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 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 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 When Iain and I started Save the Elephants together, we just had one car and one tent 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 and actually it's what's going on across Africa Lewa Wildlife Conservancy Headquarters This room is the control center of radio communication 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 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.
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