Wild Nature Institute hosts wildlife Fun Days at schools participating in our Celebrating Africa’s Giants education program as a wonderful way to build community support for conservation. Last Friday our education team held an Elephant Fun Day at Baraka Primary School near Mtowambu. The event featured student-led activities such as Maasai traditional dancing, poetry celebrating elephants as well as ‘animal-bragging’ poetry, an egg-and-spoon race, a sack race, and making wildlife artwork—and we provided a delicious hot lunch of pilau and fruits for all participants. 

This Fun Day we also added an important awareness component: a practical demonstration on how to make and apply chili pepper powder on fences around farms to prevent elephants from eating crops. The chemical capsaicin in hot chili peppers irritates the elephant’s sensitive nasal cavities and trunk, and it keeps them from entering farmlands, thus reducing conflicts. We invited a team of experts from PAMS Foundation who facilitated the demonstration and took the community step-by-step through the process of making the fences. The kids got to sniff the chili peppers and it made them sneeze just like the elephants! 

In honor of elephants, Wild Nature Institute donated enough supplies to PAMS Foundation to build chili pepper fencing for an entire village in the elephant movement corridors near Lake Manyara. Local farmers from Baraka were very keen and excited about the knowledge they gained about chili pepper fencing, and they networked for future collaborations to facilitate their coexistence with elephants.

The event included 700 students from Baraka Primary School together with all 12 teachers and many community members. Please enjoy the attached photos of the event. As always, we are so grateful for the generous support of our donors to Wild Nature Institute so we can host these Fun Days to foster peaceful coexistence with Africa's giants. Special thanks also to our conservation partners PAMS Foundation for the great work they do for people and for elephants.

Earlier this year Veila Makundi, Wild Nature Institute’s Anne Innis Dagg Education Coordinator, participated in the International Desert Conservation Summit in Palm Desert as one of The Living Desert’s conservation heroes. While in California, Veila connected with Dada wa Africa, an initiative of The Living Desert to make reusable sanitary pads for girls in Africa. These are packaged in ‘Dignity Kits’, one for each girl. The kits provide crucial support for female students because every month the girls have access to discrete and attractive pouches that contain comfortable re-useable pads made from environmentally friendly materials, which also saves the girls the cost of buying disposable pads. This is especially helpful for students from underprivileged families.

Thanks to the amazing work of Dada wa Africa and the helpful people who carried suitcases full of dignity kits from the USA to Tanzania, Veila has now distributed a total of 163 kits to girls in Kigongoni primary school, Jangwani primary school, and Kilimatembo secondary school. We are so grateful for the generous people who dedicated their time to supporting the welfare and dignity of girls in our education program, so that the girls can feel comfortable attending school and focusing on what matters—learning! 

 We’re excited to share our official theme for World Giraffe Week 2026: Giraffe Behavior. This year we are shining a spotlight on the fascinating ways giraffes interact with their environments–from feeding and drinking to social dynamics. Visit the World Giraffe Week website to find out more about the fun Girafftivities we've developed to learn more about how giraffe behaviour, and how you can be a behavioural scientist!

Wild Nature Institute published a new scientific study with colleagues from the University of Zurich in the Journal of Applied Ecology that provides insights into one possible function of giraffe spots: thermoregulation.

Understanding which phenotypes are best adapted to different temperatures could clarify how populations may adapt to climatic changes and guide effective conservation measures. In Viability selection on coat spot patterns correlates with temperature anomalies in Masai giraffes, we investigated the role of spot patterns on fitness and showed that spot size correlates with giraffe survival during heat waves and cold spells. Spot patterns influenced giraffe survival and their effects were altered by temperature anomalies. In calves, spot size may help with thermoregulation while spot shape may conceal them from predators. In adults, sex-specific selection pressures suggest sex differences in heat tolerance and trade-off with different functions. Conservation management maintaining variation in spot patterns by facilitating genetic exchange (e.g. through habitat connectivity) may help giraffes to adapt to climate change.

As always we thank our donors and partners for supporting our giraffe conservation research. Click the button below to download the paper.

A new study published in the African Journal of Wildlife Research provides clear genetic evidence that Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains act as a major natural barrier separating populations of two iconic species: the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the Masai giraffe (Giraffa tippelskirchi). The research team analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 450 elephants and 100 giraffes across the Ruaha–Rungwa, Katavi–Rukwa, and Nyerere–Selous ecosystems, uncovering a strong east–west genetic divide.

This work was made possible through a collaboration among researchers from Penn State University, the Research and Innovation for the Serengeti Ecosystem (RISE) at the Grumeti Fund, the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University, the Wild Nature Institute, the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism in Dodoma, Tanzania.

The study found no shared haplotypes between giraffe populations on either side of the Eastern Arc Mountains, indicating long-term isolation. In elephants, researchers detected only minimal historical female-mediated gene flow, with a single shared haplotype across the mountain chain.

Lead author Dr. George Lohay highlighted the importance of these findings for understanding wildlife evolution:
“We found no genetic evidence that giraffes ever crossed the Eastern Arc Mountains, and elephants show only minimal past movement.”

The mountains naturally restrict movement, but research indicates that ongoing habitat loss and the decline of miombo woodlands are now jeopardizing the remaining wildlife corridors. This makes their protection more urgent than ever. Additionally, there is evidence that other species, such as sable antelopes and lions, are also separated by the Eastern Arc Mountains.

Wild Nature Institute’s educators Patrick and Thomas traveled to Naivasha, Kenya from 27 October to 2 November, to lead a special ‘giraffe camp’ hosting 46 children ages 10-14 from low-income areas of Nairobi. The kids read and discussed our storybook Juma the Giraffe, did deeper learning activities about giraffes, played eco-themed games, constructed giraffe puzzles, and learned all about giraffes, giraffes, giraffes! Then they visited Lake Nakuru National Park to see Rothschild’s giraffes up close and personal!

Everyone received a copy of Twiga na Rafiki Zake, our giraffe-themed activity book, and a Celebrating Africa’s Giants t-shirt.

As always, all of this was made possible thanks to donations from our amazing partners! Thank you everyone for supporting hands-on giraffe-themed environmental education for African children and making learning about giraffes fun and memorable.

Wild Nature Institute launched a program in July 2024, called “Food4Thought” with Armonk2Africa. This is a free school lunch program in one of our most underserved schools, Esilalei Primary School. Most of the children at Esilalei Primary School are unable to pay for school lunch and therefore the kids go through the entire school day without eating. Children cannot learn properly on an empty stomach and feeding them improves their attention spans and capacity to learn.

In partnership with the community of Armonk, New York, who raised more than $10,000, we were able to provide a healthy lunch of beans and corn for all 600 kids in the entire school every day for an entire school year, as well as pay a local Maasai woman to cook the food, thus providing another Tanzanian with steady income. The head teacher reports that attendance is up from before the free lunches were provided, and kids even come to the school during holidays for the lunch. After a full year of successful delivery of these free lunches, the kids are healthier and happier, so we decided to expand the program to two additional primary schools, Jangwani (700 students) and Baraka (600 students), where the kids also were not regularly eating lunches due to the inability of the parents to pay, and to prevent the temptation for these under-served communities to send all their kids over to Esilalei. This means Wild Nature Institute is providing free, healthy lunches for 1,900 children every single school day!

These three schools are located within savanna rangelands that are important movement routes for wildebeests, zebras, and elands, as well as giraffe and elephants. Thus, they are critical for wildlife conservation and these communities also experience conflicts with wildlife. 

At the beginning of October, we purchased a three-month supply of beans and corn for all three schools, enough for the remainder of the year. We organized celebrations at each school to introduce the program and show them the food, and everyone was so excited and happy. 

Wild Nature Institute has just completed our 15th year of photographic surveys for giraffes in the magnificent Tarangire Ecosystem. Using photographs, we identify each giraffe by its unique spots. We are tracking thousands of individual giraffes including where they go, which other giraffes they spend time with, and their survival and birth rates. We can determine which places are important for giraffes, and help make sure those places are protected and connected. Thank you to all of our generous donors for funding our giraffe surveys over so many years. We are learning about the lives of wild giraffes, to help people and giraffes to thrive together in the savanna.

With our partners we are running the world’s largest #giraffe #research and #education program, helping people and giraffes to thrive together.
30,000 kids reached
6,300 giraffes monitored
 
Sacramento Zoo
Columbus Zoo and Aquarium
The Living Desert
Tulsa Zoo
Tierpark Berlin
Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden
Zoo Miami
Como Park Zoo & Conservatory
Roosevelt Park Zoo
Roger Williams Park Zoo
Fresno Chaffee Zoo
Toronto Zoo
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
PAMS Foundation
andBeyond Travel
NomadTanzania

World Snake Day was on July 16th, and this year the Wild Nature Institute and the Wild Snake Project collaborated on our annual “Snake Blitz” event with a full week of community education. The aim is to foster a sense of wonder about snakes, and inspire a generation to understand and care for snakes as they do for other wild animals--while also teaching people how to avoid conflicts and what to do if bitten, thus "saving people, saving snakes." During the blitz, scientists and educators reached hundreds of children in the Tarangire region of Tanzania—a place rich in biodiversity, including snakes, and the focal area of Wild Nature Institute's Celebrating Africa’s Giants environmental education program and our long-term giraffe research.

The Snake Blitz was led by snake warriors from Wild Snake Project in Kenya. WSP's Dickson (pictured above) and Collins spent a few days training our two new Wild Nature Institute educators (Patrick and Thomas) about snakes, and how to effectively teach schoolchildren about the importance of snakes in the environment, snake identification, and snake bite first aid. After this training, the entire team visited five different primary schools, teaching 550 children through hands-on games and activities, distributing 700 Swahili-language snake activity books, and bringing 130 children to visit the Meserani Snake Park and Clinic to see snakes up close and personal.

Wild Nature Institute's education program coordinator Veila said “The kids were very happy to learn and see snakes, most of the kids admitted that they have been fighting snakes for no reason, but from now on they will stop that, and they will teach other people that snakes have no problem if they are not disturbed. When they saw a snake, they will leave it, they will tell other not to kill them as well.”

It was a fun and successful week for the Wild Snake Project and Wild Nature Institute, and we thank all of you who made this week memorable!  As always, we are deeply grateful for the support of our funders.