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The Golden-Rumped Elephant-Shrew
The Golden-rumped Elephant-shrew is a strange-looking animal which is thought
to be distantly related to the aardvark and to elephants, hyraxes and sea cows.
It is only found in the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, so its survival is dependent on
the continued ecological health of the Forest. It was therefore chosen as the
logo of the Friends of Arabuko-Sokoke Forest.
Golden-rumped Elephant-shrews practise facultative monogamy, meaning that they
pair for life, but will take any opportunity to mate with a 'widowed' animal which
has not yet found a new mate. Since the pair live together in their own territory,
the males chasing off any male interlopers, and the females seeing off other females,
one rarely sees more than two together. They feed mostly on insects dug up under
the leaf litter, and sleep in nests of dry leaves swept into a small hollow in
the ground. They do not burrow or climb trees, so are vulnerable to predation
by wild carnivores and, more recently, by domestic dogs. In the early 1990s when
Clare FitzGibbon was studying the animal, she estimated that there were 20,000
individuals in the Forest.
Cindy Bauer, of Eastern Kentucky University, studied the human impact on abundance
and distribution of the Golden-rumped Elephant-shrew. This is done mostly through
recording the number of their nests found on transects in all vegetation types
of the Forest. Lynn Rathbun, the wife of Galen Rathbun who has carried out several
studies of the Golden-rumped Elephant-shrew since he first became interested in
the animal in 1970, is an artist who has made several charcoal sketches of the
Golden-rumped Elephant-shrew, including the one shown here.
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