"Paul, Drive out of here!!", Lisa whispered to the guide as she sunk into her seat in the Land-Rover. Less than 50 feet away an adult bull elephant in "musth", having warned us twice with a loud trumpet blast and mock charge, now had lowered his head and without a sound exploded into a full gallop towards us. An adult elephant covers an amazing amount of distance in a stride, I thought to myself as I scrambled down from the roof into my seat.

I was a bit distracted setting up the Earth Watch digital camera when the encounter began. While searching the thorny scrub for signs of lions from our nine seater open roof Land Rover, we stumbled upon a herd of 22 elephants calmly knocking over trees and munching clumps of grass. Our guides, Paul and Chui, did not carry guns and later explained in very strong terms that a guide with a gun shouldn't be trusted. One must know the behavior of the animals and how to change it without having to shoot the animal. As the elephant closed the distance Paul struck his machete against a metal pipe he had been concealing under the driver's seat. The loud sharp sound stopped the 5 tons of angry elephant in his tracks and he ran off into the trees. Our first of a handful of angry animal encounters averted.

Around the dinner table that night with the rest of the Earthwatch team we listened attentively as Paul humbly displayed his wildlife merit badges in the form of very vivid stories. With the loud buzzing of the insects in the background and a cold Tusker beer in front of us to wash down the dust of the day we hung on every word as Paul told the story of his journey into Tsavo East in 2001. Paul had been hired by the BBC to guide a film crew shooting a documentary on elephants in Tsavo. They encountered a budget safari van with 6 tourist from Germany and the guide, who Paul's instinct warned of inexperience. Paul and the BBC film crew pulled up along side and pointed out to the guide the moisture on the elephants temple (a glandular thing), indicating he was in musth and was very aggressive and dangerous. The oblivious German tourists clicked away with their cameras. Paul warned the guide again to leave but his advice was promptly dismissed. Paul told the guide in Swahili, "You are going to die. We are going to go over there (pointing in a direction) to film you because you are going to die!!" Paul and the film crew left and, as he predicted, the elephant, without the trumpet blast warning, charged the van. Standing up on it's hind legs pummeling the van into the ground until it and its occupants were no less than two foot high. All the tourists and the guide were killed and Paul and his crew filmed the entire event. Needless to say that footage didn't make it into the BBC documentary and no one took Paul up on his offer to view the footage.

We all swallowed hard and you could have heard a pin drop. We had been warned: elephants are dangerous animals and especially on the Taita and Rukinga ranches. The older elephants remember seeing family members and friends being killed by poachers in this area during the 1980's. This place escaped the paramilitary anti-poaching efforts of the Kenya Wildlife Service because it is privately owned land. The lions, zebra, and giraffe too have developed a sense that the area between Tsavo East and Tsavo West is more dangerous than the protected areas of the parks and adjust their behavior to more aggressive style to adapt to the threat.

The Taita and Rukinga Ranches are privately owned 170,000 acres of land occupying a space in the hook of the giant Tsavo National Parks which is shaped like a giant letter "J"...a 1.6 million acre "J". Since the time of it's creation in 1948 the Tsavo Parks, East and West, have been notoriously plagued with bands of Somali poachers who brutalized the elephant population for the want of ivory and other animals as a source of bush meat. In the early 70's the elephant population was estimated to be 42,000. Today, aided by the 1979 nation-wide ban on hunting in Kenya and the 1989 International trade ban on ivory, the elephant population has increased to 9,000 from a considerably lesser number. As recently as March of this year 10 elephants were slaughtered in Tsavo East for their ivory. Our research and attention to the lions was eclipsed by the presence of these angry elephants.

The lions ultimately proved more elusive than we had hoped. Using a 1 million candle power spotlight while sitting on the top of the Land Rover cruising the sandy tracks of the ranches roads and occasionally off road, we fried the retinas of many nocturnal animals trying to locate the lions. It was amazingly low tech search for animals but surprisingly effective in locating them in the thick scrub and acacia by spotting the reflection of the light off their retinas. We joked with other volunteers about the Earth Watch expedition into this same area five years from now titled: The Blind Animals of Tsavo. We were successful in taking census of the lions' prey: zebra, giraffe, buffalo, eland, lesser kudu, gazelle, onyx, impala, bush babies, the feared and dreaded dik-dik (actually a cute miniature dear-like creature) and of course those tasty humans in the green Land Rover. We learned that a secretary bird, a quite large bird, is called that because it stomps cobras and other snakes to death with it's long legs and feet somewhat resembling a secretary typing on a keyboard. On one night drive I spotted a cheetah crouching right next to the road and got so excited I scared him off as I whispered/screamed, "Simama, Paul, Simama!!" ("Stop" in Swahili). Unamused the cheetah stood up from his low crouch and just walked off. We spotted Genet cats, mongoose, aardwolves, bat-eared foxes, and several lions. We learned about the wait-a-bit tree whose thorns will strip your clothes off in a flash. The only leopard we encountered was the one that wandered into camp as we were sleeping but our Masai head of security, Joseph, effectively scared him off. One night on the way back to our tent we saw a scorpion the size of a lobster (that is the size of the lobster you get at Sizzler during langostino night).

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