ORPHANAGE FOR ELEPHANTS....

Conservationists are warning of a new threat to Africa's elephant population - after a surge in ivory poaching.

The illegal trade has been boosted by growing demand from China, and renewed conflict in Somalia - with poachers selling ivory to buy guns. The result is an increase in orphaned baby elephants.

But as Sky News' Africa Correspondent Emma Hurd reports, a British charity based in Kenya is doing its best to help them...

At the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, just outside Nairobi, four tiny elephant calves snuggle up to their keepers, relying on them for food, warmth and reassurance - everything they would have received from their mothers in the wild.

The "babies", as they're known at the orphanage, were each rescued from certain death.


The 'babies' are fed milk Lempaute, the youngest and the boldest, was found wandering alone in Northern Kenya, after becoming separated from her herd and Shimba was discovered clinging to his dead mother, who'd been killed by poachers.

Galdessa was found in the generator room of a safari lodge, no one knows how he got there and Lesanju, was hauled out of a deep well by local tribesman.

The children of the tribe cut her ears before she was rescued, but at the orphanage she's learned to trust humans again.

"I see them as my children," Edwin Lusichi, the head keeper at the orphanage told me, as the two-month-old calves played around his feet.

"When I came here I was afraid of elephants, but now I know they're friendly and kind."

Edwin, like most of the young Kenyan men who work here, had never seen an elephant before he was employed by the trust, but now he and the other keepers have learned to think like them.


Snooze: With their carers At feeding time they hang blankets from trees so the calves can nuzzle them with trunks as they slurp from the bottles.

In the wild, their trunks would be resting against their mother's hide. At night, the keepers sleep alongside the babies, ready to provide their three hourly feeds.

The trust takes in new orphans almost every month - a steady stream of victims of the clash between wildlife and humans in Africa, where the competition for land has made elephants a hated menace for some communities.

Ivory poaching is another major threat to the elephant population.

The trade is fuelled by the continent's conflicts, with poachers selling ivory to buy weapons.

China's growing influence in Africa is also boosting the trade. Ivory is prized by the Chinese middle classes, much to the anger of the British naturalist, Dr Dame Daphne Sheldrick, who runs the orphanage.


Sky's Emma Hurd with elephants "The ivory trade has to be banned once and for all. If there is still legal ivory, then it's easy for illegal ivory to be laundered in to the system. It has to be outlawed completely."

Dame Daphne Sheldrick has spent 50 years raising elephants and preparing them to return to the wild, and she was the first person to discover the formula of milk that would keep elephant calves alive.

It is a long, labour intensive process. Elephants mirror human development, they're dependent on bottle feeds until they're two-years-old (the orphanage has 12 "toddlers") and are not mature enough to join a wild herd until they're ten.

They can live to be 70-years-old.

The little ones have a long journey to freedom ahead of them, but their keepers will be with them every step of the way.

And it is true that elephants never forget. Back in the wild they learn to be wary of humans, but they still remember and approach their visiting keepers decades after their release.