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What Sound does a Baby Elephant Make?

Interesting and worthwhile opportunities to get to know big game animals abound just on the outskirts of Nairobi. We had visited Kenya in 2007 and enjoyed the Masai Mara, Samburu, and Lake Nakuru. Just over a year later we were passing through Kenya on the way to the Seychelle Islands and took advantage to visit some friends. We were only off the plane for two hours before we found ourselves at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and the AFEW Giraffe Center and Valentina was eye to eye with both baby elephants and full-grown giraffes.

These days you don't have to even leave the capital of Kenya before starting your safari. There are some interesting and worthwhile opportunities to get to know big game animals just on the outskirts of Nairobi. We had visited Kenya in 2007 and enjoyed the Masai Mara, Samburu, and Lake Nakuru. Just over a year later we were passing through Kenya on the way to the Seychelle Islands and took advantage to visit some friends. We were only off the plane for two hours before we found ourselves at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant and rhino orphanage, visiting the baby elephants. The reserve is open for about an hour every day, so the elephants can live unhassled lives the rest of the day. As the crowd gathered, the caretakers led out a small herd of baby elephants, some only months old. Valentina's mouth opened as she watched them bathe themselves in dust, roll in the mud, and eat some of the foliage that had been gathered for them. She was six months old at the time, the same age as the smallest of the elephants, who outweighed her by an order of magnitude.

"What sound do baby elephants make?" we asked her, and eyes wide, she responded, "phbhbhbhbhbhhbhb", channeling, as far as I could tell, Bill the Cat. She repeated the raspberry a couple times, in case the baby elephants might answer her.

The Wildlife trust is a pretty amazing place, and the caretakers there are now the "word's experts on hand-rearing baby elephants, sometimes from birth, using a special milk formula for the youngest infants and assigning keepers to individual 24-hour guardianship of their charges..." according to Richard Trillo.

We stopped by the AFEW Giraffe Center as well before moving onward. Run by the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, the center gets credit for bolstering the population of the endangered Rothschild's Giraffe from its original, dwindling population. The giraffe on display was doing a good business eating food pellets from a fawning audience, but the real fun for Valentina was watching from the second story wooden balcony, which put her at eye level with the enormous creatures. Watching it maneuver its long neck from that altitude was like watching a construction boom crane swinging over the city skyline, except fuzzier. She was suitably impressed!

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