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Big Gift African Elephants Kenya and Tanzania Big Gift to the Earth 2008 Help conserve African elephants by purchasing and securing habitat, including elephant movement corridors in the Kilimanjaro heartland. Together, the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and Earth’s Birthday Project have created Big Gift African Elephants to protect elephants in Kenya and Tanzania. Donations to the Big Gift will advance three key conservation objectives: • Purchase and protect an important movement corridor for elephants in Kenya. • Support the education and healthcare needs of nomadic, pastoralist communities in the West Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania in exchange for elephant and grasslands stewardship. • Restore and conserve Tanzania’s West Kilimanjaro Ranch, an area of vital habitat and a movement corridor for elephants and other wildlife. Just $50 helps purchase and protect an acre of elephant habitat! And in 2008, your gift will go even further! AWF has pledged a total of $500,000 to match contributions: dollar-for-dollar for donations to the Big Gift and $50 for each middle-school class that participates in the Earth Day Science Symposium: African Elephants. 10 Reasons to Protect Elephants and Habitat African Elephants! Elephants are the earth’s largest land mammals. In East Africa, elephants live in arid grasslands—beautiful, wide-open landscapes—among lions and leopards, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, zebras, giraffes, gazelles and impalas. African elephant cows travel with their calves in family herds, while bulls roam alone or in small groups. Several inter-related herds may inhabit one large region and know each other well. When they meet at watering holes and feeding grounds they greet each other affectionately. Elephants are highly intelligent and communicative. Their strong, sensitive trunks are well coordinated and in many ways as useful as human hands. Elephants signal to one another with more than 70 distinct calls and gesture with their heads and trunks. They have been known to use sticks as tools, dig and maintain wells, dam streams to create swimming holes, play catch and disable electric fences. They have excellent memories and the ability to make mental maps of the best routes to seasonal food and clean water. African elephants are best known for their tusks, which they use for digging, scrapping and lifting. Tusks are elongated teeth made of enamel and dentin, which is called ivory. Elephant ivory has been highly valued by humans for hundreds of years and has been used to make art and religious objects, ornaments, billiard balls and piano keys. An Endangered Species In 1900, more than 10 million elephants inhabited African forests and savannahs. By 1979, so many had been killed to meet the world demand for ivory that their number had dropped to less than 2 million. Although elephants have been protected by ivory bans and laws regulating hunting since 1990, there are now only about 650,000 left in all of Africa. Many are safeguarded in parks and wildlife preserves, but African elephants are increasingly threatened by extinction. In their arid homelands, elephants must migrate over vast distances to find food and water. Often as they travel from one feeding ground to another, they cross park boundaries and the borders between countries. Their migrations take them across wildernesses where they are at risk from poachers and near settlements where farmers sometimes kill or harass them to protect crops and water. In Africa, human populations are growing, and human-elephant competition is increasing.
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