Happy Nice Mall

The elephant was alone and dehydrated when the villagers first found it. It was September 2017 and the motherless mammal wandering around Boromo in Burkina Faso was only 2 or 3 months old.

“It was tiny,” said Céline Sissler-Bienvenu, who is now the European disaster response and risk reduction senior program officer for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Ms Sissler-Bienvenu estimates that the elephant should have been discovered within a day or two of leaving its family. “He wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”

Many orphaned elephants fail to do this. But with the help of Boromo and the people around him, international environmentalists, and his best friend, the black-and-white sheep named Whisty, the grumpy elephant is now around 4 years old and thriving. Kids at a nearby school called her Nania or “will.”

Moving Nania from elephant baby to elephant childhood meant working day and night for the people involved. And Nania’s rescuers now face a new challenge: figuring out if they can be brought back to life by a herd of wild elephants.

There is something unique about this process for Nania. As DNA technology reunites human orphans with their biological families, similar tests this year revealed that Nania’s mother is likely still wandering around, and that one day Nania could join her original family, not just any wild elephant herd.

DNA analysis also showed that Nania and her relatives were forest elephants. For those working to save them, this project is more about securing the future of the species than rehabilitating a young forest elephant. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has recognized forest elephants as its own species, separate from Africa’s larger and more numerous savanna elephants. earlier this year. It has also declared them critically endangered.

“Each individual is really important because of their status in terms of how threatened these animals are,” said Ben Okita, co-chair of IUCN’s Nairobi-based African Elephants Expert Group. “Every individual is valued.”

When orphaned elephant calves are rescued, they are often found near a mother’s carcass. But in Nania’s case, no one knew about a murdered adult. Although the elephant mothers were extremely careful, Nania’s family outlived her for some reason—perhaps on a nightly river crossing where the little elephant couldn’t make it.

Villagers who found him in 2017 sought help from local wildlife officials, who brought the elephant to a corral outside their headquarters in Boromo. Locals pooled resources to buy milk for Nania. A pharmacy donated powdered baby food. But the young elephant’s appetite, unlike the money of the people around him, was bottomless. People needed help.

“They were desperate to know how to handle Nania,” said Ms. Sissler-Bienvenu. Wildlife officials in Boromo, a few hours southwest of Burkina Faso’s capital city of Ouagadougou, reached out to the International Fund for Animal Welfare for help, and the group took care of the elephant.

Rehabilitating a single orphaned elephant is a big undertaking. Young calves are dependent on milk for two or three years and need more time to learn skills and in some areas they are old enough to fend off lions.

“When you start rehabilitating elephants, in some places, you’re putting in 10 or 12 years of work,” said Katie Moore, vice president of animal rescue at the animal welfare fund.

But the organization has seen promising signs for Nania. He had remained physically healthy and did not appear to be depressed.

“We quickly decided, yes, we can attack this problem and find a way,” Ms Moore said.

Ms. Sissler-Bienvenu made an emergency grant to pay for the milk and then flew to Burkina Faso to meet Nania.

He found that the community had gathered around the elephant. Schoolchildren visited him every day, and Nania sometimes chased them, she wanted to play. He got used to the sounds of motorcycles, donkeys, and shouting people passing by. Sometimes he dived into the wildlife authority headquarters to find out where his milk was prepared.

“He very quickly became a kind of mascot,” said Ms. Sissler-Bienvenu.

But all that human attention wasn’t going to help Nania return to the wild. He needed a home where he 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 barn where he would stay at night and a large fenced pasture called boma.

His loyal friend Whisty also lives there, and Nania and the four guards who stay in pairs for a week each live there. Ms. Moore said that consistency is important. “The watchmen really serve as surrogate mothers and aunts to these young elephants. They are comforting.”

Two of the guards, Abdoulaye Sinou and Salif Sanogo, are former wildlife managers at the park who have been with Nania since the beginning. The other two, Idrissa Nignan and Soulayemane Bathiono, are former farmers. The IFAW team trained them to care for an elephant calf.

“They stepped in right away and didn’t hesitate to learn about the process,” Ms Moore said. “These guys are super dedicated caregivers.”

Inside video Made by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Mr. Sanogo is splashing with Nania in the water up to his waist while his sheep friend waits on the shore. “Where I am, he is always there,” she says in the video. “And wherever he is, I’m always there.”

Nania spends at least six to eight hours a day walking around the park with her caregivers. This helps him map the wilderness in his mind and learn where to find water and delicious fruit. Nania also enjoys bathing in water and mud. And he no longer needs milk bottles; Weaned for over a year.

That means it’s ready to start the process of joining a wild group. But there is no simple roadmap.

Ideally, a young elephant like Nania would meet wild elephants while walking outside, get comfortable with them, and eventually leave the boma altogether. “Elephants choose when to go,” said Ms. Moore.

Behavioral ecologist Shifra Goldenberg of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance said helping a lonely orphan survive and return to the wild could be important to endangered populations. However, Dr. Goldenberg said rearing by humans also carries costs for lone animals. “You meet their needs, but they don’t learn from animals of their own kind.”

Dr. Goldenberg is working with elephant conservation efforts in northern Kenya to monitor orphans reintroduced into the wild. He says it’s not always clear how successful a rehab and release is. For example, will the calf survive to adulthood? Does he know how to find food and avoid snakes? Will she give offspring years later?

But getting wild herds to adopt orphans is not a human invention, said Dr. goldenberg. Elephants do this naturally. In a 2009 paper, researchers analyzed the DNA of elephants in northern Kenya and found that herd members was not always relevant. Dr. Goldenberg said the elephants in about 20 percent of herds are “not actually relatives who behave exactly like family.”

“They can integrate with other families as long as the family is open to them,” he added.

Nania may have the chance to join her own family, not just any wild elephant family.

Only about 40 wild elephants pass through Deux Balés. The team from the International Fund for Animal Welfare thought that Nania’s family was probably among them. To find out, they started collecting samples from elephant dung piles in 2019. In October 2020, they sent 17 test tubes to the University of Washington in Seattle.

There, Sam Wasser, a conservation biologistanalyzes elephant DNA in his lab. Examples often come from ivory seizures. He and his colleagues sequence DNA from tiny bits of each female. Where boiled elephants live and chase ivory smugglers. Dr. Wasser said this can be heavy work. Using the same tools to potentially help a living elephant reunite with its family is “really a breath of fresh air,” he said.

The lab found a surprising result: One of the elephants sampled was not just a relative, it was almost certainly Nania’s mother.

“There’s no doubt we’ve found the family,” said Dr. wasser

Miss Sissler-Bienvenu was delighted. “We were expecting a match with relatives,” he said, but finding Nania’s mother was a dream come true. The elephant had left its dung within about 650 feet of Nania’s enclosure.

And, as DNA analysis shows Nania and her family are forest elephants, the discovery adds to the potential importance of bringing Nania back into the wild.

Ms. Moore said that saving a single animal could represent a huge investment of resources, but could also save a species.

“I can’t imagine not trying,” he said.

Dr. Okita said using DNA to search for an orphaned elephant’s family would be impractical in most cases. In a large park with thousands of elephants, you’ll be looking for a needle in a haystack made of dung. But he said attempting family reunification in Deux Balés, where very few elephants live, was “the perfect thing to do”.

Dr. Okita added that getting Nania back with her own mother could improve her chances of survival. Soon study showed that motherless elephants in wild herds were less likely to survive even if they were weaned.

But it won’t be easy. While human rescuers have returned calves to their herd after brief separations, Ms Moore said she knows of no instances of a mother and a calf reuniting, such as Nania, who had been separated for years.

When Nania first saw the wild elephants, she turned and fled.

On another occasion, Ms. Sissler-Bienvenu said that Nania and her caretakers had returned to the boma after dark and noticed wild elephants surrounding them. As the guards sought shelter, they heard Nania and the wild elephants trumpeting back and forth outside.

Ms Sissler-Bienvenu said that after the other animals had gone, Nania was sick with diarrhea that lasted for two days. It seemed like a physical reaction to the encounter.

“We don’t know what they said to each other,” said Miss Sissler-Bienvenu. “Maybe the wild elephants told him, ‘We don’t want you.’”

The hoped-for merger did not materialize in the first half of this year. Now, wild elephants have migrated from Deux Balés for the rainy season, which begins around June, and the window of opportunity has temporarily closed. When the rains end around October, maybe Nania – a little bigger and fatter, a little more confident – will be ready for the returning elephants.

Forest elephants live in smaller groups than savannah elephants, usually just a mother and her cubs. Groups at Deux Balés have maybe five or six animals in total. Nania’s caregivers cannot identify her family by sight. And it’s okay, said Mrs. Moore. If any wild group wishes to adopt an elephant calf, “This is a big win for him.”

If Nania joins a wild group, the international fund team plans to follow up and collect more fertilizer samples to make sure she’s safe and to find out if she’s found her mother after all.

No one can say whether the two will know each other after all this time. Dr. Goldenberg said elephants can recognize hundreds of individuals. When savanna elephants are reunited with their mates after a year or more, they react with extreme excitement: they sniff each other, urinate and defecate in greeting, and leak tear-mark-like secretions from glands near their temples.

Ms. Moore thinks that a scent, a hum, can lead to recognition among Nania and her family.

“What you’re really hoping for is some connections that it remembers when it finds the right flock,” he said. “And it just happens.”

When the calf is forever returned to the wild, Mrs Moore would love to see it with her relatives.

“I am a scientist by education,” he said, “but I do it because my heart is in it.”