Elephants on the edge
In northern Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, elephants once starved and parched by drought now graze in knee-high grass. The rains that began in late 2023 transformed the landscape into a lush plain of acacia and tangled vegetation.
“These were salad days for the Samburu elephants,” writes journalist Hillary Rosner in ROAM: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World, published by Patagonia. Her visit to the reserve early in 2024 captures both the beauty of recovery and the fragility of coexistence in a country racing toward modernity.
From a field camp beside the Ewaso Ng’iro River, researchers with Save the Elephants have tracked hundreds of individuals since 1997, fitting them with GPS collars that reveal “elephant highways” across northern Kenya. The data show how herds migrate in search of water and acacia seed pods, crossing communal grazing lands and private plots in intricate seasonal patterns. But those ancient corridors are fast disappearing. As Rosner observes, “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.”
Kenya’s push to achieve middle-income status by 2030 hinges on vast infrastructure projects: railways, highways, and new towns springing up along transport routes. The Standard Gauge Railway—funded by China’s Belt and Road Initiative—has already bisected two national parks. The next wave of expressways and private land conversions threatens to wall off the remaining migration routes entirely.
Rosner’s account centers on one such bottleneck near the settlement of Oldonyiro, where GPS maps show the animals’ meandering tracks condensing into a single line—a narrow, perilous passage through encroaching development. Conservationist Benjamin Loloju, a local Samburu who earned an “elephant scholarship” from Save the Elephants, works with communities to mark and preserve corridors before they vanish. Yet even he admits, “We already think maybe we have been late for Oldonyiro.”
The elephants adapt, forging new routes where they can, but each fence and erosion gully narrows their options. Rosner’s narrative makes plain what data alone cannot: that Kenya’s test of progress is not only economic. The country’s future—and that of its elephants—depends on whether it can build prosperity without severing the ancient paths that bind the wild to the human world.