Love, Life, and Elephants

by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

  Gregory quickly became a favourite with the workforce, squawking happily as people waved at him or shouted hello as he flew overhead. If you hadn’t seen him in the week, you could be sure to catch him on Friday afternoons as the workmen and rangers gathered at the office to collect their wages. Pay day was his favourite time of the week, and trying to outwit him proved especially challenging. In order to prevent him getting in to wreak havoc on the notes and coins as they were being neatly laid out for distribution, the doors and windows had to remain firmly shut. But this didn’t deter Gregory one bit. He just waited patiently with the long queue that gathered outside, fluttering down on people’s heads and shoulders in the hope they would carry him in. Although everyone had instructions to open the door just enough to be able to squeeze through and immediately close it behind them, at some point in the procedure Gregory usually managed to slip in, swoop down, grab a note or two in his beak and fly round and round the office in great triumph. This always triggered an amused ground stampede, with everyone watching where the note might land, so that it could be recovered.

  I was aware that Gregory had missed out on picking up essential skills, despite the great pains that he took in the manufacture of his architecturally sophisticated nests. He needed to learn by example, so having found an old weaver nest in a deserted colony, we placed it in a jacaranda tree on our lawn. When Gregory spotted it, he was beside himself with excitement, cackling delightedly, flying around it, sitting inside it to test it for comfort and rearranging its outer edges. We felt sure he was going to pick up some tips as to how a nest should look, but it soon became apparent that his imagination had been fired not by the construction of the nest, but by the materials that had been used to make it. Within a few minutes, he took to dismantling it, extracting thorns and twigs to carry off to one of his own contraptions.

  I was always aware that I could not guarantee Gregory’s safety, and during his first few weeks in Voi he had had some valuable lessons in survival, twice narrowly escaping the claws of a raptor by diving into a bush in the nick of time. When I went to retrieve him, he was trembling violently; soon after he began to take note of the alarm calls of other birds, and at the first hint of danger sought shelter in the house or thick vegetation. I knew he was safe at night because he slept in the box on our windowsill. However, I was alarmed when from one day to the next he took to sleeping outside on the ground in a clump of dried grass at the back of the house, tucking his head into his wing, totally exposed to passing snakes, genets, even Old Spice, who was still paying us periodic nocturnal visits. We decided the only thing to do was to carry him back to his box in the bedroom, and as he didn’t seem to mind, it became a daily ritual to actually physically put him to bed, to bring him in from the ground to his box. It puzzled us why he behaved in this eccentric un-birdlike way, but then Gregory Peck was no ordinary buffalo weaver and perhaps we were to blame, as we had not provided a twig for him to perch on, which meant he slept on the bottom of his box.

  Undoubtedly, Gregory’s greatest charm lay in his curiosity for the world around him. He did not, though, like being laughed at by humans, most of whom would indeed laugh the moment they saw him. Gregory was on to this, and whenever we were greeting a visitor at the verandah steps – and there were several each week – he would arrive to give them the once-over, positioning himself opposite with his head held high, looking down his beak, fixing them with a supercilious stare. As – on cue – they laughed, he would give an outraged squawk, rumple his feathers and fly on to the visitor’s head. The harder they tried to dislodge him, the more determined he was to stay and let them know just who was boss.

  I will never forget the day when the concrete mixer – home then to one of Gregory’s all-time favourite nests – had to move from the workshop area to the construction site of the new ranger quarters down near the main entrance gate. As he watched it being transported, you could almost hear his brain ticking and I wondered what he was going to do about it. As soon as it was cranked up at its new location, Gregory cocked his head to one side, listened carefully and flew off to find it. And later that afternoon, just as I was packing up after a day in the office, he returned on the lorry bringing the workmen back, sitting cheerfully on the cab, fluttering to keep his balance as it bounced over bumps in the road. Incredibly, he soon learned that if he arrived at the workshop promptly by seven in the morning, he could hitch a ride on the truck that took the staff to the site; if he arrived late and missed the lift, he simply took to the air and got there himself. Usually he returned with the workers for the lunch break, covered in cement dust and looking thoroughly exhausted, but at the sound of the two o’clock bell, he would be off again. I was astounded at how much understanding went on in his bird brain, and I well remember a visiting scientist scoffing at me when I remarked on this. ‘But, Daphne,’ he said, ‘how can a brain the size of a pea be capable of any thought at all? Where do you think the phrase “bird brain” comes from, eh?’ Like David, I was rapidly losing confidence with the supposed infallibility of science.

  Now that Gregory was living with us, word soon got around and I seemed to acquire a strange assortment of other little feathered orphans: Oliver Twist, a baby swift who had fallen out of his nest at the railway station, was reared successfully and launched from the roof of the house never to be seen again; Abdul, a baby bulbul whose end was not so fortunate, for on his maiden flight he was intercepted by a goshawk; Puffin, a sweet little puff-backed shrike who in his early life would only take food from me; and not forgetting Red Head, a red-headed weaver who had been a garden resident since 1959. He had a series of nests in the large melia tree on the lawn, the newest and best always reserved for himself, an inferior one for his wife and many in disrepair that were occupied by pairs of chattering sparrows. Mrs Red Head was a dainty greyish bird with an attractive red bar on each wing and appeared to be ruled with a rod of iron by her husband. Although she took a keen interest in each new home, she was forbidden to interfere with the construction in any way, and if, in her enthusiasm, she happened to approach too close while Mr Red Head was busy working on it, he angrily chased her off. However, as soon as his back was turned, she never missed an opportunity to dart in and take a quick look around. She was allowed to lay eggs in the more up-market of the nests, and as soon as their young hatchlings appeared, both parents had their work cut out. Several little gaping mouths appeared expectantly, several times a day, and if we tapped the side of the nest, we could induce the same result. Surprisingly, throughout the years, we never saw a Red Head offspring in the garden once they left the nest. One day they simply vanished and Mr and Mrs Red Head began all over again.

  It was no wonder we shared our garden with so many different feathered and furred wild animals. Over time, David had transformed it into a colourful tropical paradise, with paths of lawn winding through a profusion of flowerbeds; a lilac-mauve jacaranda tree towered over the rustic birdbath surrounded by blossoms, and a carefully constructed tiny artificial stream meandered down a slope, tumbling into a beautiful lily pond where veil-tailed goldfish darted beneath blue and pink water-lilies. Rustic benches bordered the lily pond and speakers in a nearby tree provided music as we relaxed outdoors in the cool of the evening. The heady, sweet scent of the ylang-ylang, with its yellow and green star-shaped flowers, permeated the night and the bright red brilliance of the lipstick shrub, bixa, added yet more colour. Our garden was unexpectedly cool in a setting that was harsh, arid and hot. Here, there seemed to be a truce between man and animal, many wild creatures shedding their inherent fear of humans to venture into our garden. During the day you could see wild dikdiks strolling around the flowerbeds, and a flock of powder-blue-and-white-striped breasted vulturine guinea fowl that had multiplied to number over 100 and were as tame as domestic chickens. Ground squirrels, tree squirrels and magnificent orange-headed agama lizards were all diurnal garden residents. Then in the darkness a host of larger animals ventured in, including an old bull giraffe who came r
egularly to prune the tree on our lawn with loud chomping sounds that interrupted our sleep, as well as several old buffaloes who came to crop the grass. Daylight hours were filled with birdsong, while the nights were punctuated by the roaring of lions, the guttural ‘sawing’ of a leopard and the eerie howl of hyenas. There were times when Jill’s sleepy voice piped up from her bedroom, saying, ‘Please chase those lions away, I can’t get to sleep.’ The music of an African night was as commonplace to my daughter as the sound of traffic to a city-dweller.

  After the dry season of 1962, when rain had come and relieved us from the debilitating heat of the previous months, Old Spice and Gregory Peck finally left us for good. I was confident that Old Spice, now grown, would fend for himself, but I have been haunted ever since about what might have happened to Gregory. He was seen by one of the rangers, leaving the Park at dusk on the shoulder of a visitor on a day when David and I had been delayed in Mombasa. Returning after dark, I had gone to collect him from his usual sitting place in the grass at the back of the house, but he was nowhere to be found, and nor did the days that followed bring any sign of his return. Eventually, after tears and real anguish, we accepted that he was gone, and then gone for good, grateful for the pure joy he had brought us during his one year of life and the lessons he taught us about ‘bird brains’ the size of a pea. I will always remember fondly his antics and quite dazzling abilities.

  Towards the end of 1962 I fell pregnant and I knew at once exactly where and when my baby had been conceived – during a safari on the southern side of the Galana River, one stormy evening as thunder rolled across the sky and flashes of forked lightning lit up the inside of our tent. I was initially surprised to feel nauseous and tired, but as soon as my pregnancy was confirmed, I was delighted. I had longed to have David’s child for some time, but when I had broached the subject he had not been keen – we already had three children between us and he told me candidly that he didn’t want to ‘share me’ with anyone else. When David and his ex-wife Diana had separated, their daughter Valerie had been only six and their son Kenneth just three. When she remarried, Diana, her new husband and the children had moved from Kenya to South Africa and this had been very painful for David. Unlike Bill and me, the divorce of David and Diana had been acrimonious and he found it uncomfortable even to speak about it. I knew that he was not eager to start another family, so I had to pick my moment carefully to tell him our news.

  This was, for the white settler community, a particularly unstable time. As 1962 drew to a close, we knew that Kenya would be granted self-government from Britain in June 1963, followed by full independence in December. Not only did we fear Jomo Kenyatta, the man who was bound to head an independent new African government, but we also worried that Tsavo would be taken over both in terms of the land and the running of the Park. No one doubted that all over Africa, posts held by ‘foreigners’ would be subjected to rapid ‘Africanization’. The Nairobi British High Commission made it crystal-clear to us that should we ever relinquish our British passports to take on Kenyan identity, we would never be considered British again. Still proud of our English ancestry, we were not prepared to change our identity simply for reasons of expediency. I had always had a British passport, having had grandparents born in Britain. It all seemed grossly unfair: anyone living in Kenya who had been born in Britain, or who had parents born in Britain, could retain their British nationality, and although no blood other than English, Scottish and Welsh flowed through my veins, since neither my parents nor myself had been born in Britain, we – the people who had the deepest roots in Africa and had sacrificed so much to support the famous British Empire – suddenly found ourselves in danger of being cast as aliens.

  David had recently experienced huge difficulty in renewing his British passport. Despite having been born in Alexandria because his father had been dispatched there by the British during the First World War; despite being the product of two very English parents only born in India because in those days India was British and the jewel in the crown of Britain’s far-flung Empire; despite his birth having been registered at the British Consulate in Egypt to establish the fact that he was British, nothing he presented was enough to satisfy the British High Commission that he was, indeed, British. In fact, the official there suggested that David should instead be seeking a passport at the Indian High Commission, but stopped short when David said quietly, ‘There was no question about me not being British when the Second World War broke out and I was called up to fight for your bloody country.’ Eventually David had to provide documentary proof – at great cost, from the archives at Somerset House in London – not only that his parents were legally married in order to produce him but that his English-born grandparents had also been legally married in order to produce them!

  With the Mau Mau insurgency of the mid 1950s still fresh in our minds, many people we knew felt it unwise to remain in Kenya on the cusp of independence and moved to Rhodesia, South Africa, Australia, Canada or back to Britain. All Government servants, including our colleagues serving with the Game Department, could expect generous compensation from the British Government for any loss of career should they find themselves ‘Africanized’, and were to enjoy an indexed pension as well. But the same benefits were not extended to those of us serving with what was by then the Royal National Parks Service, because the institution did not fall under the Government’s remit but instead under an Independent Board of Trustees. It had been set up in this way to safeguard the country’s wild heritage from the plunder of political expediency, and so it happened that those few dedicated men who had transformed the National Parks from virgin bush into what, at this point in time, were acknowledged as the finest Parks in Africa, found themselves penalized.

  Understandably, David was feeling pretty insecure, and a poaching incident that took place around this time served to highlight just how unsettled things were becoming. A Field Force patrol came across a gang of poachers hunting with dogs in the Park near Maktau in Tsavo West, and in an ambush succeeded in arresting one man. Two others escaped towards a railway encampment, pursued by the rangers, who had left one of their men to guard the prisoner. Emboldened, the captured poacher attempted to wrest the rifle from the ranger, who, fearing himself being over-powered during the ensuing struggle, pulled the trigger in self-defence and shot his assailant dead. Almost at once, a hostile crowd of railway workers armed with sticks, clubs and metal bars surrounded the ranger. Thinking quickly, he fired shots into the air, a signal to his colleagues, who came hurrying back to contain the angry crowd, and soon David, accompanied by a police officer, arrived on the scene, having received a call for help from the patrol. As they drew up in David’s car, the crowd surged forward, hostile and angry. David stepped out of the car and walked through the crowd to the dead poacher. At cries of ‘Bwana Saa Nane’ – the affectionate nickname of ‘Mr Two O’Clock’ that David had acquired among the locals, since he took his lunch break every day at that time – the people fell silent, David’s name and reputation by now respected among all the tribes that bordered Tsavo. But then a chilling voice penetrated the silence – ‘Wait until Uhuru – we will kill them all!’ ‘Freedom’ or independence was not that far off, and following the events of the Mau Mau insurgency, those words did not go unheeded.

  This incident shook me as I remembered how lucky I had been to survive the ambush by the Mau Mau when I was pregnant with Jill. Now, I was about to announce my pregnancy at a time of imminent upheaval, news that I knew would not be received lightly. When I eventually plucked up the courage to tell him, I was mightily relieved that, having recovered from the shock, David held me close, murmuring, not with a great deal of conviction, that he was delighted! Coincidentally, another baby had come into our lives during the safari on which I had conceived – a tiny newborn zebra foal whose mother had been killed by a lion and who in her distress had attached herself to the car as we passed by. This new zebra orphan became known as ‘Huppety’ and was a beautiful little creatur
e with perfect markings, a soft bushy tail and the face of a thoroughbred. She loved being groomed as well as taking evening exercises, galloping, bucking and kicking joyfully around the garden. When she tired, I would lead her back to the new nursery stables at the side of the house and try to entice her into bed. This demanded a lot of time and patience, for just as success seemed within reach, she would break back and gallop off down the hill again, so that I was usually the more exhausted of us, something exacerbated by my condition.

  Like Gregory, Huppety became attached to me from the moment we found her. Back at home, she would often try to follow me around the house, leaping wildly and lashing out in terror when her hooves slid on the polished concrete floor. When it was becoming increasingly impossible to get on with my daily routine, I came up with the ingenious idea of hanging one of my dresses across a branch of our jacaranda tree and covering Huppety’s head with it while I made off. As long as I was hidden from view by the time she freed herself from the dress, she settled down next to it quite happily. As time went on, she became more problematic, especially when, having been weaned from the bottle, she took to sampling other things, particularly the washing on the line at the back of the house. As soon as it was pegged out, she would gallop over and start working her way through the garments and sheets, chewing them until they were reduced to mangled rags. Many smaller articles of clothing disappeared entirely, remnants turning up in her droppings some time later! We hoisted up the washing line with a bamboo pole, but this seemed to make her even more determined to outwit us and she took to creeping up behind us – ears back and teeth bared – dashing in to snatch an article before the washing line was up and out of reach. She also took to chewing the putty off windows and sneaking into David’s office to hoover up all the correspondence lying on his desk; even drinking sludge oil in the workshop with no apparent ill effect. But I forgave all this – most of the time – because when she nudged me with her nose and pressed her head against me in an affectionate embrace, my heart would melt and I enjoyed her all over again.