Hunted to the brink of extinction, the African elephant is making a dramatic comeback - thanks to an amazing example of nature's adaptability.
It is the elephant's tusks that have been its downfall. Ivory, once prized as highly as gold, is still a commodity to kill for.
So many elephants have been massacred by poachers that in the African bush the very balance of nature has come under threat.
But now the poachers are being foiled by nature. A genetic reaction to years of slaughter is producing a dramatic increase in the number of elephants born without tusks.
Fort the poachers, no tusks means no profit, and no reason to kill. Thus, tuskless elephants survive and increase their numbers; those with tusks continue to diminish.
It is the elephant's way of saving itself from extinction - and they are already being allowed to trumpet their success.
The natural fightback against decades of illegal and uncontrolled poaching has brought about a remarkable recovery in once - dwindling numbers.
At one national park in Uganda, for example, there were 3,500 elephants in 1963. Thirty years later there were just 200. Today the population is 1,200 and growing rapidly.
The tuskless phenomenon has been chronicled by researchers at Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. A survey in 1980 recorded that only one per cent of elephants were without tusks, as a result of a rare genetic mutation.
Now Dr Eve Abe, a Cambridge educated elephant specialist with the Government of Uganda, says that 15.5 percent of female elephants and 9.5 percent of the males in the park are tuskless.
Evidence is coming in that the tuskless elephant is occurring all over Africa, and particularly in southern Tanzania, where poaching levels are high.

"HEART OF WILDNESS"
(Conde Naste Traveller - January 1999)
(Prior to refurbishment of the Lodge)

Here stood the Mweya Safari Lodge, suspended in the sky between two bodies of water. Porters ushered us through the lobby, past a giant pair of elephant tusks and onto a veranda that commanded one of the most spectacular views in Africa - Lake Edward on one side, the Kazinga Channel on the other, and before us, the Mountains of the Moon, their flanks clad with mysterious forests, their snowcapped peaks lost today in cloud. We collapsed into wicker chairs, struck dumb by the sight of an alpine landscape on the equator. Waiters brought tall glasses of passion fruit juice. A lanky, bearded fanatic sat down beside us and started jabbering about birds.
Malcom Wilson spent his asthmatic boyhood staring out of fogged-up windows at shivering sparrows in rainy English gardens. From such beginnings grew a lifelong obsession that eventually landed him here, where he was trying to establish a bird-watching center. "It's a gold mine, if you understand birding," he said. "We hold the world record for a one-day species count - 397 species in a single day. There are 558 species in this park alone." He began to enumerate them: fish eagles, palearctic ospreys, Goliath herons, the papyrus gonolek, the bare-faced go-away bird, and the legendary shoebill, a huge pterodactyl like creature with yellow eyes and an imbecilic expression, almost impossible to see on account of its preference for impenetrable swamps.

MWEYA ENJOYS FRUITS OF CHANGE
(The New Vision - 24th February 2000)

"This is heaven on earth" wrote a family from Kisumu in the Mweya Safari Lodge visitors' book. "Lovely!! Excellent service and hospitality," Lilian Acom's scribbling reads. "What a nice place you have got here. Lovely is the word," a couple's message states. And the writings go on and on.
Forget the times when the place was under Uganda Hotels. Mweya has recently been renovated to standards that can hardly be matched in Uganda.
The lodge boasts of a breathtaking panoramic view overlooking Lake Edward on one side and the Kazinga Channel on the other. One does not have to venture from the hotel to view the whole area that is teeming with game and bird life.
"This is a beautiful place. It is a very good first impression of Uganda," says Janine Rosmalen, a journalist from the Dutch National Radio KRO.
"This is a very different scenery. It is a more breathtaking view than some of the places I have visited," chips in Faharen who is enjoying the water of Lake Edward with a group of six people.
"I have never been to a place like this. You can swim and still view the game! That is the best thing," she adds with ecstasy.
"It is a pity this image of Uganda is not catered for. If my mother knew that I was here, she would faint," Rosmalen says.
The Lodge has a unique character provided by its traditional architecture. The traditionally designed single storey structures of the main building and the separate guestroom blocks, a