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