Hanging upside down by his ankles from a crane, a sedated baby elephant is carefully lowered onto a truck for the only road trip of his life as part of the most ambitious wildlife project ever attempted.
A similar scene will, this week, greet Prince Harry, who has returned to Africa to continue his conservation crusade and take a frontline role in the extraordinary effort to save the continent’s biggest beasts from extinction.
An experienced pilot with warzone experience, the prince is expected to be deployed in the careful rounding up of family groups of elephants to be darted from the air, before they are trucked 200 miles to sanctuary across Malawi, as part of the extraordinary initiative ‘500 Elephants’.
Devotion: Prince Harry has been a devoted conservationist and spent three months embedded with an anti-poaching patrol in southern Africa last year. He posted this heartbreaking picture near the end of the tour
Back to Africa: Harry is spending his second successive summer in Africa, this time working with the NGO African Parks. The project will help 500 elephants move 200 miles to a conservation park in Malwai
Help: Elephant numbers have been dropping in Malawi due to poaching. Above, The immediate priority of the programmer is to check the health of the elephants before they are hoisted onto flatbed trucks
Harry is spending his second successive summer in Africa, this time working with the NGO African Parks which said it was ‘delighted’ to have the bearded prince on board.
The 31-year-old royal brings valuable field experience from last year’s three months embedded with bush vets and an anti-poaching teams, gaining a host of hands-on skills with the animals known as Africa’s Big Five.
Fran Read, from African Parks, told MailOnline, ‘We are delighted that Prince Harry will be joining us for this very important project.’
Harry’s latest venture is the £1million move of around 500 elephants to a wildlife reserve in central Malawi from two parks in the south of the country, where food and space is becoming increasingly scarce for the animals.
Frontline: The 31-year-old royal brings valuable field experience from last year’s three months embedded with bush vets and an anti-poaching teams, gaining a host of hands-on skills. Above, he helps treat a rhinocerous
Hanging: The Prince has landed in Malawi to assist the NGO African Parks. Above, An elephant is lifted onto a flatbed lorry, ready for the journey to its new home. Twigs will be placed in their trunks to help them breathe
Hero: One of the prince’s tasks in Namibia was to measure vital signs and administer fluids to sedated rhinos, whose horns were being removed to make them less attractive to poachers
The elephants’ new base will give them more space to breed and help restore the numbers of the animals whose numbers are dwindling in other parts of Africa, mostly as a result of poaching.
Elephants appear to hold a particular fascination for Harry, who left the army last year. The prince released an instagram picture of himself lying face down with his arms stretched across a sedated elephant during his previous stint as a conservation volunteer in Africa.
The role of the pilot in the ‘500Elephants’ project is to flush elephants from wooded areas onto the plains to enable them to be more easily darted by the on board vet.
This would be a task Harry could easily undertake, along with the monitoring of the sedated animals after their immobilisation.
After the elephant is tranquilised, it is measured in Liwonde National Park, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants
The Malawi relocation is ‘a win-win for elephants and people’ and an example of wildlife management that ‘will likely become the new norm in many places in Africa,’ said Bas Huijbregts, African species expert for the WWF conservation group
Once they are sedated and recorded, the elephants are revived with injections in ‘wake-up’ crates and cattle prods are used to herd them onto flatbed trucks for the day-long journey to their new home
One of the prince’s tasks he undertook assisting wildlife vet Peter Morkel in Namibia was to measure vital signs and administer fluids to sedated rhinos, whose horns were being removed to make them less attractive to poachers.
Once they are sedated and recorded, the elephants are revived with injections in ‘wake-up’ crates and cattle prods are used to herd them onto flatbed trucks for the day-long journey to their new home.
There is some risk and stress in drugging and moving elephants long distances, although the process has been successful in other parts of southern Africa and most animals adapt to new environment if it similar to their old one.
An elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. The animal is unconscious and will wake up unharmed
The role of the pilot in the ‘500Elephants’ project is to flush elephants from wooded areas onto the plains to enable them to be more easily darted by the on board vet – something Harry could easily undertake
The Malawi relocation is ‘a win-win for elephants and people’ and an example of wildlife management that ‘will likely become the new norm in many places in Africa,’ said Bas Huijbregts, African species expert for the WWF conservation group.
African Parks hopes elephants in Malawi can eventually serve as a ‘reservoir’ to restore other African elephant populations. One estimate says Africa has fewer than 500 000 elephants, down from several million a century ago.
Harry was in South Africa last week attending an Aids conference in Durban where he shared a platform with Sir Elton John. The Prince undertakes regular official and private visits to Africa – a continent he was first introduced to by his Zimbabwe-born girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.