A mother’s work is never done: A screenshot from a video posted by Darmin on his TikTok account showing the female elephant trying to gently steer her calf back into the forest in Tawau.
KOTA KINABALU: A female elephant’s gesture of using her trunk to gently steer her calf in the right direction caught the eyes of Darmin Ladiro.
Not wanting to tell the story without proof, he quickly reached for his camera and managed to record the moment.
“The elephant was trying to stop her calf from going to a nearby river. She was trying to lead the calf back into the forest.
“Her gentle pushing continued for quite a while,” said the 50- year-old, who described the moment as “cute”.
Darmin added that sightings of Sabah’s iconic Bornean elephant, locally known as the pygmy elephant, had been rare up until seven years ago.
“Lately they have been coming out a lot, maybe to look for food,” said the Bahasa Melayu teacher at SK Umas-Umas in Tawau, located in the heart of an oil palm plantation.
He said there was an ongoing tree-planting project where non- productive trees were felled, leaving the edible palm heart exposed.
“I guess the elephants are attracted to the palm heart as it is a food source for them,” he added.
Darmin began spotting wild elephants about 10 years ago.
“Sometimes they come alone or in pairs. But the most I have seen was seven years ago when a herd of up to 30 adults and calves were walking along Kalabakan Road, which now separates areas that used to be their habitats.
“It was beautiful and scary at the same time, but neither humans nor elephants were hurt in the incident,” he said.
Since then, elephants have been spotted on main roads quite often, so much so that elephant crossing signs have been put up to alert motorists.
Darmin said elephant sightings had become more common as they could be seen “visiting” villages around Felda Umas, Benta Wawasan (Dumpas), Kalabakan and Luasong, which used to be their habitat.
He also acknowledged that human-elephant conflicts exist, though he had not heard of any cases of elephants being abused or killed.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species recently listed the Bornean elephant, a distinct subspecies of the Asian elephant, as endangered.
In total, there are just about 1,000 such elephants left, including 400 breeding adults mostly found in Sabah, with a small population in Kalimantan, Indonesia.
In a report, the IUCN called for urgent conservation efforts to protect these genetically unique elephants.
