An Interview with Sharon Deemby Sharon L. Deem with Stephen Blake
I stood frozen at the edge of the muddy clearing, eyeing the big bull elephant cautiously. I knew he would become alarmed if I, or any of the team members, revealed our presence. Lifting my dart gun, I aimed carefully, hoping to hit the bull in his large hip muscles, where the anesthesia would be delivered most effectively, and fired.
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| A forest elephant in Gabon. (Carlton Ward, Jr.) |
The dart was on target, and as if irritated by its sting, the elephant splashed around in the clearing. Minutes seemed like hours as Steve and I anxiously waited to see whether he would run, and in what direction. When he retreated into the trees on the opposite side of the clearing from where we stood, Steve radioed the rest of the darting team, stationed 150 feet back in the forest, to join us. We followed the bull, with pygmy trackers leading the way looking for fresh prints, dung, and disturbed branches. We spotted the anesthetized bull lying comfortably about 200 feet from where I had darted him 15 minutes before.
While I checked the bull’s condition and collected skin, blood, and other samples, Steve strapped a telemetry collar around his neck. Finally, we had accomplished part of what we had come to Congo’s Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park to do: fit four forest elephants with collars that, through their embedded GPS tracking devices, would enable us to follow the elephants’ movements through the central African equatorial forest for the next two years.
This trip, which took place in March and April of 2003, was the third time I’d traveled to the Congo to work with Stephen Blake, a conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Steve leads a project to understand the ranging and migration patterns of forest elephants in Africa’s equatorial forests, which comprise the largest expanse of rainforest on Earth after the Amazon. The project involves WCS scientists from Congo and Gabon, as well as scientists from the European Union-funded ECOFAC Project, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Save the Elephants (a Kenya-based charity), and now, with my involvement, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. The WCS Field Veterinary Program, based at the Bronx Zoo, coordinates forest elephant immobilizations for the project.
As one of the project veterinarians, my job is to safely anesthetize elephants so Steve can place telemetry collars on them. In addition, I collect biomaterials (such as blood, feces, ticks, and skin biopsies) that I take back to the laboratory to assess the health of these animals, about which little is currently known. The rest of our team on this trip included a second veterinarian, Robin Radcliffe, from Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas, one Bantu field assistant named Sylvan, and four pygmy trackers, Mossimbo, Adouma, Mambeleme, and Monyaka.
The forest elephant telemetry project began in 1998 thanks to Steve’s budding collaboration with the internationally recognized elephant conservationist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder and chairman of Save the Elephants. Since the 1960s, Douglas-Hamilton had studied savanna elephant ranging using conventional radiotracking technology, and by the mid-1990s he had developed an impressive satellite telemetry program in East Africa.
Iain was enthusiastic about sharing his knowledge and experience with Steve, and was also keen to expand his operation to the forests of central Africa. He financed two trial collars, which jump-started the program in 1998 after they were deployed under the veterinary supervision of Dr. William Karesh in Dzanga National Park in Central African Republic. Unfortunately, one of the collars failed immediately, and the other only gave GPS data for one month. However, this small data set, in conjunction with a few locations from VHF radiotracking, showed that a female elephant and her young calf used a home range of at least 340 square miles (880 square kilometers), considerably larger than many had suspected. Not only did she cross the international border repeatedly, but she traveled well outside the boundary of both Dzanga-Sangha Reserve and Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park.
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| This female elephant was collared by Sharon's and Steve's team in 2001. (Stephen Blake) |
This was a tantalizing look into the almost unknown world of forest elephant movements. But the disappointing collar performance stalled the project for the next two years, while collar technology improved. When Iain had successfully tested a new generation of collars on savanna elephants, STE funded four new collars for the forest program in late 2000, and Steve and his colleagues were ready to try again. Luckily for me (and, it turns out, for Steve who is now my husband), I was asked to join Steve to provide veterinary supervision during elephant immobilization in the heart of the Ndoki forest.
As in the case of many good plans made in the office, ours went awry as soon as they met the realities of the forest. Instead of deploying all four collars, we spent a full month nomadically stalking through the Ndoki wilderness to shoot and collar just one elephant, a beautiful bull whom we called Sue (from the Johnny Cash song). In early 2001, we returned to the Ndoki to finish the job, but decided to go back to Dzanga National Park on the Central African Republic side of the border, where elephants are easier to find. This time we succeeded in collaring the three remaining elephants in just ten days.
The data from these four collared elephants have given us the first real window into the life of free-ranging elephants in central Africa. A former WCS scientist had successfully satellite-tagged forest elephants in Cameroon, but in those days the collar performance was poor and the elephants were in a forest surrounded by human activity. In the relative wilderness of Ndoki, our four collared elephants roamed over an area of about 2,300 square miles (nearly 6,000 square kilometers), with one individual using a home range measured at about 850 square miles (more than 2,200 square kilometers). The elephants could cross Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park rapidly, moving more than 37 miles (60 kilometers) in as little as three days, and traveling well into the neighboring logging concessions and unprotected areas. These data showed us what forest elephants can do in a vast, intact area of protected forest. But what about in areas around the park, where humans are modifying the landscape with roads, and where there is logging, poaching, and other hazards?
The purpose of the 2003 trip, to the buffer zone around Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, was to begin to answer that question. The Ndoki National Park is one of the most remote areas in central Africa, and thanks to effective conservation management now enjoys almost no human activity other than research. However, surrounding the park, commercial logging, elephant poaching, and both commercial and subsistence hunting are increasing pressure on the elephants and their habitat.
What is a Forest Elephant?
Why all the fuss about putting telemetry collars on
forest elephants and learning about their movements?
This question may best be answered by asking another.
How many people even know that elephants exist in the
depths of the central African forest?
At present, scientists recognize two species of living elephants: the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and the African elephant (Loxodonta africana). What most people don’t realize is that the African elephant is further classified into two subspecies, the familiar savanna elephant, L. africana africana, and the mysterious forest elephant, L. africana cyclotis. Forest elephants are smaller than savanna elephants, they have straight, downward-pointing tusks, and their back is higher than their head, all of which are adaptations to life in dense forest. Recently, geneticists seem to be confirming what tropical forest ecologists had suspected for some time: Forest elephants may in fact be a distinct species.
Although there have been many studies, articles, books, and films about savanna elephants over the last several decades, the ecology of forest elephants, which in 1989 were thought to have made up more than one third of all Africa’s elephants, has largely been ignored. These mega-herbivores, described by tropical ecologist Adrian Kortlandt as forest bulldozers, are true forest engineers, shaping the African rainforest through foraging, seed dispersal, and excavations for minerals, yet we know very little about them, including how to ensure their survival in the 21st century.
Studies conducted by forest-elephant specialists Richard Barnes, James “Buddy” Powell, Andrea Turkalo, and others have provided data on the abundance, distribution, foraging, and social structure of these elephants. Barnes and his team pioneered census techniques for elephants in central African forests, and in the late 1980s showed conclusively that forest elephants had suffered enormous losses during the ivory trade boom years of the 1970s and 1980s. In a paper entitled “Man determines the distribution of elephants,” published in the African Journal of Ecology, Barnes and his colleagues provided recommendations for conservation actions in the 1990s. In the first comprehensive ecological study of forest elephants, James Powell showed the huge role forest elephants play in seed dispersal. Andrea Turkalo knows forest elephants as individuals and social beings better than anyone alive. Through tremendous dedication over more than a decade, Andrea now knows more than 2,800 individual elephants, and has helped ensure the protection of the Dzanga Bai in the Dzanga National Park, perhaps the most important single location for elephants on Earth. (Bais are water- and mineral-rich clearings probably created by elephants excavating for minerals. Our telemetry data show that bais may attract many hundreds of elephants from as far away as 62 miles, or 100 kilometers.)
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| A forest elephant in Gabon. (Carlton Ward, Jr.) |
More recently, Steve and his colleagues are showing how elephants are true forest gardeners, planting the forest on an elephantine scale with more than 100 species of seeds, including many that are important foods for humans. His research shows that an elephant may eat a fruit in the heart of a national park, and a few days later deposit its seeds in a nutritious mass of dung 60 or more kilometers away in, for example, an unprotected logging concession. No other animal is able to shape the potential distribution of fruit trees in this way.
The ranging data we are amassing from the first five GPS-collared elephants are important for decision-making about land use and management. These data help demonstrate that even large national parks, with their finite boundaries, do not provide the space and resources necessary for the long-term survival of forest elephants. By adding more collared elephants to the study—elephants living in different habitats and under different land-use conditions both in and out of national parks—we will be able to see how roads, logging, hunting, and other human activities affect the movement of forest elephants and their ability to cope in a changing world. This information will help resource managers, governments, and industries to promote conservation on a scale sufficient to support the needs of viable elephant populations. In the Ndoki, for example, the logging company Congolaise Industrielle du Bois is collaborating with WCS to improve forest management for the benefit of wildlife. Elephant-ranging data from this company’s logging concession will certainly be incorporated into management planning.
Our study comes at a time when conservation, scientific, and commercial interests are all focusing on the nearly 772,000 square miles (two million square kilometers) of Central Africa’s forest as one of the richest biodiversity regions on the planet. This forest is home to elephants, forest buffalo, bongo antelope, leopards, golden cats, and more species of primates than anywhere else, including gorillas, common chimpanzees, and our closest relatives, bonobos. It supports many thousands of plant species, including an abundance of majestic hardwood trees that provide some of the most beautiful timber found anywhere on Earth.
Timber, and a wealth of commercially important minerals including gold and coltan that are important to the cell phone industry, make the Congo Basin’s forest an essential economic resource, under present global economic conditions, for the development of the central African nations, some of which are among the poorest in Africa. In addition to rich flora and fauna, the Congo Basin is home to pygmies, possibly the oldest living human ethnic group. Pygmies, too, are in danger of disappearing due to the encroachment of commercial exploitation and increased human pressure from the exterior. Recent scientific studies on the biodiversity of the region, by organizations such as the Smithsonian National Zoo’s Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity (MAB) Program, are now beginning to reveal the high level of biodiversity of this species-rich region (see “Teeming Life in Gabon’s Rainforest,” ZooGoer September/October 2003).
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| The study mentioned in this story evaluates the effects of roads, logging, and poaching on forest elephants. (Carlton Ward, Jr.) |
Travels in the Congo Forest
During our 2003 trip, we camped for two weeks in various
places within the forest surrounding Nouabalé-Ndoki
National Park while we searched for elephants to safely
immobilize and fit with telemetry collars. Unlike similar
work on savanna elephants, in which the field team often
drives to the elephants in air-conditioned Land Cruisers
or flies in by helicopter, work in the forest is all
on foot and a completely different undertaking. The
first challenge is simply walking through the forest
far enough to find areas with dense concentrations of
elephants to have a reasonable chance of finding suitable
individuals to collar.
Our team of local Bantu and pygmy people is essential for any mission into the forest. To walk in the forest for weeks on end, we must carry all the supplies we need for survival. These include food, tents, sleeping gear, and clothing to stay moderately comfortable in the wet, hot forest environment. We also have to haul the equipment for our veterinary and ecology studies. And even with the benefit of GPS “compasses,” few Westerners have mastered the skills necessary to navigate in the thick forest. The pygmies know the forest like most of us know the streets of our hometowns, and they continually keep us on track. Importantly, some of the trackers have a deep and intimate knowledge of forest elephant behavior.
Two of the pygmy trackers with us, Mambeleme and Monyaka, have killed many elephants with handheld spears, and more recently with automatic weapons and large-caliber elephant guns, always at the behest of their Bantu “patron.” For their services as elephant killers, pygmies may be paid with a new pair of shorts, a pot and pan, or a few dollars, and a beautiful pair of tusks may be worth hundreds of dollars to the gun owner. But Mambeleme and Monyaka have now been working with Steve and WCS for many years and are glad to be off the poaching circuit, earning a steady salary, and involved in conservation efforts.
We relocated our camp four times to be near bais that appeared to be visited often by elephants. Some of our campsites were no more than tents pitched in the thick understory of the secondary-growth forest, which grows after primary forest has been selectively logged. When we found a site after a long day, the pygmies would quickly make a campfire and prepare a cooking area while we found flat areas in the thick bush to erect our tents before the light faded. Unfortunately, at many of these camps, the insects found us within an hour, making camp living less than pleasant. Other times, we stayed in research camps, where we enjoyed the luxury of sleeping on cots under wooden shelters.
We carried four collars with us, but the elephants were less abundant than we anticipated, and over the course of 13 days of hunting we had only two opportunities to dart one. In both instances, we successfully immobilized large bull elephants in the same bai, called Wali Bai, near the village of Bomassa, HQ of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, fitted the telemetry collars, and collected samples for the health study.
Unusually high rainfall may have hampered our ability to find many elephants during this trip. Heavy rains dilute the minerals in bais, making them less attractive to elephants. The rain also increases the amount of fruit available in the forest, which tends to make the highly frugivorous forest elephants disperse in search of good food. The lack of elephants may also have been due to more human activity than we have previously encountered, which is, of course, the principal reason for the current study. Although most days would go by without our finding a hint of elephants nearby, we were fortunate to experience some of the forest’s other inhabitants, including gorillas, chimpanzees, duikers, flying squirrels, and forest buffalo. The sights and sounds of the forest captivated us as we walked for miles in the forest or sat near a bai at dawn.
It is always disappointing not to finish a job, but with two out of the four collars successfully deployed and no people or elephants hurt, we were satisfied. It is gratifying to know that two forest elephants are now wearing our collars and providing us with unique data about their daily movements. We are certainly fortunate to have an excuse to return to this enchanting forest to finish the job.
Where Are They Now?
Half a year has now passed since we deployed the collars
on our two bulls. We are receiving a continuous update
on one of the greatest mysteries left in the forest—the
ranging patterns of elephants.
Surprisingly, the younger of the bulls, St. Nick, is rather sedentary, and concentrates his movements around the Wali Bai. He also appears to prefer the large openings caused by logging road junctions, which offer an abundant food supply of succulent ground vegetation. Unfortunately, he also frequents the plantations of the village of Bomassa—for St. Nick is a crop-raiding elephant. Crop-raiding often leads to human-elephant conflict, and it is a serious problem through the range of African elephants. But almost nothing is known of the underlying behavioral decisions made by crop-raiding forest elephants. We hope that these data will help us understand when, where, and why elephants such as St. Nick concentrate their crop-raiding activities, and enable us to predict and perhaps prevent them from crop-raiding in the future.
Old Mammoth, on the other hand, has not yet visited the Bomassa fields, but has instead traveled several times deep into the sanctuary of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. On each of his repeated visits to the park, he has taken roughly the same route, which he may have been using for more than 60 years. Unlike young St. Nick, Mammoth surely remembers when Bomassa village was the center of an intense poaching operation, and when the old habit of avoiding human beings at all costs was the only hope for a forest elephant’s survival.
We expect these two collars to continue sending us data for two full years, which will show us the elephants’ large-scale seasonal range and their smaller-scale movements and habitat use. Solving the mysteries of forest elephants is always both exciting and sad. Exciting, because with knowledge comes the power to reason and act intelligently; and sad, because with understanding, the mystery itself dies. Until now, elephants have been the phantoms of the forest—the trees have hidden their secrets from the world. Unfortunately, the trees also hide their massacre. We hope to use our knowledge to conserve the forest elephant and protect its habitat. If we succeed, perhaps the elephants will still keep a few secrets for themselves.
We thank the enormous and varied financial, logistical, technical, and political help provided by all of the collaborators involved in this work: The governments of Congo and Central African Republic, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the United States Agency for International Development, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the World Wildlife Fund, Save the Elephants, Lotek Engineering, and Telonics Inc. We also thank all our colleagues in Congo and Central African Republic for their tremendous support of this project.
—Sharon L. Deem is a veterinarian at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Stephen Blake is the forest elephant conservation coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society. In Spring 2004, Sharon will return to central Africa as a member of a Smithsonian team of researchers working in the Gamba Complex of Gabon. On this future trip, Sharon plans to immobilize six forest elephants so that the team can place telemetry collars on them. Data collected from these elephants will help researchers better understand where forest elephants travel and how savanna corridors, which link forest patches in the region, are used by the elephants.
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Photographer Carlton Ward, Jr., whose images accompany this story, and the Smithsonian's Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity (MAB) participants Francisco Dallmeier, Alfonso Alonso, and Michelle Lee have just published a book titled The Edge of Africa, which is available from Hylas Publishing. Buy the book online at the National Zoo Store.
Carlton Ward, Jr. photographed forest elephants in Gabon as part of the MAB Program. MAB focuses on the broad goals of research and education and seeks to integrate science—especially conservation biology—with resource development projects around the world. In cooperation with governments, industry, and other research entities such as zoos, the program strives to conserve Earth’s storehouse of biodiversity and the potential that millions of species hold for future generations.
ZooGoer
33(1) 2004. Copyright 2004 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
