A routine aerial surveillance flight over the western part of Chad’s Zakouma National Park has uncovered the deaths of two female elephants and their calves in what officials say is the first poaching incident there in more than three years.
The loss of any elephants in Zakouma, a 1,158-square-mile preserve in southern Chad not far from the border with Sudan and the Central African Republic, is particularly worrying because the park’s population—ravaged by poaching in the first decade of the 2000s, when the numbers fell from about 4,000 in 2006 to some 450 today—had finally stabilized.
After more than four years with almost no births—a sure sign of herd stress—babies are again being born in Zakouma, as Bryan Christy and photographer Brent Stirton highlighted in the September 2015 cover story of National Geographic.
The incident came to light on August 11, when a pilot doing a routine surveillance flight chanced upon a herd of 30 elephants, massed in a defensive position, and spotted two men and their horses nearby.
According to African Parks, the organization that manages the park with the Chadian government, an anti-poaching patrol of park rangers was sent to the area immediately.
By the time the team arrived, the men had vanished, leaving behind the carcasses of two adult females, one with her tusks removed.
Two calves, orphaned by the killings, were nearby. The patrol flew the younger one, likely less than two months old, to park headquarters. Staff hand-fed the baby, but the trauma apparently was too great, and he died.
The other calf had moved off before it could be rescued and is presumed to have died, being still too young to survive on its own.
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