Tsavo Trust

13/06/2026

🌳 In Kamungi Conservancy, community members meet with their elected Board every month.

This month, 117 came. 70 from the upper cluster. 47 from the lower. 73 women, 44 men.

They have been doing this since 2019. Every month. Through Covid. Through droughts. Through good harvests and hard ones.

The meetings are how Kamungi works. They are how community holds leadership to account. They are how decisions get made. They are how this place stays community-led.

Last month they validated the next chapter - the Kamungi Conservancy Management Plan (2025–2034). A 10-year roadmap shaped by 45 stakeholders, now being finalised before submission to Makueni County and KWS for endorsement.

A quiet, monthly conversation. Six and a half years of it. One 10-year plan.

Tsavo Trust is proud to walk alongside.

📍 Kamungi Conservancy · bordering Tsavo East National Park
Kenya

12/06/2026

Watching a large Super Tusker like IR2, it is hard not to wonder why evolution favours such extraordinary size.

The African savanna contains the largest land animal on Earth, the tallest animal on Earth, the heaviest bird on Earth, and some of the largest living herbivores and predators. Their immense size provides advantages in competition, defence, thermoregulation, and access to resources, helping them survive and thrive in challenging environments.

Yet giant animals were once found across much of the world. Mammoths roamed Europe and North America, giant marsupials inhabited Australia, and enormous ground sloths lived in South America. Today, Africa remains one of the last great strongholds of megafauna.

Super Tuskers like IR2 represent the extreme end of this story. They are not a separate type of elephant, but the product of exceptional genetics, favourable habitat, and decades of survival. An elephant must live for many decades to grow tusks weighing more than 100 pounds each, making these bulls among the rarest animals on Earth.

This week’s article explores why some animals become giants, how Africa retained so many of its megafauna, and why protecting species like Tsavo’s Super Tuskers helps preserve one of the last living remnants of a world once dominated by giants.

Follow the link to learn more.

The African savanna contains the largest land animal on Earth, the tallest animal on Earth, the heaviest bird on Earth, and some of the largest herbivores and predators ever to evolve. While giant animals once existed across much of the world, today Africa remains one of the last places where a rema...

11/06/2026

📞🐍 A phone rings at our HQ.

Somewhere in Kamungi, there’s a snake in someone’s kitchen 🍳, or under a bed 🛏️, or coiled on a doorstep 🚪.

The person who answers? A young man from Kamungi himself, Patrick Isika Mutua 👤✨, trained at the Watamu Snake Farm - Taylor Ashe Antivenom Foundation in Watamu 🌴, now a certified senior venomous snake handler.

🐍 Four years of work (2022 – 2025):
🏠 226 snakes safely removed from community homesteads
🚨 66% venomous, including Puff Adder, Red Spitting Cobra, and others
🔬 21 different species recorded
📣 140+ community members sensitised every year
💪 5 snakebite victims supported with 100% recovery

🇰🇪 Beyond Kamungi: snakebite is more than 40% of all human–wildlife conflict cases in Kenya. The WHO calls snakebite envenoming a neglected tropical disease 🌍, affecting the poorest hardest. Calling a trained handler can be the difference between life and death.

🐍❤️ Every rescue saves a snake too. Released safely into the bush, instead of killed in fear.
💥 Small programme. Big impact. 🌏 A model that could work across Kenya.

🙏 Asante to every Kamungi member who picked up the phone instead of a stick. 📞

📍 Kamungi Conservancy · bordering Tsavo East National Park

09/06/2026

🐐 Nine goats and a dog. For one family in Kamungi, that was the cost of last month.

In May, Kamungi Conservancy recorded 21 human–wildlife conflict incidents.

📊 The May breakdown:
▸ 🐆 Leopard — 10 incidents (including those 9 goats and 1 dog)
▸ 🐘 Elephant — 6
▸ 🐍 Snake — 3 (entering homes)
▸ 🐃 Buffalo — 2

Since January? 106 incidents in total.

These numbers are why our work exists. Every report is verified in the field by the joint KWS–Tsavo Trust Kamungi Scouts, logged and tracked, so that mitigation goes where it is actually needed. 📍

There is a hopeful line in this month’s data too 👇

✨ Every one of the elephant incidents recorded by this join team in May happened outside the Elephant Exclusion Fence.

Where the fence stands, people and crops are protected. That is the whole argument for maintaining it. 🛠️

Living alongside wildlife will never be without cost. Our job is to keep lowering it, for the families here, and for the animals that share this land. 🌍🐘

Coexistence Tsavo Kenya WildlifeConservation KWS

07/06/2026

🐘 The Tsavo Conservation Area covers 42,000 km². The only way to know where 13 of its elephants walk every day is to ask them, and then fly out and verify the answer. 📡✈️

In August 2024, the team at led a five-day collaring operation across Tsavo, alongside the Kenya Wildlife Service, Wildlife Research and Training Institute, Wildlife Works and Tsavo Trust. 🤝

The scale of the operation 👇
🚁 40 personnel
✈️ 5 aircraft + 1 helicopter
🐘 13 elephants collared
📍 Among them: a vulnerable big tusker, a notorious crop raider, and a female known for her extraordinary long-distance journeys
📱 Tracked in real time via the STE WildTracks platform

What Tsavo Trust contributes after the operation:

✈️ Dedicated aerial flights to locate collared individuals across the landscape
👀 Eyes-on confirmation of each elephant’s welfare, herd composition and surroundings
📊 Real-time field intelligence flowing back to Save the Elephants’ monitoring database
🐾 Tembo monitoring teams on the ground, supporting WRTI’s science effort
🛩️ All of it underpinned by 9,155 flight hours and 1.1 million km of patrols logged across the wider TCA since 2013

STE, in partnership with KWS and WRTI, lead this work. Tsavo Trust brings the eyes and ears in the air and on the ground. 🌍
This is what conservation looks like when organisations bring their strengths to the same landscape. 💪🐘
—
🙏 Big thanks to Save the Elephants, the Kenya Wildlife Service and Wildlife Research and Training Institute.

06/06/2026

A ten-year plan. Validated by the community it serves. 📋🌍

On 15th May 2026, Kamungi Conservancy reached a significant milestone, the stakeholder validation of the Kamungi Conservancy Management Plan 2025 to 2034.

45 representatives. One room. One shared commitment.

From local community members to Kenya Wildlife Service, Wildlife Research and Training Institute, Makueni County Government, elected leaders, KWCA, TTWCA, universities, and conservation partners - everyone at the table, reviewing and validating the plan that will guide Kamungi’s conservation and livelihoods work for the next decade.

This is what community-led conservation looks like in practice. Not a plan written for a community. A plan written with one. 🤝

Next step: final revisions, then formal endorsement by Makueni County Government and KWS.

📍 Kamungi Conservancy, Tsavo, Kenya 📸 ©️ Tsavo Trust

Tsavo CommunityLed KWS Makueni WildlifeConservation

05/06/2026

🌍 World Environment Day, and the 2026 theme is climate.

In Tsavo, this isn’t theoretical. Our HQ has been recording rainfall for nine years now, and the picture is clear - drier, more erratic, and harder on the wildlife and the families living alongside them. The 2022 drought alone cost 110 elephants and 32 buffalo their lives. Snaring rises when the rains fail.

What it looks like, on the ground, working on it:

💧 14 sand dams holding water below the surface
☀️ 224 home solar systems in Kamungi households
🌱 379 farmers trained in climate-smart agriculture with KALRO
🐘 60 new water tanks across 11 villages this year
🍳 200 energy-saving cooking stoves

Built in partnership with KWS, WRTI, Makueni County Government, Kamungi Conservancy, Sand Dams Worldwide and our incredible network of supporters.

Climate work and conservation work are the same work in Tsavo. We’re getting on with it. Thank you for your continued support.

📍 Tsavo Conservation Area · 42,000 km²

Kenya KamungiConservancy

05/06/2026

When we think about elephant conservation, we usually think about protecting elephants themselves.

But what if saving elephants also means saving countless other species?

A remarkable 22-year study in Kenya found that areas without elephants contained 67% fewer dung beetles and 23% fewer dung beetle species. Some disappeared entirely. The reason is simple: elephant dung provides food, shelter, and breeding sites for a wide range of organisms, and other herbivores could not fully replace this resource.

The findings provide rare experimental evidence for what scientists call co-extinction — the loss of one species leading to the decline of others that depend on it.

Yet dung beetles are only part of the story.

Elephants disperse thousands of seeds every day, sometimes carrying them more than 65 kilometres from their parent trees. They create trails used by other wildlife, open up dense vegetation, dig for water during droughts, and help shape entire ecosystems.

In Tsavo, every elephant is influencing the landscape around it. Their ecological importance extends far beyond their own survival.

This week’s article explores why elephants are considered ecosystem engineers, and how protecting them helps safeguard a hidden network of species and ecological processes that depend on them.

A new study from researchers at Princeton University has provided some of the strongest experimental evidence yet for something conservationists have long suspected: when elephants disappear, other species disappear with them.

05/06/2026

This is why Tsavo Trust exists. 🐘✨

In 2012, a small group of conservationists set out to answer a question most people had stopped asking. Were the Super Tuskers of Tsavo still there? The great bulls whose tusks grow long enough to sweep the ground as they walk. A genetic lineage that poaching had brought to the edge of functional extinction across Africa. 🌍

The answer changed everything.

They were still here. Still in Tsavo. 🙌

That discovery founded this organisation. And for thirteen years, in direct support of Kenya Wildlife Service who lead the protection of this landscape, Tsavo Trust has been flying - locating, photographing, and monitoring every individual across 42,000 km² of the Tsavo Conservation Area. ✈️🛩️

Today the numbers tell their own story. 📈
👑 10 true Super Tusker bulls - the rarest animals of their kind on Earth
🌱 27 emerging tusker bulls - the next generation confirmed and growing
👑 4 iconic tusker cows - matriarchs of this extraordinary lineage
📊 3,786 individual Big Tusker sightings recorded since 2013

And here is what makes us most hopeful. 💚

The emerging tusker bulls, younger individuals whose tusks are developing the distinctive length and weight of the Super Tusker lineage, have grown from just 6 individuals in 2013 to 27 today. The gene pool is not just being preserved. It is recovering. 🌱🐘

Seven consecutive years without a single tusker lost to poaching. 🙏

The bulls are still walking. We are still flying. 🛩️❤️

📍 Tsavo Conservation Area, Kenya
📸 ©️ Tsavo Trust
🤝 In partnership with Kenya Wildlife Service

Kenya WildlifeProtection KWS TuskerMonitoring AfricaWildlife Elephants CultureOfConservation BigTuskerProject

04/06/2026

📊 Joseph and Mophat just got back from Mombasa. They brought back homework. 📚

From 13–15 May, our Conservation Officer Joseph Kyalo and MEL Officer Mophat Peter represented Tsavo Trust at the Esri Conservation Summit and the 15th Esri Eastern Africa User Conference. 🛰️

The theme: GIS — Integrating Everything, Everywhere.

The line that stayed with us 👇

✨ Some of the most important work in conservation doesn’t happen in the field. It happens when you come back and work out what the field was trying to tell you.

A patrol record 🐾
An aerial count ✈️
A human-wildlife conflict report 🐘

Each only matters once it becomes a map, a dashboard, a decision.

📍 Data is the beginning. Action is the point.

Joseph and Mophat came home with new tools to learn 📊, new people to learn from 🤝, and a sharper question about every byte of data we collect across the 42,000 km² of Tsavo. 💪

Big asante to Esri Eastern Africa, and to peers from and the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association for sharing the week. 🇰🇪

💬 What’s a piece of data that changed how you work?

ConservationTech Mombasa Kenya DataForConservation TsavoConservationArea MapsForGood