Rare twin elephants born in Kenya are now beginning to settle into life with their herd at Amboseli National Park.
Amboseli is a 392 square kilometer National Park located 240 kilometers Southeast of Kenya's capital, Nairobi, along the border with Kenya and Tanzania.
It is a popular tourist attraction due to its huge number of elephants.
There are roughly 16-hundred elephants living inside Amboseli National Park, which are grouped into 58 families.
The 2-month old twin elephants, a male and female, were delivered at the end of May by 39-year old "Paru," who lives in a herd of around 40 elephants.
Kenyan Wildlife Service officials say surviving twin births amongst elephants is rare, with the last known birth of surviving elephant twins taking place in Amboseli in 1980.
Kenneth Ole Nashu is a Senior Warden in Amboseli National Park.
"For the last 38 years, this park experienced a very unique scenario whereby we have an elephant giving birth to twins that was around 1980 and then this time again round we had Paru giving birth again twins. This is a very unique scenario in terms of conservation particularly in the elephants population."
Given the sheer size of the animals, twin births are rare, as gestation of African elephants normally lasts for around 22-months.
This means the survival of baby elephants, let-alone twins, is a challenge in the wild.
To try to ensure that the twins, as well as the rest of the elephants in Amboseli National Park survive, steps have been taken to try to eliminate poaching.
Around 300 scouts from the local communities surrounding Amboseli are tapped to help local game wardens monitor and protect the elephants.
To keep better track of the elephants, the Kenya Wildlife Service recently carried out an aerial census in the park.
Julius Kimani, director with Kenya Wildlife Services, says getting a head-count of the animals is important.
"We are trying to establish the number of wildlife species, the big mammals that we have in the ecosystem because as you have heard from our chief scientist here it is not possible to manage what we cannot count; what we cannot measure so the objective today is to establish the number of the big animals that we have in this ecosystem so that we can be able to establish the management strategies. We want to know how many are in the parks, how many are outside the park."
Conflicts between humans and wildlife have also been an issue, which wildlife officials hope to mitigate through the aerial census.
Better tracking of the animal migration patterns can help authorities ensure that human-elephant conflicts are kept to a minimum.
China Plus/AP
