Author finds inspiration from elephants

The story started with the killing of a 19-year-old elephant at the hands of poachers in Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya in 2016.

Her two calves, in another part of the reserve, embarked on a perilous journey to mourn her. They were too young to deal with the lurking dangers in the wild without the protection of adults.

Based on that tragic, but inspiring true story, elephant lover Sun Xiao wrote a children's book Samburu, I'm Back. It was published last year and is a way for Sun to not just impart knowledge about the elephants themselves, but also raising public awareness about the urgent need to protect them from the scourge of poachers, who kill the majestic creatures for their ivory tusks.

This is "a lifelong career".

In the past decade, Sun has devoted himself to spreading knowledge of elephants to as many people as possible via all kinds of methods, such as posting hundreds of articles he wrote on social networks, sharing photos he took of elephants and writing children's storybooks featuring pachyderm protagonists.

Herds of elephants play in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya. [Xinhua/Long Lei]

"Elephants are as complex as humans in terms of emotion. The more I learn about them, the more I love them," says the 30-year-old.

Sun is a witness to the story told in his book Samburu, I'm Back. He was, at the time, in Kenya working for Save the Elephants, a UK-registered charity based in Nairobi. When he and his peers found the two calves heading toward the dangerous area where their mother was killed, they tried in vain to change their course. Finally, they had to immobilize one of the calves by using a tranquilizer gun and transport it to an elephant sanctuary.

"Elephants are very emotional. They have lots of rituals to show their feelings and mourning is typical," says Sun.

Sun has received a great deal of positive feedback from his readers, mostly mothers, saying that their children cried and were moved by the emotional bond between the elephant calves and their mother.

Sun stayed in Kenya with the STE for three months to watch elephants closely for his research. Every day he would go to the wild to observe the elephants and take photos.

"To understand elephants, one needs to spend decades watching them closely. It's a long-term project and a lifelong career," Sun says.

He says that a good elephant watcher can remember the names of hundreds of elephants and will recognize each of them on sight. As long as they know which is which, they are able to understand the interactions and relations between different herds.

Due to his short time there, Sun was only able to recognize several of the elephants which sometimes played and grazed near the STE settlement.

"In fact, I felt like I was the one in a zoo, being watched by these curious elephants," Sun says.

"I had to be careful, though. I wouldn't stand too close to any of the wild elephants. They can be dangerous, especially if they feel threatened. They can run fast, and it is easy to get injured or killed by them," he adds.

When he went into the wild to watch elephants, he often used a telescope, making sure to stand downwind at a distance, so that the herd could not pick up his scent.

Two elephants embark on a journey in Kenya in September 2021. [Xinhua/Long Lei]

Apart from Kenya, Sun also worked at elephant camps and shelters in Asia, including facilities in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, to gather materials for his study of elephants.

His second book for children, chronicling a 68-year-old elephant named Raindrop, is going to be published later this year.

Usually, a captive elephant can live up to 90 years, while one in the wild lives for about 50 years, says Sun.

He tells many true stories in Raindrop's tale, though the elephant itself is fictional. Sun even created a blind elephant in the story, writing about how it grows up and explores the world with the help of its mother and other family members.

"What attracts me to them is the obvious fairness and love between family members. Adults take care of each calf as if it were their own," says Sun.

Sun's connection with elephants started on a late night in 2011. He watched, shocked, as an adult elephant from a circus stood stock still, seemingly ignoring the pain, as its keeper beat it again and again with a stick after they had finished their performance.

Three elephants embark on a journey in Kenya in Augest 2021. [Xinhua/Li Yan]

"The elephant was much bigger in size than its keeper. The beating obviously hurt it. But it just bore the pain in silence," he recalls, who was then a college student at China Agricultural University.

Feeling a deep sense of pity for the animal, he began his study of pachyderms, a task which has lasted for a decade and "will last for my lifetime", says Sun.

"As my study goes deeper, I feel like they're my family and have become a part of my life."

Sun says that he is a man of few words and is not good at dealing with people. He has loved animals since childhood. His family lives in the rural outskirts of Beijing, where they have raised animals and livestock since Sun was a little boy.

 

Sun's parents say he was a silent boy and only got excited when he got close to animals. As a child, he also raised insects and arachnids, such as crickets and scorpions. While Sun lives in the heart of the capital city, he spends several months every year staying in the family home to be close to the animals.

Because of the pandemic, Sun has been forced to stop working at elephant shelters in Asian and African countries. He is now working, free of charge, on the translation of an English book, The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-term Perspective on a Long-lived Mammal, which he hopes will be helpful for elephant lovers in China. It's a tough job, however, as in the book, there are hundreds of terms which can't be found in Chinese, he says.

According to Sun, who got his master's degree in ecology from Beijing Normal University in 2016, there are about 300 wild elephants in Pu'er city and Xishuangbanna Dai autonomous prefecture in Yunnan province, near the border with Laos. It was from here that, earlier this year, a herd of 15 Asian elephants started wandering hundreds of kilometers north toward some uncertain destination, capturing the imagination of the Chinese public. It was the longest recorded elephant migration in China's history.

Sun says foreign elephant enthusiasts and experts paid close attention to the migration and communicated with him via email.

"Our government really did a good job on directing these wandering elephants and protecting them," says Sun, who played the role of ambassador, providing information about the migration to his foreign peers when the story rose to global prominence.

In the future, Sun hopes to open a retired elephant shelter, where elderly pachyderms can roam free and members of the public can watch them from a distance.

On many of Sun's social network accounts, he writes that he wants to learn more about elephants and how to protect them. He is already headed in the right direction.

"Though I'm not materially rich, I feel that I have a wealth of knowledge and experience when it comes to elephants," he says.