Nature has thrown us another surprise, as an Elephant gave birth to baby twins in Kenya which is a rare situation. Save the Elephants reported that the twins – one male and one female – were born to a mother named Bora.
Videos show the days-old newborns getting accustomed to their savannah surroundings with their doting mother and an older sibling, Bora’s first calf, born in 2017.
African elephants have the largest gestation period of any living mammal, carrying their young for nearly 22 months, and give birth roughly every four years.
“Twins are rarely encountered in elephant populations and form about only one percent of births,” Save the Elephants’ founder Iain Douglas-Hamilton said. “Quite often the mothers don’t have enough milk to support two calves. “The next few days will be touch-and-go for the new twins, but we all have our fingers crossed for their survival,” he concluded.
There are an estimated 36,280 elephants in Kenya, according to the country’s first national wildlife census conducted last year.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said last year that poaching and habitat destruction, particularly due to land conversion for agriculture, had a devastating effect on elephant numbers in Africa as a whole.
The population of African savannah elephants plunged by at least 60 percent in the last half-century, prompting their reclassification as “endangered” in the latest update to the IUCN’s “Red List” of threatened species.
