A small elephant, hardly bigger than a calf, wanders through the bone-dry Samburu National Park in northern Kenya – not just looking for something to eat. What you can’t tell from the pictures: The clumsy trunk animal boy is one of two extremely rare twin elephants that were first spotted in the reserve earlier this year – but now there is no trace of the baby jumbo’s brother. “He probably starved to death,” said animal welfare organization Save the Elephants on Twitter.

According to a study by the responsible ministry, at least 205 elephants are said to have died in Kenya alone in the past nine months, as well as 512 wildebeest, 430 zebras, 51 buffalo and twelve giraffes. The study also states that it is only the tip of the mountain of corpses: A large proportion of the animal carcasses were probably not found at all because they were too remote in the bush or had already been eaten by scavengers.

Experts know that young elephants are particularly at risk. They can only reach a small portion of the leaves while their mothers stopped producing milk under the stress of the drought. A full-grown jumbo needs at least 200 liters of water and a good 200 kilograms of feed per day: in times when there has been no rainfall for five rainy seasons in a row, a goal that is difficult to achieve. In Kenya alone, five million people are currently at risk of starvation, and more than 1.5 million goats and cattle have already starved to death.

Among the wild animals, herbivores are particularly endangered – also acutely threatened with extinction, such as the Grevy’s zebra with its particularly fine stripes, which is only found in northern Kenya and Ethiopia. Their total number is estimated at around 2500 copies. At least 49 of them are said to have died in the past nine months, almost two percent of all living striped animals.

Those responsible for Kenya’s national parks have begun drilling new water holes and feeding the starving herbivores hay. The population was asked to help with the procurement of additional feed – which is not exactly easy for them.

Because the famine also has a catastrophic effect on the coexistence between humans and wild animals. Francis Mutuku farms two hectares of land bordering Tsavo National Park in southeastern Kenya. “We haven’t had any problems with wild animals so far,” says the smallholder of the British newspaper Guardian: “We all had enough to eat.”

In the course of the persistent drought, however, elephants in particular visited his fields more and more often – and destroyed everything he had planted or sown. Mutuku and his neighbors took to driving the pachyderms away with noise, with the light of powerful lamps or with chili bombs. But the hungry trunk animals were getting bolder – recently two adult elephants, followed by seven young ones, destroyed his water tank.

“People say the rains are less and less because rich countries have polluted the air,” says Matuku. “I can no longer grow corn, but have to switch to plants like mung beans, which ripen faster and need less water”: The small farmer’s four-legged blackheads, however, have nothing to complain about mung beans either.

So far, the approximately 15,000 elephants in Tsavo Park have been threatened by poachers: But now twenty times more pachyderms are dying from the climate crisis than from shots by illegal ivory hunters, complains Najib Balala, Kenya’s Minister for Nature Conservation and Tourism.