On a blistering August afternoon, Stephanie stands itching her legs in the heat at the Sedgwick County Zoo. As a three ton, 54-year old African elephant, leg scratching can be quite the balancing act. That’s no matter to the comparatively small, 400-pound Kijani.
The four month old male calf, covered in distinctive red hair and a layer of dirt, saunters right under Stephanie. The elder elephant lifts her trunk as Kijani makes his way underneath her on his march towards a nearby mud wallow.
Katie Muninger, the zoo’s manager of elephants, watches on from the other side of the enclosure fence. She says this is the new normal for Stephanie.
“When he was introduced to her, she would always put her ears out and look down at him, like ‘What are you?,’” Muniger says. “But she is just so relaxed with him now, like he just walked under her and she made sure he had the space to do it.”
Stephanie’s comfort with Kijani is a big relief for the team of 12 keepers that care for the African elephant herd at the zoo. Stephanie was brought to the zoo in the 1970s as a young elephant. Since she’d grown to adulthood, she’d never seen a baby elephant until this year.
The zoo is in the midst of a baby boom. The majority of the African elephants born in North America this year were delivered at the Sedgwick County Zoo. Kijani is just calf two of three born to the herd since April. A fourth calf is due any day now.
Dr. Hannah Arens, the zoo’s director of animal health, said there’s a mix of nerves and anticipation among the staff as they wait for the final delivery day.
“I think we're excited for the last baby to be born, just so we can all breathe a little bit,” Arens said. “The last six months have been kind of a whirlwind for us.”
This is not where Arens thought her career or the zoo would be when she was hired more than a decade ago. She joined the zoo in 2012, back when Stephanie and another elephant Cinda were the only two elephants in the zoo’s care.
“We didn't know the future of elephants in our zoo,” Arens said. “It was all about geriatric medicine and making them [Cinda and Stephanie] comfortable and monitoring them for decline in health. And that's just kind of how I thought my career was going to go for elephant medicine.”
Both Stephanie and Cinda came to the zoo 1972 as orphans from Kruger National Park in South Africa. They were some of the earliest residents of the zoo, moving to Wichita in the zoo’s second year of operation.
Cinda passed away in 2014 leaving Stephanie as the zoo’s lone elephant. Arens thought that might be the end of the program.
That’s because of rule changes occurring with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. It’s the gold standard for animal care and management in the United States.
In 2011, the AZA published its first elephant-specific standards. The rules emphasized the social health of elephants as well as the physical health. The AZA called for all zoos with elephants to maintain at least a three elephant herd to provide a base level of socialization. It gave zoos until 2016 to adapt to the new requirements.
Zoos had three options: lose their accreditation, send their single elephants to other zoos or bring in more elephants.
The Sedgwick County Zoo first received AZA accreditation in 1981 and has maintained its accreditation status ever since. The zoo decided to embark on a major elephant exhibit expansion rather than lose Stephanie. It set its sights on creating a breeding herd.
The zoo spent $12.6 million expanding Stephanie’s exhibit to a five acre area capable of supporting nine elephants. In 2016, Arusi, Xolani, Zuberi, Talia, Simunye and her young son Titan arrived from Eswatini. The African nation, in the midst of a severe drought, was preparing to cull its elephant herd to free up more resources for rhino conservation.
Arens said that the move saved the zoo’s elephant program and the elephants.
“They were starving to death,” Arens said. “That's a memory that will be burned in my brain forever. When they first arrived — if an elephant had two trunks to shove hay in its mouth, they would have done it. They ate for days and days, just straight eating. That's all they were doing.”
Staff got the new elephants healthy, acclimatized to the space and comfortable with newly minted matriarch Stephanie before it worked with the AZA to find an elephant match for breeding. The second male elephant brought to the herd — Callee from Omaha — was the key.
A month after he arrived, five of the six elephants were pregnant.
“Everything changed and we had to shift drastically to turning into a breeding herd — which was fantastic and amazing, but also kind of scary,” Arens said. “It was definitely a new territory for everybody at the zoo, not just the vets.”
Muninger, who joined the elephant team in early 2025, said like with any birth, there was a lot of preparation to do. The exhibit was baby proofed. Bars were added to any space in the pens a baby elephant might be able to squeeze its head through.
Medical check-ups increased as well. Keepers increased their blood draws on pregnant Simunye, Talia, Xolani, Arusi and Zuberi. They watched for major changes in progesterone levels, first to confirm pregnancy and then to estimate a delivery window. Keepers helped vets perform rectal and abdominal ultrasounds as they were able.
“And then we sometimes try to see if we can feel the baby on the side, because sometimes you can,” Muninger said. “We had a pretty good kick last week that one of the keepers felt.”
That’s about the limit of the prenatal monitoring the zoo could do, something Arens said she became painfully aware of during the first delivery.
Simunye was the first elephant to go into labor. In March, much of the staff gathered in a small shed to watch the delivery via a camera feed of the boma, or indoor elephant facility. Arens said that while Simunye and the calf had been healthy throughout the pregnancy, it became clear that labor was going too long.
“There's a lot of medicine that you cannot perform on elephants because they're too big,” Arens said. “Our machines aren't calibrated for those kinds of things…. A lot of it is just gut feeling.”
Arens and the vet staff ultimately had to decide when was the right window to administer oxytocin to induce Simunye and save her life. Simunye delivered a stillborn female calf the zoo named Malaika.
“It was pretty traumatizing, honestly,” Arens said.
Simunye’s loss upped the emotional ante when Talia went into labor in April. The birth of Bomani, a male calf, brought joy back to the herd. Muninger says Simunye stepped in to help Talia.
“Simunye came with her and helped her get the baby up, helped nurse the baby,” Muninger said. “And then [she] showed, ‘Here, Taila. You nurse your baby,’ and it was kind of a cool experience to see Simunye help Talia figure it out.”
The relationship between Simunye, Talia and Bomani has been a particularly special one for keepers to watch develop. Muninger said that Simunye and Talia allomother Bomani. It’s a behavior seen in the wild where one elephant will take on all of the trappings of raising a calf alongside the biological mother.
Both Simunye and Talia nurse and protect Bomani.
“Bomani — having two moms —he has all the snacks he could ever want,” Muninger said with a chuckle. “He recently hit 600 pounds. He's a little on the upper side for his age, but not too bad.”
Bomani’s birth was followed four days later by Kijani’s. In June, Arusi gave birth to a girl named Asali. Zuberi is ready to deliver any day now.
It’s a major accomplishment not just for the zoo, but what Arens calls the American herd. Changes to the AZA standards, particularly in 2023, have fostered a collaborative approach to elephant management in the United States where officials think herd first, zoo second.
“I know a lot of the elephants at other zoos by name, which I never thought would happen,” Arens said. “Tthat's really because of the tight knit community that we have become, that we're working as a herd of one.”
Arens said the new calves add biological diversity to the herd and preserve some of the genetics under threat because of population decline in Africa.
“They have wild genetics from Eswatini,” Arens said. “That's really important. And I love that they were all born together. They can all be raised together. And then, you know, the future for our females after that is, it's open.”
For now though, Munginger said that the only job of Bomani, Kijani and Asali is "learning how to play and be elephants with each other.”
