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Barely known and never seen, Elephant shrews baffle even the zoologists. With their stilt-like legs and long mobile trunk, joined to the body of a large shrew with a golden bottom, they certainly deserve their name - though they are related to neither elephant not shrew!

This shy, endangered creature has become the mascot of Kenya’s beautiful Arabuko National Park. The income they attract via tourism pays for the education of local children. The elephant shrew has truly become the Spirit of the Forest

These are very cautious animals. Hunted by eagles and snakes, they retreat under piles of leaves on the forest floor. During the day they will seek out beetles and worms with their twitching trunk. Biologists once ranked them with mice and hedgehogs, but now they have a class of their own: the Sengis.

Their only habitat is the Arabuko forest on Kenya’s East Coast. Kenya’s last coastal forest is a unique - and globally significant - centre of biodiversity. And it even contains ancient ruined cities straight out of The Jungle Book. Its best-known citizen is this creature with its whimsical looks and amusing behaviour; local and international environmentalists have taken the elephant shrew as a symbol for a new approach to protecting our world.

Thus the inhabitants are learning to profit from the forest without damaging it. They run butterfly farms, and plant medicinal herb gardens. Projects like these are bringing work and wages to a growing population. As more people begin to understand what the forest can do for them, so there is less poaching in the elephant shrew’s domain.

People have stopped cutting down trees to make their fires and build their houses, planting new trees instead. They have built an electric fence to keep the elephants out of their villages; they have come to love the jumbos instead of shooting at them, and they have a new tourist attraction. It’s all about defeating ignorance and adapting old traditions - a full-time job for the forest rangers and researchers.

This film follows forest ranger and nature guide Willy Kembo as he educates two 12-year-old cousins, Karim and Karembo, in the ways of the forest, and keeps an eye out for the last of the illegal woodcutters!

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