Word: tsavo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...storage room in Kenya's Tsavo National Park, where poaching has been rampant, bears witness to this carnage. Tiny bloodstained tusks from infant elephants fill an entire shelf. Each is the length of a candle. They come from three-four- and five-year-olds who fell before a rain of automatic gunfire. In a corner of the room, elephant tails, rancid and maggot infested, lie in a heap. Behind the building, skulls bleach in the sun. And just up a slope, an orphaned elephant greedily nurses on a bottle of formula and suckles at the fingers of its human keeper...
Accompanied by photographer William Campbell, Gup saw his first elephant in the wild in Kenya's Tsavo National Park. "We were lying on our bellies near a water hole, waiting, when suddenly there they were -- a herd of seven elephants approaching the water hole. The little ones were frolicking and gamboling about, some of them locking their tusks and pressing their heads against each other in a kind of reverse tug-of-war. A pretty good-size bull noticed us. His ears flared in alarm, and he looked very menacing." Gup and Campbell tensed, but the bull did not charge...
Bill Woodley killed his first elephant at 16. By 19 he had shot 150 tuskers and lived as a professional ivory hunter. Today, at 60, he is the elephant's staunchest protector, leading the desperate war against poachers in Kenya's Tsavo National Park. "They say once an elephant hunter, always an elephant hunter," says Woodley. "But I've spent the past 41 years hunting poachers." The difference, he observes wryly, is that "poachers shoot back...
...Tsavo, the country's largest wildlife reserve, was once the grandest elephant sanctuary in Kenya. Now it is a case study of what has gone wrong -- and how the elephant may yet be saved. Tsavo stretches over 8,000 sq. mi., an area the size of Israel. In the mid-1960s, 40,000 elephants thundered amid the scrub thorn, acacia and baobob trees. Last year's aerial survey spotted only 5,363 live elephants in and around the park, and 2,421 carcasses. The survivors are skittish creatures, often clustered in fear and quick to flee at the scent...
Years ago, Wakamba tribesmen poached in Tsavo, using arrows tipped with poison. Now Somali gangs, including many former soldiers, spray whole families of elephants with automatic-weapon fire. Not all Tsavo's poachers have been outsiders to the park. Some who are paid to protect the elephants -- wardens and rangers -- are also suspect. The evidence: Woodley and others have extracted .303-cal. bullets from carcasses. "The only people who use .303s are the rangers," he says. Numerous carcasses have been found near the rangers' headquarters. And when the park's patrol plane is grounded for inspection, the poachers quickly appear...