NAIROBI -- When I had a summer job in the Baltimore Zoo's mammal department, I never saw an operation as big as this, just to put a single animal to sleep. There were four Land Rovers and a light plane, seven biologists, four veterinarians, three camouflaged, heavily-armed rangers, one journalist and myself, a student on exchange from Dartmouth College.
Because it was an elephant. The bull was shot with a tranquilizer to protect him from the bullets of hunters and poachers -- although for this particular elephant, outside Kenya's Amboseli National Park, and for all Kenya's elephants, these are not their greatest problems.
I went with a researcher from the Kenya Wildlife Service to the camp at Amboseli of Cynthia Moss, the American who began an elephant study here in 1972.
The wildlife service wants to collar some of these elephants. ''There are at least three mysteries to be solved about the Amboseli elephants,'' says Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the scientist chiefly responsible for documenting the decline in elephant numbers across the continent during the rampant poaching of the 1970s and '80s. The British charity he founded pays for the radio collars.
Our Land Rovers headed west of the park, onto Olgulului group ranch, communally owned by Masai pastoralists, which surrounds Amboseli on three sides. After a morning's search we came upon a suitable bull. He was identified as M162, ''Parsitau,'' by Ms. Moss' research team, three Masai women who count the elephants every day, keeping track of about 900 individually.
At 28 or 29 years, Parsitau's big tusks made him a potential target for hunters or poachers, and he was known to disappear from the park.
Hunting in Kenya was banned in 1977, but it is legal in Tanzania, and Amboseli, by Mt. Kilimanjaro, is close to the border. Just over a year ago, three of Amboseli's largest and oldest bulls were shot for sport across the line, before an informal agreement against hunting near the border.
Last summer, the Kenya Wildlife Service collared a bull here on Olgulului, and it has been to Tanzania and back, shedding light on the first mystery.
In February, Ms. Moss' research team found the skinned, tuskless body of M10, ''Oloitipitip,'' a 50-year old bull, killed in Tanzania by poachers.
Where the bulls are
''If we have to plan for their security,'' says John Waithaka, director of the wildlife service's elephant program, ''we need to know where they are going.''
