Chilla: Without the intervention of Rajaji National Park (RNP) Director, Mr. Sunil Pandey, the recently rescued elephant calf may not have got all the care and attention it is getting now. Mr Pandey was one of the first to reach Chiderwala village in Khasnrao Range on Aril 23 when a local forest guard spotted the lost calf wandering on the roadside.“In the summers, elephant herds move across the road to reach the river to drink water once in the morning and evening. In the evenings, they cross over to the fields and raid crops. In the process the calf must have got left behind,” surmises Mr Pandey.

“We waited for more than five hours and even sent out several search parties to locate the natal herd but did not met with success,” he says. The calf was very distressed at this point, he kept pacing up and down, making small sounds with his trunk and was trying to stay as close to the people as possible.

Since the only elephant camp in RNP is locate in Chilla with two captive elephants, the calf was brought here. “We called the local vet, Mr. Lokesh Kumar, to examine the calf’s health. Once he declared that it was good, we started him on a diet of cow’s milk and later changed it to infant formula,’ he says.

RNP has looked after an orphaned calf earlier. Raja, the 16-year-old male at the camp, was orphaned when his mother was killed in a rain accident on the Hardwar-Dehradun track. “Since Riaz’s father brought up Raja, I handed over the responsibility of Yogi to him as he may remember from his childhood how his father brought up Raja,” explains Mr. Pandey.

Though Mr. Pandey visits Yogi as often as possible, he is busy directing other rescue operations at RNP as well. Even as he was talking about Yogi, Mr. Pandey was called to supervise the rescue of a leopard that had got entangled in a farmhouse’ s barbed wire on the fringes of the park.

With Yogi being the first calf orphaned calf to be rescued from the wild in the last 16 years in RNP, he surely occupies the pride of place in the RNP director’s schedule.