Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Nursery

This guide to the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Nursery in Nairobi follows Daphne Sheldrick, who spent decades chasing a problem no rescuer in Africa had solved: keeping a milk-dependent orphan elephant alive without its mother. It traces her work alongside her husband David, founding warden at Tsavo, and the grief that followed his death in 1977, before an orphaned calf named Olmeg pushed into her bedroom in 1987 and turned her search into this nursery. You'll hear about the failed formulas tried over thirty years before hers finally worked. Keepers still start each day here at dawn, with bottles, mud baths and calves that never sleep alone.