KWS chopper arrived Amboseli at around 10 am in the morning to purposely fly KWS and ATE officials over the apparently impassable swampy perimeter surrounding Kalume’s body. The 6-seater chopper had to make two trips to complete the exercise. The first trip was to take in KWS officials together with their tools to uproot the tusks while Soila and I were on the other side awaiting the second trip.

When Cynthia Moss started the project in 1972, Kalume had already gone independent (males isolate themselves from family group between the age of 10 to 15) and therefore he was not traced back to his family members. We were very excited for we all knew this was our shot to take samples for DNA testing in order to determine the apparent family he came from and/or the calves he may have sired. We managed to take skin samples from Kalume’s body and we were then successfully flown back. Kalume’s tusks are amazingly one-big pair (see images) and so the KWS pilot was unsure about flying them over a long distance. He therefore delivered them to a KWS vehicle for easy transportation to the Amboseli-KWS headquarters.

His tusks weighed: