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  • 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

Samburu, Kenya Fighting to Save Elephants

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