A rare elephant with "super-tusks" has died in Kenya

"If I hadn't seen her with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed that such elephants still exist" — this is how British photographer Will Burrard-Lucas described his impressions of meeting an African elephant named F_MU1. This man was the last to photograph a rare animal, shortly before his death, and may have become the last of the people who saw an elephant with "super tusks".

A 60-year-old elephant, codenamed F_MU1, recently died of old age in Tsavo National Park in Kenya. It is quite possible that this animal was the last individual on the planet with so-called "super-tusks", that is, tusks reaching the earth.

That's what Burrard-Lucas said in his BBC interview, in which he described his work with the animal. If you think that photographing elephants is easy, then you should know that Will spent a year and a half on a photo shoot of an elephant living in the largest nature reserve in Kenya.

In his blog, Will talked about how he first saw an elephant with giant tusks and what emotions he experienced. The photographer was simply speechless, although he knew perfectly well what he had to deal with. When the man met F_MU1, she was walking through the savannah with her herd.

Burrard-Lucas noted that she looked very thin and old against the background of the other elephants, but at the same time she moved forward nimbly. The elephant's tusks rested on the ground and left two parallel furrows in it.

Animals with such an anomaly are especially interested in poachers, because the price of "super tusks" is very high on the black market. In nature, tusks of this size are extremely rare, since elephants accidentally or intentionally break them off before they reach the ground.

Just two years ago, another elephant with such a rare decoration lived in Tsavo — Satao II. But he, unlike the elephant F_MU1, did not happen to die a natural death. An elephant grazing near the border of the national park was killed by poachers, firing an arrow smeared with poison at it.

Dr. Mark Jones from the organization Born Free, which protects wild animals in Africa, is sure that if the deceased elephant is not the last individual with long tusks, then it can certainly be considered one of the very few on the Black continent. Jones described the situation to journalists as follows:

Will Burrard-Lucas took the last photos of a rare elephant near a watering hole. He says with delight that he received a huge portion of impressions, shooting F_MU1 from different angles in the immediate vicinity of the herd.