Birth Of Twin Elephants At Samburu National Reserve

An elephant in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve has given birth to twins, an event said to be extremely rare.

The baby elephants were discovered by the tour guides out on safari at the Samburu reserve at the weekend. The pair – consisting of a male and female – have become only the second set of twin calves ever encountered by local charity Save the Elephants (STE).

“Twins are rarely encountered in elephant populations — and form around only 1% of births. Quite often the mothers don’t have enough milk to support two calves,” STE founder Iain Douglas-Hamilton said in a statement.

The twins are the second birth of a female elephant named Bora who is from a family of elephants called Winds II. Her older calf was born in 2017 and was recently spotted in the same area as its mother and the twins.

At about 22 months, the African elephant has the longest gestation period of any living mammal and gives birth approximately every four years.

Elephants in Kenya and other sub-Saharan African countries have increasingly fallen prey to poachers.

But Kenya’s tourism ministry said in 2020 that elephant numbers in the country had more than doubled thanks to increased anti-poaching efforts, to 34,000 in 2018 from 16,000 in 1989.

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