- Years of elephant movement data reveal distinct routes the animals take to access food and water, but road building and new rail lines, towns, cities and fences are increasingly cutting off their ability to move across the landscape.
- In response, conservationists are working with communities across hundreds of miles of northern Kenya to delineate these corridors, so that any future development will protect their pathways, which are also dwindling due to severe erosion of some areas from heavy grazing followed by rain events.
- In an excerpt from her new book “ROAM: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World,” author Hillary Rosner discusses these issues and how local communities are partnering with NGOs to ensure the future free movement of these iconic animals.
The regularly used airstrip outside the town of Archers Post, in northern Kenya, was closed after being damaged in heavy rains, so my flight landed at an even tinier dirt airstrip on the other side of Samburu National Reserve. From there, the road headed south across community-owned grazing lands to the western gate of the reserve, along the Ewaso Ng’iro River. It was just a week into 2024, and January is normally the start of the dry season, but the rains still hadn’t fully subsided. The reserve, a protected area about the size of Washington, DC—part of a much larger swath of adjacent conservation lands—was a study in green, its plains and hillsides covered in a tangled tumult of vegetation.
Almost as soon as we crossed the reserve boundary, we were among elephants, ranging in size from months-old babies to small and spunky adolescents to towering matriarchs and giant bulls. They lumbered about on their baggy-skinned legs and round feet, they snoozed, they roughhoused, they nursed, they waded in the river, they doused themselves with dirt. In the midday heat, they stood in the shade of acacia trees and lazily plucked up wads of greenery with their trunks, then swung it up into their mouths. They were unbothered by the presence of the Land Cruiser I rode in; they wandered right up to the vehicle, some barely more than a trunk’s length away.
These were salad days for the Samburu elephants. It had been a long, hard, deadly two years of extreme drought, when starving animals succumbed in the desiccated landscape. Between 2021 and 2023, 1,260 elephants died in the broader Samburu-Laikipia region, at least 563 from “natural causes”—most likely hunger and thirst from the drought—and a good many of the rest at the hands of humans fed up with desperate animals crashing through fences and stealing the meager grasses that herders needed for their also-starving livestock. But the rains had finally come in November, and kept coming, and the region now was as verdant as anyone could remember seeing it for years. The elephants were fat and healthy, and it was magical to watch them enjoying a rare period of relatively easy living.
At a bend in the Ewaso, across from an old safari lodge destroyed in another flood and now given over to baboons, sits a small field camp where conservationists have been studying and helping protect elephants since 1997. Researchers there can identify more than 600 living elephants by sight, based in part on detailed notebooks containing sketches of the animals’ ears. They’ve given family groups thematic names — Flowers, Royals, Hawaiian Islands — to help keep track of the individuals within each group, recording each birth and death. And they’ve also been fitting elephants with GPS tracking collars, amassing three decades of movement data that helps inform conservation planning. At the field camp, wooden racks set between the river and the open-air dining area hold scores of used elephant collars, giant leather straps outfitted with rectangular boxes—a museum of GPS-collar design throughout the ages.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a Scottish zoologist, started Save the Elephants (STE) in 1993, after studying elephants in East Africa beginning in the 1960s. Much like Jane Goodall gave humans intimate access to the world of chimpanzee behavior and culture, Douglas-Hamilton did the same for elephants. He also brought the poaching crisis to the world’s attention and helped spur global ivory bans and conservation initiatives. In the 1970s, Douglas-Hamilton kept tabs on elephants from the air, piloting a tiny plane and, as several people who flew frequently with him recounted to me, often swooping down sharply and nauseatingly to follow a group of animals on the ground. These surveys laid the foundation for elephant movement data that showed just how crucial it was to protect the corridors. Later, Douglas-Hamilton pioneered the use of GPS tracking collars on elephants.
Years of elephant movement data shows distinct elephant highways, routes the animals have used throughout history to access food and water. Today, though, those routes are disappearing. By building roads and rail lines, putting towns and cities in the midst of elephant roads, and erecting fences that make it impossible for the animals to cross, humans are cutting off the elephants’ ability to move across the landscape. As these highly intelligent mammals follow their longstanding, culturally shared routes to reach the resources they need seasonally, they bump up against new infrastructure and, often, few desirable alternate pathways. This raises the likelihood of human-elephant conflict, which in Kenya has now become the largest cause of elephant deaths, just as the herds were finally recovering from years of a devastating poaching crisis—a “holocaust,” as Douglas-Hamilton has referred to it.
In northern Kenya, many of the elephants that graze in Samburu National Reserve are migrants. They follow the available food, moving between vast tracts of protected areas, often traveling hundreds of miles each way across community owned lands—the matrix—with some places intentionally set aside for livestock grazing and wildlife movement and others not. Samburu was lush when I turned up in January, but within weeks it would begin to dry out. Water levels would drop, nourishing food would be harder to find, and many elephants would begin to venture elsewhere. Hundreds of them would migrate west, making their way along various well-worn routes and then funneling through a narrow channel between steep hills, near the settlement of Oldonyiro, on their way to the plains of Laikipia. There, acacia trees would be dripping with the tasty, nutritious seed pods the elephants crave.
That area around Oldonyiro is a crucial link on the elephants’ journey. It’s also a study in just how quickly things in Kenya are changing, and what’s at stake.
Kenya is a country in rapid transformation. Under a program launched by then-president Mwai Kibaki in 2006, the country has been striving to become a middle-income economy by 2030. A central component of this plan, known as Kenya Vision 2030, has been infrastructure improvement—including a goal of paving 10,000 kilometers (more than 6,000 miles) of roads and modernizing the existing railway system, built by the colonizing British a century ago. Beginning in 2014, as an early initiative of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese government funded 472 kilometers (293 miles) of new train tracks, called the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), stretching from Nairobi southeast to Mombasa, on the coast. That train line cut the journey by rail from about twelve hours to four, but it also bisected two national parks with tracks. Next up is the expansion of the railway in the other direction, and the construction of a new six-lane expressway, parallel to the SGR, where a two-lane paved road currently moves roughly three-quarters of all goods imported to East Africa.
Where roads go, so do development and sprawl. Kenya sits at a crossroads, with one path leading to sustainable growth and the other to massive collapse of the country’s iconic wildlife populations.
Ensuring that those animals can safely cross the matrix is a daunting, essential conservation challenge, with implications far beyond the country’s borders. As one of the leading economies in Africa, Kenya is under scrutiny as a model for how to develop and raise living standards without sacrificing biodiversity. Getting it wrong could have wider, catastrophic, implications.
On a sunny afternoon, I set out for Oldonyiro—about four hours’ drive from Archers Post along narrow, rutted dirt paths—with Benjamin Loloju, who is Samburu and grew up herding goats in the surrounding lands. He told me he thought he was around thirty-two or thirty-three years old, but he didn’t know for sure since no one in his community recorded births. One of eleven children, he was the only member of his family to attend school; the literacy rate in the area still hovers around 30 percent. He excelled at school and ultimately earned an “elephant scholarship” from Save the Elephants, part of an initiative that helps fund schooling for children in pastoral communities coexisting with elephants. A new dirt road was under construction at the time, a big step forward for development. Roads meant more settlements, more permanent structures, and more potential for escalating human-wildlife conflict. Douglas-Hamilton wanted to work with the community to promote coexistence.
With funding, Loloju attended boarding school in Nairobi. “I could not believe it the first time I arrived in that city,” he recalled, laughing at the memory. He earned straight As and made the list of the top one hundred students in all of Kenya. He went on to study geospatial engineering at the University of Nairobi, and then earned a master’s degree in the UK. When I met him, he was beginning to think about PhD programs to study soil erosion, a particular problem in this region. Loloju built a home on a hill outside Oldonyiro, returning to his homeland to help create safe and sustainable pathways for elephants.
We bumped east across vast plains of communal grasslands, occasionally getting stuck in the sand crossing ravines or dry riverbeds. We skirted dramatic hills and rock formations where baboons scampered. We passed zebra and giraffes, tiny dik-diks skipping through the bush, grazing impalas, and the occasional temporary human settlement, or boma, with huts constructed of acacia wood. Every so often we passed a lone herder walking with his goats, or a child carrying containers to fetch water. But mostly we drove for hours across expansive landscapes with no permanent human structures. A few hours into our journey, we stopped where a trail crossed the road. Loloju hopped out to show us a square concrete marker placed in the dirt. “Livestock + Wildlife Corridor,” read a metal sign embedded in the concrete.
Based on the data from the GPS-collared elephants, Save the Elephants and Wyss Academy for Nature, a Swiss organization, have worked with communities across hundreds of miles of northern Kenya to delineate these corridors, so that any future development, should it occur, will protect at least this pathway for the animals. They have installed more than 200 markers in the ground, with community support. The corridor demarcation helps ensure a route for herders to move their livestock, as well as a route for wildlife. “This has been good,” Loloju said of the effort. “People, communities, have agreed to say, ‘Good, demarcate it.’” The group is now working to get these routes enshrined in national law, and also to extend them farther east and south, in Laikipia. But Oldonyiro represents the thorniest situation. “We already think maybe we have been late for Oldonyiro. We should have come ten years earlier,” Loloju lamented. “But now, this is the time.”
In the late afternoon, we came to an area of more concentrated settlement than we’d seen all day, with permanent structures—buildings made of cinderblocks and concrete— beginning to appear along the roadside. This was the edge of Oldonyiro. “It is such a tricky, tricky situation here,” Loloju said. “This is a really, really big lifeline corridor.” From Samburu to Laikipia, it’s essentially one big migration area for elephants, and so many other animals, that need to move with the seasons. “But here”—in Oldonyiro—“is the thread; here is the heart of it. If we close off here, then we will cut off those elephants moving, and other wildlife. We will cut off those movements. And for their survival—for their survival—it is so, so important to have this connection.” Without it, many more elephants could die from lack of food or at the hands of angry humans.
On a map of the elephants’ movement data, big spaghetti-like blobs of red lines, showing the paths of individual GPS-collared animals, indicate “relaxed” movements—elephants eating, drinking, frolicking, resting, maybe mating. They’re on their way someplace, but they aren’t in a crazy rush to get there. Imagine you’re on a long-distance drive, and this is where you stop for a leisurely lunch, spend the night, maybe visit a local attraction.
Right near the town of Oldonyiro, though, that spaghetti straightens into a single noodle. Here, the data makes clear, the elephants are not hanging out; they aren’t dawdling. They’re just trying to cross to the next safe space. This is where, on your road trip, you’ve reached an unpleasant stretch of highway, or maybe you’re just trying to power through and put the miles behind you.
On the same map, yellow circles indicate human settlements. The biggest cluster of these intersects with the elephants’ no-dawdling spaghetti strand exactly in the town of Oldonyiro. For centuries, perhaps millennia, elephants crossed the landscape here. But now it’s a newly bustling town center, with building after building rising up along the dirt road. An area composed previously of pastoralists’ bomas is morphing into a town. “All these are new,” Loloju said as we drove through the center of the development, where one-story concrete buildings—butcher shops, basic grocery stores, mobile phone kiosks—were under construction on both sides of the street.
He pointed out a handful of wooden structures that dated back to his childhood. Other than those few buildings, the rest were recent additions. “This expansion is heading that way,” he said, pointing south. “And it will go all the way to where I live, in the next very few years. Everything is new and they’re still building—and so the line is approaching the corridor that the elephants are using at the moment.”
Barred from their historic route because the new buildings now blocked their path, the elephants had forged a new route south of town. The latest map clearly showed their shifted movement. You could even see from the GPS tracks that elephants had tried to use their traditional route but hit fences or other development, made U-turns, searched for a way around. A few family groups had found this new southern route, and “everyone else I think will smell, and they know, this is now the route,” Loloju said.
“Elephants are very adaptive,” elephant biologist Lucy King, who grew up between Kenya, Somalia, and Lesotho, had told me before my trip. King works as director of STE’s Human-Elephant Coexistence Program and pioneered the use of “beehive fences” as a way to prevent elephants from raiding croplands in southern Kenya and elsewhere. Elephants want nothing to do with the bees, so putting hives on fences can help keep them away from crops. “They are quite capable of moving and changing where they walk, if they can find another route. They don’t mind being a bit flexible.” But there have to be available options.
As it turns out, the elephants’ new pathway south of town is also critically endangered. Two years earlier, the county completed a land conversion here, transitioning from community owned land to private title deeds. People now owned their individual lots—and many were building permanent structures and enclosing their property with wildlife-proof fencing, not unlike in the American West. “These elephants will come and say, my god, this fence was not here a month or two ago,” Loloju said.
We pulled over at a point where the elephant corridor crossed the road, and we strolled a hundred meters or so down the trail. Dried mounds of dung dotted the rust-colored dirt. “This is someone’s plot,” Loloju said of the ground we were standing on. “It’s just not built yet.” He pointed around us in various directions. “Here is someone’s plot, it’s a title deed for someone. On this other side, it’s a title deed. On this other side, it’s a title deed. So, in a few years on, all this could be built up.” Once that happened, the route would be completely cut off to elephants— unless Loloju and some local helpers could convince the landowners around the corridor to set aside narrow sections of their properties, just twenty or thirty yards, even, for wildlife—like a conservation easement. It’s unclear how far the animals might walk in a fenced-off corridor that narrow, but it represented the only option.
Across the road, we could see the future. The newly titled landowner there had already built a large home, surrounded by a six-foot-high wire fence. One section of fence was missing; elephants had knocked it down recently as they tried to follow the route they had taken just months earlier, and the owner had piled acacia branches to temporarily fill the gap. Loloju had been speaking to individual property owners—a meeting with several dozen of them was scheduled for the following month—and this owner had verbally committed to build his fence leaving thirty meters for elephants. But then he built the fence far closer to his property line. And because the fence now sat exactly in the path that the elephants had last walked, they had returned, come too close, and damaged it.
This wasn’t the only problem. Part of the reason the elephants had stayed so close to the fence line was that it represented the least dangerous avenue for travel. All across the area, giant erosion gullies, some large enough to drive a car through, are opening, spreading, and multiplying. It’s a wicked problem in which grazing patterns, climate change, past land-use mistakes, and sheer physics are combining into a quagmire—both literal and metaphorical. Livestock grazing removes vegetation, which loosens the soil—and then when the rains come, the pounding water erodes the bare dirt. “It starts like a little path,” Loloju said. “And over the years, it just expands.” With nothing to hold the soil in place, the gullies grow and grow. Many are far too wide now for a human to jump across, and more than six feet deep—large enough for baby elephants to fall into.
We walked for an hour across the plain, peering over the edge of gullies, trying to follow the elephants’ trail. Some gullies we could maneuver around, some we could hop over, some were so wide we had to scurry down one side and back up the other. It was hard to imagine a family of elephants making this journey; even harder to envision how they would make the trip if fences left only a narrow corridor and then that was swallowed by a sinkhole.
This wasn’t an abstract exercise of thinking about some hypothetical elephants or picturing a theoretical route. I had seen the exact individual elephants that would soon be heading this way—seen the adults close ranks to keep babies safe in their midst, watched one frisky young sibling try to wake his sleepy brother from a nap, seen their wrinkles and eyelashes and how the dirt clung to their tusks. These were the elephants that, in the coming weeks or months, would arrive in this very spot, needing only to safely pass through on their way to the next place where they could have plentiful food.
Hillary Rosner has reported on environmental issues for National Geographic, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Audubon and many others. This essay is excerpted from her new book published by Patagonia, “ROAM: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World,” in which she challenges readers to rethink our place in the world, and makes the case for treating wildlife as neighbors.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: A conversation about how to help wildlife migrate around human infrastructure with Ben Goldfarb, author of the award-winning book “Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet,” listen here:
See related coverage of wildlife migration, movement and corridors:
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