This month I want to share the wonderful book my reading club just finished: Love, Life, And Elephants: An African Love Story by renown conservationist Dame Daphne Sheldrick.

It begins with the less savory tale of Dame Sheldrick’s British colonialist family’s arrival in Africa. Born in Kenya in 1934, Daphne Jenkins grew up on a dairy farm near Nairobi where her involvement with wildlife began at age four when she adopted an orphaned baby bushbuck. It was then she learned an important lesson when her Bushy ran off to be with his own kind.

Daphne’s love of orphaned wildlife hit its pinnacle when she married the warden of Tasso East National Park, David Sheldrick. That small park comprises lush combination of open plains, broken bush, a forest, a river fringed with grasses, and foothills that host an amazing variety of wildlife—elephants, giraffes, rhinos, lions, bushbuck, and monkeys, just to name a few.

Then, starting in the 1970s, Daphne and her husband, noticed an increasing number of orphaned animals left by poachers, predators and periodic droughts. So they set to raising and rehabilitating these animals and returning them to the wild. The two soon learned that the most difficult orphaned babies to raise were elephants because they couldn’t tolerate cows milk. It was Daphne who discovered a mixture of human baby formula and coconut oil that provided the proper elephant nourishment.

The book is filled with happy and sad rescues—the loss of Daphne’s first attempt at saving a baby elephant named Aisha, and Daphne’s lifelong friendship with an elephant matriarch, Eleanor, a rescued orphan who went on to introduce other rescued elephants into her wild elephant family. Daphne rescued other orphans—rhinos, bush antelope, and even a tiny buffalo weaver bird named Gregory Peck.

Although Daphne died in 2018, her work continues through the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, https://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org, a four-star charity according to Charity Navigator.

My Muse demands that I adopt (at a distance J) one of these sweet babies! My little adoptee is Mokogodo! Video about Mokogodo’s rescue: https://youtu.be/ybZRhU3tRck

Sad update: Poor little Mokogodo didn’t survive. Still, I’m glad that she had time to love and be loved.