Morkel has loaded his dart gun with a dose
of etorphine, an opioid about 6,000 times more
powerful than morphine. Once it penetrates the
giraffe’s skin, he and his team will have just min-
utes to chase down the animal, tackle her, and
inject her neck with an antidote to keep her from
dying. If she can be successfully captured and
survive a 500-mile translocation across Niger,
she’ll become one of eight founding “Adams”
and “Eves” of a new population of one of the
world’s rarest wild mammals.
THE GIRAFFES we have chased for a
week are the descendants of some
50 animals that made their way to
the West African country of Niger
in the late 1980s, when drought and
war pushed them from their habitat
in neighboring Mali. They walked
south-southeast across the Sahel, along
the Niger River, and skirted Niamey before settling
in the Koure region, on a dry and dusty plateau.
A Fulani herder named Amadou Hama, 76,
recalled what it was like decades ago when he
first encountered one of these giraffes one eve-
ning while tending his cattle. “We thought it was
the devil, because of that neck and those horns.
People had told me about dangerous animals
like lions, but nobody had ever told me about
the giraffe. We were frightened. Even the cows
were frightened.”
These newly arrived giants were
the last survivors of a once vast pop-
ulation of “white giraffes” whose
range at the turn of the last century
spanned all of West Africa, from the
coast of Senegal to Nigeria.IN 2016 A TEAM of scientists came
to an epiphany (if still contentious)Framed against the
Nairobi skyline, giraffes
roam Nairobi National
Park, four miles from
the center of Ken-
ya’s sprawling capital.
More than 100 mam-
mal species live in the
45-square-mile park,
but Nairobi’s expansion
threatens this habitat.PARAS CHANDARIAGIRAFFES 95