Amboseli National Park

Foles will nurse from their mother for 8 to 13 months.

At Amboseli in 2018, we watched as two stallions were challenging each other for the right to mate with a mare.

They rose up and they kicked at each other with their hooves.

Their fighting was interrupted when someone, whether another zebra, a topi, or a wildebeest, spotted a lioness stalking them.

So it gave us enough time to kind of get his bag early in the morning and then, you know-

I've, I've had that situation before at the Amboseli Safari a couple of years ago where my bag got lost, and it was like four or five days of me living-

Mm

...

This girl's story is just one example of the difference that educational support can make.

Through its partnership with community conservation organisation Shades of Amboseli, Drusilla's is helping to provide opportunities for children while also supporting projects that strengthen the resilience of the wider community.

The partnership forms part of Drusilla's long history of supporting conservation and education in Kenya.

Since 1996, the park has raised more than £84,000 for projects in the region, and in 2025, formally joined forces with Shades of Ambuseli, working closely with its founder and Maasai elder, Kenneth Ole Sayi, and President Paul Lovett-Smith, who lives locally in East Sussex.

Drusilla's work with Shades of Amboseli is based on a simple principle.

Protecting wildlife and supporting the people who live alongside it must go hand in hand.

Earlier this year, the Sussex attraction funded the repair of a vital community borehole after it was damaged by elephants.

Life alongside wildlife brings its own challenges.

It's, you know, every time you shake hands with somebody or touch somebody, um, you're actually exchanging microbes.

And we did this cool study with baboons in the Amboseli National Park in, in Africa, um, uh, where, uh, where we found that baboons actually...

The physical interaction between certain baboons actually exchanged beneficial microbes to help them digest their food.

So, you know, think about that.

And they, uh, they, excuse me, they interact with each other a lot.

Gosh, what is my favorite thing? We just got back from doing, from Amboseli where we were photographing the big tuskers, you know, big giant, crazy giant elephants.

And that was kind of fun.

The big cats.

The manto is lost at about three months of age.

A few days after we observed the mother cheetah with her six-week-old litter of five cubs at Amboseli, we saw another mother cheetah with four adolescent cubs, possibly six to nine months old, at Masai Mara.

These cubs were much larger.

They were great fun to watch as they tried to climb a tree and were playfully roughhousing with each other.

Well, we've still got, uh, for some of us 24 hours or so before we leave.

You guys are flying off to Amboseli tomorrow morning-

Yeah

... continuing the adventure.

So they're, they're, they're loud, and they're bright, and they're not dangerous, so the elephants see it and run away.

Um, and we saw this happening in Kimana, which is near Amboseli.

Um, but when they get to the farm, they break down the fences, they trample the farms, they eat the, the, the vegetation.

So I'm wondering if that pesticide was on purpose, like this will fucking kill an elephant.