How This Orphaned Elephant Defied the Odds

One Sunday morning in late November, Tunde Morakinyo received an unexpected and urgent phone call. “The baby elephant will be here in two hours,” said his ANI Foundation colleague Peter Abanyam, who is based at Okomu National Park in Nigeria. “We need to figure out what to do to keep it alive.”

Morakinyo, who leads ANI Foundation, a Nigerian nonprofit group focused on protecting biodiversity, was in disbelief. “Baby elephant?” 

Earlier that morning, a worker at the Okomu Oil Palm Plantation, which borders the park, had spotted the baby wandering alone—a highly unusual sight. What came next was a whirlwind learning curve for everyone involved in taking care of Nigeria’s first surviving orphaned baby elephant, who has since become a national beacon of hope for conservation.

“Never once had I expected to become an elephant parent,” says Abanyam. “This is the first case of elephant rescue in Nigeria. When this happened, we didn’t have any form of experience.” His team’s prior work at the park involved poaching patrol and curbing illegal logging, not animal care. 

“But life gives us unexpected challenges, and we must rise to meet them,” he adds. 

The baby was a critically endangered African forest elephant; they’re smaller than savannah elephants, with rounder ears and shorter, straighter tusks, and their habitat is much more restricted. Today Nigeria is home to an estimated 400 forest elephants, with about 30 to 40 living in Okomu National Park, a protected swath of rainforest in southern Nigeria that is co-managed by the Nigeria National Park Service and ANI Foundation. 

“Okomu is one of the last fragments of forest habitat left for forest elephants and many threatened species,” says Morakinyo. 

How the baby elephant—then about eight months old and not yet weaned—became separated from his family remains unclear, but Morakinyo suspects the group may have stumbled across hunters and scattered at the sounds of shotguns, machetes, and iron traps. “When you have a baby elephant wandering around alone, it’s very sad,” he says. 

After failing to find the baby’s family in the dense rainforest, the team brought him into human care. At that age, he wouldn’t survive and find sufficient food on his own, says Abanyam, who was worried about the threat of bushmeat poachers. 

They transported the elephant baby, barely as tall as a car tire, in the back of a pickup truck. “Our lives here in the outpost changed drastically after the baby elephant arrived,” says Abanyam. “We had many sleepless nights.”  

The infant’s early days were touch and go. Experienced wildlife veterinarians warned the first-time caretakers not to name him yet, for fear of worsening the heartbreak of potentially losing him. Within a few days, the baby had little energy to move around or eat. “We were very scared,” recalls Abanyam. 

When baby elephants “crash,” says Liz O’Brien, a consultant in Zambia who specializes in orphan elephant care and who joined the rescue effort as an adviser, it’s usually due to one or more factors: exhaustion, losing their mother and her milk, and adrenaline levels that spike and suddenly drop. “It’s like the animal just runs out of gas—it doesn’t have energy to stand, to eat, to do anything.” 

At one point, after blood sugar tests revealed hypoglycemia, the team sent a truck to pick up the nearest veterinarians—an hour’s drive away at the oil palm plantation. They administered IV fluids and dextrose to raise the baby’s blood sugar. “For two days, we were constantly checking his blood glucose, constantly adjusting the IV drips,” recalls O’Brien. 

The Okomu team also learned how to feed the baby a mix of milk powder, coconut, cooked oats, and other ingredients for targeted nutrition and how to give him social support to comfort him and help him develop without his original family. “A baby elephant in the wild is never normally alone,” O’Brien says. “It always has a family around it.” 

Dedicated animal keepers took turns staying with the elephant around-the-clock inside an improvised fenced space near the main ranger outpost, gently tucking him under a brown cotton blanket to keep his temperature stable while he slept.

After several weeks, the elephant started to eat more quickly and became more playful and confident. “Then we saw there was hope—we saw that this guy is ready to survive,” says Abanyam. And so they gave him a name: Agbaibor (pronounced Ah–gba–ibow), which means “bravery,” “strength,” or “the survivor” in Ijaw, a Nigerian language.

Today Agbaibor’s favorite activity is taking a bath by slinging mud on his back with his trunk to cool down. “He’s very playful and a bit naughty,” says Joshua Aribasoye, a 29-year-old caregiver who currently serves as Agbaibor’s chief keeper, working alongside four other carers. 

It’s been a steep learning curve for Aribasoye, who had previously worked with domestic animals like cows, goats, and dogs. He has sought frequent and detailed advice from O’Brien when she visits Okomu and also over a very active WhatsApp group chat they share. 

Agbaibor is basically a “toddler” now, at around 17 months old—he’s three feet high and four and half feet long. (The team doesn’t have a scale large enough to weigh him.) “Today he was trying to sit on my leg and put his head in my lap,” Aribasoye says. “Now he’s too big and heavy, but sometimes he still tries.” 

One of Aribasoye’s favorite traits is the little elephant’s “greeting” run: “He has this joyful way of running when he sees you,” Aribasoye says, “dragging one leg, throwing his head up, with trunk back and ears out, and coming toward you.” 

Such strong bonds are only natural, O’Brien says. “The baby elephant needs a mother to run to,” she explains. “And the fact is that the mother is a 30-year-old Nigerian man right now.” 

The long-term goal is not to keep Agbaibor in captivity but to release him back to the wild after he is past the weaning age of forest elephants, which is around two to three years old.  While an orphaned elephant baby is unlikely to be adopted and suckled by a new mom, the caretakers hope that as a slightly older elephant, Agbaibor can one day rejoin elephant society and other wandering males in Okomu National Park. 

But the park itself needs protection. Okomu spans less than 80 square miles, an oasis of wilderness in a landscape mostly shaped by agriculture and urbanization. The park is also threatened by illegal land-clearing for farming, which leads to deforestation, and by poachers trapping for bushmeat, says Abanyam. 

Agbaibor’s caretakers hope that his plight will help strengthen support for conservation, including economic support for communities near the park. “There is no point in saving any baby elephants to release them into the bush if there is no bush left,” says O’Brien.

The ultimate goal is to help both an individual elephant and his rare species. “Forest elephants are critically endangered, so we must try to save every one of them,” says Amos Hamman, Nigeria’s Conservator of Parks. “There’s just very few left.”

Recently, Agbaibor and three of his keepers set off at 6 a.m. on a drizzly day to walk five miles through the rainforest to reach a newly built, larger enclosure called a boma. Agbaibor’s new home, ringed by a wooden fence, will allow better access to wander in the forest, eat native plants, and perhaps encounter other wild elephants, even as caretakers continue to feed and monitor him. 

“We hope that in time he will get back to where his own family is,” says O’Brien. “They are out there somewhere.” 

In a year or so, after Agbaibor moves from milk mixtures to solid foods, the park team will steadily reduce the amount of human contact. He won’t be fed with a bottle but will find food in his boma. O’Brien expects that he will gradually stop coming back to the boma so often. Eventually, the little elephant should, she hopes, “forget about humans.”

The caretakers say that until then, the team is prepared to provide food and watch over their little survivor.  When he is finally ready to leave, Abanyam expects to feel a mixture of pride, relief, and sorrow. “You understand that you need to release something that’s so close to your heart,” he says. “I’m sure it’s going to be a difficult moment for all of us.”