Not a single day at Elephants Alive (EA) is the same. They are working on many different projects, and I am lucky to be exposed to quite a number of them. Let me introduce you to these projects by showing you what a day at the ‘office’ of EA can look like.
Another day at the office: tracking elephants This is one of my favourites! Elephants Alive collects different types of data by tracking elephants in the Associate Private Nature Reserves. These reserves are now part of the Greater Kruger National Park since the fences were dropped, and the elephants can therefore roam from these parks to Kruger and beyond, as the fences from Kruger to Mozambique are also removed. A number of elephants in the region are given a GPS-collar. This enables EA to check their movements, which has a number of benefits. With a collar it is easier to protect individual elephants and collect data, and allows for preventive action in the rare case of an elephant trying to break the fence.
On a tracking day, I join my colleagues Tammy and Ronny, two experienced elephant trackers with lots of knowledge about the bush. With some help of GPS and telemetry, we locate the elephants and drive to them – if we can. Sometimes the elephants are invisible in the bush, and all you can do is wait. When they do show themselves near the road, we take pictures of both ears of every individual, as well as other characteristics of each elephant. These photos are used for ID studies, which have been going on for decennia. Location, time, habitat type, the number of elephants, and what they are doing are also noted. At the moment EA is doing research on a number of different ageing techniques, for which they also need to collect dung samples to test testosterone and stress levels, measure height by using trees as a reference, and measuring footprints. To not disturb the elephants, and for our own safety, we wait for the elephants to move away completely before we can do the measurements. Because you can never be sure when and where they will move, this sometimes means waiting for a couple of hours – which we lately fill by a guessing game to test each other’s knowledge of wildlife. To me, a day tracking elephants means spending a full day enjoying the bush and the presence of elephants, with a major bonus of having a safari in the meantime.
Another day at the office: bees and trees project Elephants are very powerful and intelligent animals, and use these characteristics to get access to natural food sources. For example, in times of food shortage, they regularly push over trees to reach roots or dig for water. Unfortunately for people however, some also use their strength and intelligence to get access to food in human-occupied areas, for example by breaking fences to access crops. Their capacity to destroy human property contributes to human-elephant conflicts in both Africa and Asia. One way to reduce such conflicts is to use bees to deter the elephants, as elephants are fearful of bees and are likely to move away from an active beehive. Multiple studies with such fences have proven successful in reducing the number of elephants breaking in to croplands by using beehive-fences (read more in this link). Single beehives can also be used on a small scale, for example, by protecting economically or ecologically valuable or iconic trees – especially those that elephants find very tasty. They can push them over to reach the roots or the leaves on top, break branches, and strip bark. Elephants Alive has previously tested the potential of bees to protect trees, compared to wire netting the stem or no treatment at all, and the results are impressive. Of the control trees (no treatment) 54% were impacted by elephants, compared to 28% of the wire-netted trees, and just 1 tree (2%) of the trees with bee-hives (source: Cook et al., 2018).
All these experiments with bees require a lot of time and dedication. In the previous large-scale study, 50 active hives and 50 dummy hives were hung in trees in the Jejane section of the Greater Kruger National Park. During the experimental phase, these hives required regular care, for example by bringing them sugar water and nectar to help their survival. Although most of the hives are now inactive due to the winter drought, the hives still require occasional check-ups. For example, we just cleaned all 100 boxes for potential new wild swarms to move in, and will be moving some active hives that are stored elsewhere back to Jejane. This moving is done at night because the bees are less active then – but handling hives still requires suiting up in these fabulous white costumes! Furthermore, queen-excluders and supers are added to certain hives to be able to collect honey at a later stage. Lastly there are occasional other small jobs to be done, such as checking wild hives that might be collected and added to the study.
Another day at the office: bees and trees project, continued As always in research, results give rise to more questions and ideas to be tested, so research on other methods to protect trees from elephants continues. For example, an experiment was set up to test whether bee-pheromones are able to deter elephants. Elephants have an excellent sense of smell, and individuals that have previously been exposed to angry bees can associate the pheromones with the angry bees and learn to avoid it. They can also pass this knowledge on to their relatives. The potential of pheromones will be tested more extensively in the future. Another technique that is being used to protect trees from elephants is the use of rocks or concrete ‘pyramids’ (which the elephants do not like to step on). When applied correctly, bees, wire netting, and pyramids have already proved their ability to significantly decrease tree damage, which can be very important for saving iconic or valuable trees.
I get the opportunity to help out with practically all different tasks involved with the bees and trees projects as long as I’m here, which is pretty cool. And the more time I spent with these little creatures, the more intriguing they become.
Another day at the office: vulture surveys Vultures are very important to the ecosystem because they clean up carcasses and therefore prevent the spreading of diseases. However, their numbers have decreased a lot over the years, which is worrying. As I just mentioned above, elephants are very capable of impacting trees. Because vultures nest in trees, people have worried that elephants negatively affect trees with vulture nests. It is important to find out if elephants are significantly influencing vulture populations by damaging their nesting trees, or if other factors are to blame. Therefore EA collects data on trees with vulture nests, and the elephant impact on these trees. To collect this data, we drive around in various game reserves and check the trees with vulture nests. Many of the new trees’ locations have been collected by spotting nests from an airplane – a very useful method, but unfortunately not always very accurate. We therefore spend quite some time trying to find the tree, which in some cases is not exactly where we expect it to be but, for example, on the other side of the river (which has hippos and crocs in it). When we do find a tree, we give it a tag, note the exact location, note score all elephant-related and other important impact, measure its diameter, and take a photo with a measuring stick to later determine height and other characteristics on the computer. This is all used to assess both tree preference of vultures and the impact of elephants. Fun fact: we encounter a lot of animals on these days, and we even enjoyed the beautiful scene of a breeding herd of elephants crossing the river close by! (photo)
If elephants are indeed contributing significantly to the decline of vulture nesting trees, steps can be taken to protect these trees from elephants. This however does necessarily mean that elephants directly cause the decline of vultures, because many other factors are involved. If elephant impact minimally affects nesting trees, or the effect on the vulture population is for other reasons negligible, the focus of research on how to protect vultures can shift to other potential causes. Other causes can be for example changes in rainfall and the use of poison. For comparison, in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, there were way more suitable potential nesting trees available than there were vultures, even though trees had decreased in numbers. Furthermore, elephants did not seem to be the primary driver for decreasing woodland density, and neither is nest disturbance likely to affect breeding success and adult survival, the latter of which is more important to vulture population dynamics (source: Kendall et al., 2017).
Another day at the office: the office You might not believe it after reading the above sections, but there truly are normal office days at Elephants Alive. The office is located at Mica village near Hoedspruit. In total, there are about 8 employees at EA the moment, which are regularly joined by freelancers and others involved in elephant conservation. Some people spend more time in the office than others, but there is a lot to be done. For example: preparing and following up on research projects, educational projects, and community programmes, creating maps, entering data, analysing data, writing reports, making presentations, keeping up to date in relevant issues, updating land owners, having meetings, managing a non-profit company, fundraising, keeping track of elephant movement, abundance, mortality, identification, and ageing, and all else I now forget to mention.
Also at the office, but not necessarily limited to the office, are marketing related issues. This contains more than just social media posts, blogs, and maintaining the website. EA is lucky to attract a lot of bigger media attention, for example from newspapers, magazines, radio, television, documentary makers, and film makers. These show interest in the organisation as a whole, or in specific projects. Already at my second day, we had the 50/50 film-crew (South Africa national television) over, to film EA and the different projects, at the office and in the field. Two weeks later, my colleague Robin got to do another interview about the bee projects. Such media outreach is very important to EA, as it spreads awareness about the importance of elephant conservation, and might attract new sponsors. EA is a non-profit organisation and mostly reliable on sponsors. You too can make a donation if you want to contribute to their amazing work. Any donation or purchase from their shop is appreciated! Let me know if you want me to bring bracelets, I can squeeze those in my suitcase in December!
References and further reading If you want to read more about Elephants Alive and their different projects, have a look at their website. The sources I used for writing this blog are:
- Elephants Alive, personal communication
- http://elephantsandbees.com/beehive-fence/
- Kendall, C. J., Rubenstein, D. I., Slater, P. L., & Monadjem, A. (2017). An assessment of tree availability as a possible cause of population declines in scavenging raptors. Journal of Avian Biology, 48, 1–8. http://doi.org/10.1111/jav.01497
- Cook, R. M., Parrini, F., King, L. E., Witkowski, E. T. F., & Henley, M. D. (2018). African honeybees as a mitigation method for elephant impact on trees. Biological Conservation, 217, 329–336. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.11.024