If you’re a wildlife conservationist in Africa and you haven’t got someone after you, you’re not doing your job properly. There’s a saying around activist circles. “I can’t help but think, if we can’t save the world’s largest land mammal, what hope do smaller animals around the world have.” “We are still losing some 30,000 elephants a year to poaching. “But I also went over there with the purpose of studying social structure and population dynamics and better knowing them as individual elephants.” “Within my first year, I was continually looking for 17 elephants to do snare removals from,” Sharon said. “What I learned over there is that you can’t always change the world, but you should do what you can.” While there are myriad tour operators and ‘officials’ in the area, they’re not exactly looking for accurate data around elephants and how they’re faring and certainly not tracking individual elephants or clans and Sharon says there were a LOT of snares. “I was the first person to be on the ground in this area for many years.” “When I arrived, poaching was out of control, local people would set snares to trap other animals – but elephants wander into those snares,” she said. “In terms of being a single woman in Africa, Zimbabwe was of the only places you could walk around by yourself and be safe.” “Which tells you things about the other countries,” Sharon said. She had spent time working with wildlife in Uganda, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe and it was Zimbabwe where she says she felt the most safe. “It definitely was the best of times and the worst of times,” she shared.īefore she took on the unpaid conservation role she left her well-paid professional job for, Sharon had visited Africa many times to volunteer with wildlife groups – taking extended leave to do so.
From 2001 she completely immersed herself in fieldwork with a single clan, one that she formed an extraordinary bond with. Sharon arrived in Africa in the early noughties without any science qualifications but a dogged determination to do something to save elephants. Sharon shares touching footage of her time spent forming an incredible human-wildlife connection with ‘her elephants’.
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