r 
Joe Le Monmer 
KENYA 
tana R/^ 
Nairobi 
During dry seasons, elephants 
depend heavily on the Tana River for 
drinking water. Not all sections of 
the river are accessible to the 
elephants, however, as banks are 
commonly six to ten feel high. 
Sloping banks, lower left, are 
situated at scattered sites, and the 
elephants make extensive use of 
them to get to the river. Farms 
located along the paths leading to 
such drinking sites suffer the most 
damage from elephants raiding 
crops. Pastoralists of the lower 
Tana River also depend greatly on 
the flood plain when the region dries 
up because of a lack of rainfall. The 
river's course, below, is constantly 
changing, resulting in a mosaic of 
wet and dry habitats. 
Wolfgang Bayer 
James Allaway 
peak more times than expected, crops 
drown or wash away. However, the 
impact of wildlife damage is often 
magnified since the worst damage 
tends to occur at just those times when 
farmers have the fewest reserves to 
fall back on — late in long, dry periods 
when crops have been poor. 
Conversely, the main direct impact 
people have on the elephants is killing 
them. This killing is also often con- 
centrated near the flood plain. Tana 
elephants have long been hunted for 
ivory and, to a much lesser extent, 
for meat. The British colonial gov- 
ernment about the turn of the century 
found a thriving and well-established 
ivory trade, which has continued to 
the present. More recently, the Tana 
was renowned as a prime region for 
sport trophy elephant hunting, until 
the nationwide ban imposed on such 
hunting in 1973. 
In the early 1970s, however, ele- 
phant hunting escalated with a ten- 
to fifteen-fold leap in ivory prices from 
the fifteen to twenty shillings per 
pound level that had held for decades. 
(World ivory prices held relatively 
steady through the mid-1970s but 
jumped significantly again in 1978.) 
The style and the impact of hunting 
changed. Large, w'ell-armed, and well- 
supplied bands of hunters, many from 
outside the region, joined the tradi- 
tional long-bow and poisoned arrow 
hunters. A factor contributing further 
to the heavy impact of recent hunting 
may have been the dry weather during 
much of the early and mid-1970s, 
which forced the elephants to spend 
much time near the river. 
33 
