Friday 30 September 2022 05:05 PM Amazing images show £5m operation to move 2,000 animals away from deadly ... trends now
An extraordinary rescue operation is under way in the parched bush of the Savé valley in southern Zimbabwe.
A helicopter swoops low over a family of elephants and a sharpshooter, sitting with his legs dangling out of its open door, aims his gun.
A sedative dart is fired towards the matriarch of the herd. It’s a hit. A team on the ground rush towards the stumbling animal, ready to catch all four tons of her as she falls to the ground — ensuring she doesn’t squash a calf on her way down.
Then, once the rest of the herd has been darted and sedated, each animal is lifted by a crane to be weighed on giant scales, so that the team can ensure that they use the correct dose for their ongoing sedation.
Then they are hoisted on to flatbed trucks — hanging upside down to prevent their weight from crushing their vital organs — to be driven across the bush and loaded on to bigger lorries.
An extraordinary rescue operation is under way in the parched bush of the Savé valley in southern Zimbabwe. An elephant family are tracked from a helicopter as they trek through the parched Zimbabwe game reserve searching for ever-dwindling resources of food and water
Great care is taken to keep each elephant family together, before they are transported 566 miles, for 19 hours, across Zimbabwe to a new home.
This is Project Rewild: a rescue mission to rival Noah’s Ark in terms of its scale and logistical challenges — only this time the animals are being saved not from flood but drought.
Climate change has left food and water scarce in Savé, once a haven for elephants, giraffes, lions, zebra, impala and countless other wildlife. There are too many animals for the now-starved landscape to support. Without help, thousands of these animals will be condemned to death by starvation or thirst.
It’s a different story in northern Zimbabwe. The Great Plains Sapi Reserve on the Zambezi river, a former hunting concession on the border with Zambia, has enough food and water to sustain its own wildlife and more.
Sedated: A marksman targets them with his sedation dart gun
And so a plan was hatched. In a relocation exercise unprecedented in its
