Samburu, Kenya Fighting to Save Elephants
The Clan of the Elephants believes the elephant is one of their brothers
That is what makes an elephant very special to us
We have legends and totems about elephants
Conservation of elephants is very important in our culture
If you kill an elephant it is like killing one member of the Samburu people
That is why we have given strong respect to an elephant
Elephants are part of us
In this landscape more than 70% of all elephants killed were killed illegally
That's a really bad sign
I'm Frank Pope
and I'm the Chief Operations Officer for Save the Elephants here in Kenya
The challenge of elephants is that they roam such an enormous distance
So by studying the elephants with the tracking aerials we've got on the plane here
and with the GPS collars that relay to what we're doing through Google Earth
we get to understand this landscape through the perspective of an elephant
[Jerenimo Lepirei, Research & Community Outreach Officer]
They're coming up here on the left
Okay, see if you can ID any Jerenimo?
Okay
What he's looking for is distinctive shape of tusks and distinctive tears to the ears
It's a bit of detective work, but it all goes on in a fraction of a second inside Jerenimo's head
Oh, it is the boys. That is Ares.
It's uncanny. He can be quite high above an elephant and he'll go, "I know who that is!"
This hill here is where our research camp is.
Save the Elephants Research Camp
My name is Dr. Jake Wall
and I'm an elephant researcher studying the movements of elephants using primarily GPS tracking
We can't ask an elephant what it wants and what it needs
So the only way to do that really is to follow it over the ground
My perception of elephants changed when I joined Save the Elephants
When you study elephants for many years, suddenly you develop this trust
and when you meet with them in the field, or when they meet you
[David Daballen, Head of Field Operations]
You look each other in they eye and you see this trust with these elephants
This actually gives you the capability of absorbing a lot of names and a lot of features
Small things like nicks and broken tusks and shapes of the ears
and different kind of personalities with these elephants
My main work is monitoring about 1,000 elephants that are all individually known
We're following their stories
So basically this is my field book
and M here means Migrant
So this is a code for a particular female
and if it's a bull I put the bull's number: B20, B50
But they all have their numbers
This data is like gold
It's kind of a warning system on what the population is doing
Are we losing elephants? Are we up? Are we just moderate?
What is happening?
That's what Save the Elephants has been based on since 1997: identifying all individuals that use these reserves
and following them
When the price of ivory initially went up
There was this terrible holocaust of elephants that swept across Africa in the 70's
and that was when our lives changed into a battle for the elephants
[Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Founder, Save the Elephants]
When Iain and I started Save the Elephants together, we just had one car and one tent
[Oria Douglas-Hamilton, Founder, Save the Elephants]
The car was the office
It was fun that early time
We got to learn the landscape and the topography
You were forever climbing up high hills and trying to make connections with elephants
that were somewhere out on the plains below you
We were doing two things:
looking and known individuals
building up a knowledge of who they all were
and also getting a team of scientists across every corner of Africa together
I think for Save the Elephants, the key is we have some of Africa's living experts right here in our camp
We're firmly based in the knowledge of what elephants do,
how they behave and what challenges they face
But in recent years, we've had poaching here in Samburu
[Numbers of elephants poached]
and actually it's what's going on across Africa
Lewa Wildlife Conservancy Headquarters
This room is the control center of radio communication
[John Tanui, Senior Radio Operator]
We have a variety of anti-poaching operations
We have rangers all over
They are keeping watch to make sure that the whole area is secure
This is where they report everything that they come across in the field during their patrols
Poachers go after elephants because of their ivory
They kill them to get ivory and then they sell to people from countries like Vietnam and China
So they kill them for money
Elephants are being poached across Africa
Very tragic scenes repeated time and again
I think now we're getting a consciousness worldwide about what's happening with the elephants,
and if we can lower demand for ivory,
and, particularly, share our awareness about the destructive effects of buying ivory
then I think we can once again shift the needle in favor of elephants
That's what we're campaigning to do right now
Building information about elephants is actually critical to make any policy for their conservational protection
So really until recently, very little was known about elephant movements
Radio tracking of elephants is something that Save the Elephants has always done
Iain was the first person to put a tracking GPS collar on an elephant
and we've just gone from strength to strength
It was always a research tool
Why are elephants moving in this way? Where are they going? What are they doing?
It was only when the GPS part of it came in
That platform for sharing the real-time movements of data
is turning the communities throughout this Northern landscape into protectors of elephants
We learned about this functionality in Google Earth that lets you retrieve information in real-time
One of the things that I've implemented is a series of algorithms that can analyze the data as it's collected
and that allowed us to supply our tracking data into Google Earth and have it refresh continuously
[Dr. Jake Wall, Database Manager]
So we could almost track in real time
The big female is called Coconut
It's just empowering for us to be able to follow our elephants around the screen in near-real time, day after day
and to share that with people who can do something about it
Other species must be allowed to live on this Earth together with us
It's not just our world
The Orphans' Project at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi has hand-raised over 180 orphaned elephants and reintegrated them back into wild herds in Kenya.
Samburu is very special
It's outstandingly beautiful
But a Samburu without elephants would be devastating
Once you start looking at how elephants can survive, you have to look at how other animals can survive
How habitats and great ecological movements take place
And above all, how human beings relate to the wild
Hello Samburu. Hello world.
Google
Explore Samburu at g.co/samburu
Learn more at SavetheElephants.org