The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant and rhino orphanage inside the western end of Nairobi National Park, offers a wonderful opportunity to see the baby elephants being fed with milk from bottles and when they play with each other. The keepers will give you a lecture of each of them explaining their names and their life histories on how they were orphaned. It’s a great place to go and adopt a baby elephant.
The trust was run for many years by Dame Daphne Sheldrick in memory of her husband David Sheldrick, the founding warden of Tsavo National Park. Dame Daphne died in 2018, but the hand-rearing methods and substitute elephant milk formula that she developed over many years of trial and error will outlive her and are now being replicated across Africa.
During the hour-long open house, the elephant keepers bring their juvenile charges out to play for an hour between 11:00 and 12:00. After some ad hoc football games and mud baths, the elephants and their keepers come up to an informal rope barrier stretched along one side of the ‘playground’ from where you can easily take photos. Each keeper gives a short presentation to the visitors nearest to him, explaining how orphaned elephants need to be cared for. The youngest infants are assigned keepers for individual 24-hour guardianship, a responsibility that includes sleeping in their stables. Without the love of a surrogate family and plenty of stimulation, orphaned baby elephants fail to thrive: they can succumb to fatal infections when teething, and, even if they survive, can grow up disturbed and unhappy and badly prepared for reintroduction to the wild.
Giraffe Rothschild centre day tour is a brief day excursion from Nairobi to giraffe centre & giraffe manor Nairobi day trips-the only sanctuary for endangered Rothschild giraffes.
The Giraffe Centre in Nairobi is an amazing place to visit. It started as a rehabilitation project to rescue the Rothschild Giraffe. There were only 120 giraffes left in a ranch in Western Kenya when the Giraffe Center was founded.
The giraffe centre provides you with pellets that you can feed the giraffes by hand with. You can even give take photos while feeding the animals by your mouth and it seems like you are kissing the giraffe. That is a priceless photo opportunity to miss.
