, but All Things Wild Rehabilitation is celebrating our 10th anniversary this year. It's incredible to see how much we have grown. We started from humble beginnings, with a handful of volunteers treating orphaned and injured wildlife out of their homes. Through the support of our community, we have grown into a complete medical and husbandry facility with staff caring for thousands of animals each year.
This year, we invite you to come and celebrate with us, black and white skunk style, at our 10th Anniversary Black & White Ball held at 6 pm on October 29, 2022, in the beautiful Garey House in Georgetown. Come dressed to the nines and enjoy a wild evening filled with delicious food, good fun, special guests, and a look into what the future holds for All Things Wild.
Tickets to the ball are $150 per person and can be purchased from our website with all proceeds directly supporting All Things Wild. We only have a limited number of seats available at the venue, so reserve yours today.
It'll be a stinkin' good time!
Do you have a business that would like to be a sponsor? We have several opportunities available to be a part of our Black & White Ball. Visit our website for more details.
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REHABILITATING BABY ELEPHANTS
Last month, 15 intrepid travelers took the trip of a lifetime to Kenya in Eastern Africa. Among the group were several volunteers and supporters of All Things Wild. As devoted wildlife rehabilitators, we were thrilled to visit the Sheldrick elephant orphanage in Nairobi and the Voi Reintergration Unit in Tsavo National Park, a vast wilderness where orphaned elephant calves are raised and eventually returned the wild. After all, the elephant orphanage does the same thing as All Things Wild but on a much bigger scale! A newborn elephant weighs between 200-300 lbs.
The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (the Trust) was founded by Daphne Sheldrick in 1987 to honor her late husband and to continue her pioneering work in saving young elephants who lost their mothers. In the 35 years of its existence, the Trust has saved hundreds of baby elephants orphaned because of the death of the mother, usually due to ivory poaching, or because the baby was seriously injured and in need of medical intervention.
The rescue of an elephant calf begins when Sheldrick receives a call that a baby in trouble has been spotted. The Trust helicopter is dispatched with a team trained in elephant calf rescue. Usually, the young elephant has been without his mother for several days and is severely dehydrated from the lack of mother’s nourishing milk. The young elephant is carried to the helicopter and, while IV fluids are being administered, rushed to the orphanage in Nairobi where veterinarians work to save the baby’s life.
Once the young elephants are stable, they are moved into the main part of the orphanage. Although they spend most of each day in the forest of Nairobi National Park with their keepers, at night they each have a “bedroom” with a keeper assigned to sleep with the baby and to make sure he gets a bottle every three hours. In fact, the orphans receive a bottle every three hours for the first three years of their lives. We at All Things Wild think we are busy feeding orphaned baby mammals every 3-4 hours overnight, but our effort only lasts for a few weeks. Orphaned elephants receive a bottle every three hours around the clock for the first three years!
Below are pictures of Enkesha taken on an earlier trip to Kenya in December 2017. Her trunk was caught in an illegal trapper's wire snare and almost cut off. After hours of painstaking surgery, veterinarians were able to reattach Enkesha’s trunk only to have her systematically tear apart all the stitches. Today, Enkesha is a big girl of 7 and lives at the Sheldrick facility for special needs orphans in Umani Springs in Tsavo National Park. She still has a hole in her trunk.
 Enkesha is busy eating greenery, called browse, in her bedroom where she will sleep. Enkesha with her keeper who will stay with her overnight.
During our trip last month, we visited the orphanage early in the morning to find the baby elephants away in the forest. However, it was time for a bottle, and we watched the babies run in from the forest with trunks raised to grab a bottle of formula from the keepers.
 The babies love their bottles and are able to hold them with their trunks. The helicopter used by the Trust to rescue the orphans waits in the background. Kim loved mingling with the babies after they had finished their bottles.
After the bottles were finished, our group was allowed to walk among the young elephants. The keepers kept a close eye on us because the youngsters love to play shoving games, and people are not off limits!
But our education in elephant rehabilitation didn’t end at the orphanage in Nairobi. A few days later, we traveled by train to Voi in southeast Kenya where the Sheldrick Voi Reintegration Unit is located in Tsavo National Park. Here and at two other locations, the Trust operates facilities where the older babies go when they are ready to begin transitioning to the wild.
At the reintegration unit, older elephants who were once orphans but have joined herds in the wild are free to come into the camp to visit with the younger orphans. The older elephants never fail to miss the arrival of orphans in a specially designed truck from the nursery in Nairobi. Sometimes they will take the youngsters out to the wild for a sleepover bringing them back to the unit the next morning. Slowly, over a few years, the young orphans are introduced to the wild by their older mentors.
 Look how big these young elephants are compared to the babies at the Nairobi nursery. But they still love their bottles!
Our group watched while several young elephants came in for bottles only to return to browsing in the nearby forest. However, one young elephant, named Lemeki, stuck around, curious to meet the visiting humans.
. . . anyone who spends time with elephants knows: Their lives are dominated by smell. You don’t need to know about an elephant’s record-breaking catalog of 2,000 olfactory receptor genes, or the size of its olfactory bulb. Just watch the trunk. No other animal has a nose so mobile and conspicuous, and so no other animal is as easy to watch in the act of smelling. 1
 It was definitely mutual admiration between Ashlyn and Lemeki. Lemeki particularly loved Becky's hair and spent time sniffing her head.
Lemeki was particularly interested in smelling our breath and put her trunk on the face of everyone who would cooperate. Initially, the keepers were wary, but they soon realized that we weren’t afraid and were loving every minute of it. Regardless, they kept a careful eye on our interactions with Lemeki.
As we continued on our safari in Kenya, we saw many wondrous things. However, for many of us, the elephants were the highlight of the trip. We saw super tuskers in Tsavo National Park, those wild elephants with really long tusks, a sight that ivory poaching has all but eliminated. In Ol Pejeta Conservancy, the electric fence surrounding the camp was not working, and an elephant was peacefully feeding perhaps 10 feet behind our tent. In the Maasi Mara, we watched a touching scene when two massive bull elephants greeted each other with trunks intertwined, the elephant version of a hug. They had been friends when they were younger. We saw lots of baby elephants staying close to their moms, family groups of females led by a matriarch, and solitary bulls.
...animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature's fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world's most emotionally human land mammal.
― Daphne Sheldrick
Footnote 1: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong
For more information on Daphne Sheldrick and her work with orphaned baby elephants, read her autobiography, Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story.
To watch Enkesha’s Story on You Tube, click HERE.
To watch a You Tube video of Lemeki’s rescue, click HERE
To learn more about the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s work with orphaned elephants and perhaps to symbolically foster a baby elephant, click HERE.
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Wild and Free
The orphaned animals who came into All Things Wild earlier this year are now big and healthy and ready to return to the wild. At All Things Wild, release is our goal. We love returning wild animals to habitats where they will live out their lives as Nature intended. (Because of the current drought, we are careful to release only near a stable water source.) Here are some pictures of recent releases. We hope you enjoy seeing the once orphaned and injured animals returned to their home in the wild.
 Twelve young healthy raccoons, vaccinated against rabies and distemper, were released at a site on the San Gabriel River. The newly released raccoons headed straight for the water. A young opossum climbs her first tree in the wild. A great-horned owl, raised from a tiny baby, flies out over the San Gabriel. (The flying owl is upper center of the picture. Squirrels are released in specially made boxes where they have shelter and safety until they figure out how to survive in the wild. Young cottontail rabbits begin their life in the wild.
If you would like to be a release site for All Things Wild and have a stable source of water on your land, please email us at allthingswildrehab@gmail.com.
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