We rescued Sities almost exactly 15 years ago. On the morning of 22nd March 2010, a baby elephant walked onto Mgeno Ranch Headquarters. Despite her diminutive size, the calf was bellowing at the top of her lungs. Staff shooed her off, hoping her mother would be along to fetch her. However, it wasn’t long before the baby returned, desperate for company and milk. Given that poaching was rife at the time, with a number of elephant carcasses discovered in the area, we suspect that her mother was killed for her ivory.

The little orphan was estimated to be around two months old. The Kenya Wildlife Service requested we rescue her, so we scooped her up and airlifted her to our Nairobi Nursery. She arrived on the same day that the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) voted in favour of elephants, prohibiting the sale of ivory stockpiles from Tanzania and Zambia. This was a victory for Kenya, which lobbied passionately against the sale of ivory stockpiles, and for all conservationists. In celebration of that auspicious event, we named the orphan Sities — pronounced the same as CITES.

As is the case with every orphan rescued at such a young age, Sities grew up as an extremely spoiled baby. She has always been instantly recognisable thanks to the fact that she has only one tusk, the result of a genetic anomaly.

After three years at the Nursery, Sities graduated to our Ithumba Reintegration Unit alongside two of her best friends, Turkwel and Kainuk. She quickly earned a reputation as a mercurial, no-nonsense elephant — sweet as could be one minute, unrepentantly short-tempered the next. Everyone went to great lengths to avoid incurring her wrath!

Sities has been living wild for nearly a decade now. Her ex-orphan group, consisting of matriarch Mutara, Suguta, Kainuk, and Turkwel, is special in that they are all old friends from their shared Nursery days. When Mutara became a mother in 2022, giving birth to the indomitable Mambo, Sities immediately became top nanny. Over the past three years, she has honed her nurturing skills — and perhaps even softened some of her volatile character too!

Now, Sities will nurture her own calf. We knew that she was expecting, but we did not know that her due date was imminent. On the evening of 14th March 2025, Head Keeper Benjamin spotted Sities, Turkwel, and Kainuk approaching the Ithumba stockades from the east. He quickly realised that this was a baby debut: Squeezed between them was a tiny baby boy, born just hours before!

Mutara and Mambo, who were already at the stockades, immediately caught wind of the new arrival. Their joy was palpable: with a chorus of trumpets and rumbles, flapping ears, and unbridled urination, they surrounded the newest member of their herd. Sities brought her son close to the stockades so he could also be admired by the people who raised her.

Even though they have fully embraced their wild lives, Mutara and co. have always remained closely linked to their Ithumba family, remaining frequent faces around the stockades. Over the years, we have watched the group’s first baby, Mambo, blossom into a precocious little bull — and now we hope the same for little Sunni.

Sunni is a living, breathing reminder of the multi-generational impact of our Orphans’ Project. Fifteen years ago, a bellowing baby elephant helped herself get saved. Now, this same orphan is grown up, living wild, and raising her own baby in Kenya’s largest national park.

Sunni is the 71st known calf born to an orphaned elephant we rescued, raised, and reintegrated back into the wild. These births are the greatest testament to the success of our Orphans’ Project, demonstrating how the orphans nurtured in our care go on to reclaim their place in the wild and contribute to Kenya's elephant population.