TERF Information
Straight From The Elephant’s Mouth
by Alongkot Chukaew and Philippa Mitchell
Driving through the dark, forest-lined roads late at night, you see occasional glowing eyes of civet cat or porcupine as they scuttle across the road. Then away up ahead, the headlights pick out a large shadow in the middle of the road. Elephant!
The huge bull is out alone on the road enjoying a feast of banana trees. He is very aware of the vehicle, but at his size and age, he really doesn’t give a damn! He pulls a banana trunk down and drags it into the middle of the road where he proceeds to shred the plant, only eating the jucier, softer inner of the tree. The remainder is dumped on the road.
Patiently you wait . . . . and wait . . . . and wait. Eventually, perhaps having had enough banana tree for one evening, the bull looks directly at the vehicle, flaps his ears just a little and casually saunters off the road. It is obvious who has right of way in Khao Yai!
Watching Elephants
For most of us, this is the kind of experience we may have once, or if very lucky twice, in a lifetime. However for a privileged few, this is an almost nightly experience. Why? Because their job is to find, identify, observe and film the elephants of Khao Yai National Park. Od, Ou, Lung Pairn, Pong and P’Bun work for the Wild Elephant Research Fund, Khao Yai (see box) and have the role of driving the park roads to look for elephants.
Usually, the elephants come out of the forest and onto the park roads in the evenings and this is when most of the elephant searching is done. However, tip-offs from Park Rangers about elephant sightings in the daytime can have the elephant team scurry to collect all the surveying gear (cameras, data sheets, elephant identification records, video, spare batteries and dung measuring equipment), jump into the Fund vehicle and hurry (below 60Km/hour of course) to where the elephants were sighted.
Once there, the first job is to start filming and taking photos, whilst taking a GPS reading to determine the location, and making notes on the numbers and ages of elephants, their activities and where possible identifying each individual. At night-time, there is the added duty of manning the spotlight and keeping it trained on the elephants to enable the recorders to collect their information accurately.
Elephant Identification
To most people, elephants all look pretty similar – OK, you get smaller ones and bigger ones, but other than that they are grey with a few pink and black bits, have large ears, a long nose, 4 monster-sized legs and are generally pretty large.
However, for our elephant team each animal is different and can be recognized by features such as size, ear shape, pinky-brown colouring on the ear, ear folding and any holes or tears in the ear, presence, size, shape of tusk, length of tail and amount of hair on tail. Look closely at the ears and tusks in the photographs accompanying this article and see if you can see some differences. Some features may run in a family, for example all the animals in F1 have a wide forehead, whereas the animals in the Short-tail Family, needless to say, all have short tails.
After a while, the different features of individual elephants become clearer and identification becomes easier. However, just to make sure we do not make mistakes, we make an Identification Record for each elephant. This is a combination of mug-shots and body-shots with written details about approximate length of tail and tusks; a written description of other features and notes about where the elephant is often seen and with whom he or she prefers to hang out. Where possible, we also collect information about the footprint size of each elephant and even the size of the animal’s dung balls!!! Elephant research is not a job for the faint-hearted. Footprint size gives an excellent estimate of the elephant’s shoulder height – twice the circumference of the footprint. Dung size and shape also varies from animal to animal – the older the animal, the larger the dung ball and in old animals the dung is not so well digested which makes it much easier to identify the plants the elephant has eaten!
So How Many Elephants Are There in Khao Yai?
This is a question we still can’t answer – but we are working on it. In addition to our identification records for 56 elephants, we know of at least 17 others from camera trap photographs (see box). However, our surveys are not complete and we still regularly get camera trap photos of animals that we have not seen before. We don’t think that we will be able to get photographs of every single elephant in Khao Yai, so we need to use indirect survey methods to help get an accurate picture of how many elephants there are and where they live. Again, elephant dung is perfect evidence of the presence of elephants in an area – it stays around for quite a while, slowly decaying. So as we walk along trails deep into the forest, we count the number of dung piles, measure each ball of dung and note what stage of decay it has reached – Stage A being quite fresh and Stage E being totally rotten away. All this data can then be used to estimate the size of the elephant population and the different densities in each part of the Park. We will keep you updated!
Elephant Babies
We have seen at least 12 new additions to families over the last few years, and since October 2003 we have seen 5 elephant babies in the 8 family groups we have Identity Records for. First there was Khan Kluay, a charismatic female calf, born in October 2003 to the Kluay (or Banana) Family. Almost since she was first seen, Khan Kluay has been the ‘voice’ of the elephant research project in our presentations and is also the star of a series of documentary films we made about the elephants. Khan Kluay and her family are also the inspiration and models for a new cartoon animation film by Kantana Animation Company LTD, called ‘Khan Kluay’. We and Kantana hope that this film will inspire young people in Thailand to understand and care about elephants and realize the need for everyone to get involved in the conservation of elephants.
In November 2003, NamFa was seen in the Ding Family. Next came Madi, and then our Christmas present – Sai Tong first seen in December 2004 in the Tong Family and our New Year baby, NamMon was born in January 2005, also to the Ding Family.
As with human babies, elephant babies learn new skills and become more adept at doing things as they get older. We have had many opportunities to see how the youngsters develop and change physically in the first months and years of life. We would like to share with you the story of Madi…
It was a routine night in late October 2004. Everything seemed quiet and we wondered if we would see any elephants as we drove down the Prachinburi road. As usual, we slowed right down on approaching the salt lick, and what a surprise met our eyes. The salt lick was just heaving with elephants. We had never seen so many animals there before, and we were not sure if we had ever seen so many anywhere else either. Slowly we drove up and started gathering information – filming, photographing, counting, identifying. The elephants were oblivious to their human watchers and milled around, some feeding, others digging, sucking and squirting the mineral-rich soil into their mouths or over their backs. There were over 30 elephants, from at least 5 different families and some solitary males (male elephants that have left their family group and now live alone, or sometimes with other males), gathered in the one place.
What was going on?
After we had been watching for some time, an elderly matriarch (female family leader) moved slightly forward into the light and from between her legs peeked a small face with large eyes, a very floppy trunk and an incredibly hairy head and back. We were enthralled by the new arrival and we all felt incredibly privileged to watch the elephants gathering and celebrating the birth of a new member to the family of Mali, 4 year old Ruang and teenage Jumpbee. This was the second baby of Mali’s that we had seen, as we had also watched her with Ruang when he was a baby and seen how Jumpbee, a young female elephant, had helped look after Ruang.
The new baby, Madi, which can be roughly translated as ‘A Good Arrival’, was by far the smallest baby any of us had ever seen and we were very worried about his survival. We wondered if Mali’s mature years were a factor in her latest baby being so small. We need not have worried though, as Mali’s experience in raising offspring paid off. Over the next few months, we met this family frequently around the salt licks on the Prachinburi road – it seemed Mali was reluctant to make her family travel long distances, preferring instead to stay in a location with pretty much all that elephants need – water, food and mineral-rich soil.
Though able to walk and follow the herd within a few hours of birth, new-born elephants are by no- means in full control of all of their muscles. The main problem is the trunk. To the very young animals, this strange floppy limb must seem totally pointless as they appear to have virtually no control over it other than to throw it in one direction or another. We couldn’t help but giggle as we watched Madi half-running to keep up with his Mum, his trunk flailing around, not quite in rhythm with his loose, floppy stride. When Madi was about 3 months old, we saw him at one of the salt licks with Khan Kluay’s family. The older calf was quite adept at digging and sucking soil with her trunk, but poor Madi just couldn’t quite get the hang of how to manoeuvre this long muscular limb and eventually gave up, dropping onto his knees so he could eat the soil directly with his mouth. By four months, Madi was starting to have some control over his trunk and could direct it and start to wrap it around things like clumps of grass. Soon he was happily ripping up grass and other plants and (as with human babies) putting the pulled items into his mouth. Milk, however, is still his staple diet and will be until he is well over a year old. From the start, Madi was a healthy eater and it seems that his appetite has grown with his size too! By five months we saw him drinking almost every time Mum Mali stopped for long enough, whereas when he was younger he didn’t feed quite so often. Now at six months Madi does eat some of the plant material he so cleverly plucks and places in his mouth with his trunk, but if Mum stops, then he is running for her teats! Male elephants tend to be weaned about a year earlier than female calves – basically, once their tusks start to form at between one and two years, Mum doesn’t want to have anything to do with the boy calves! And who can blame her?
Madi is a typical youngster – curious and interested in everything. From about 5 months onwards, he started bravely to move away from his Mum and investigate more of the world around him. When his family met with others, he would play with the other calves rather than stay under the protection of his Mum and family. He would also cheekily drink from other Mums too! (We have seen this feeding of other Mother’s calves quite often amongst the Khao Yai elephants, but it is too early in our research for us to know whether the mothers are related or not.) Like many youngsters, Madi has a very short concentration span. He will lie down for a rest and then jump up to investigate a noise or something that has caught his eye. But that will only hold his attention for a short while, and soon he just has to investigate something else, or go back to having a nap!
Volunteers on the Elephant Project made a short video on Madi’s early life, but at the moment we only have it in Thai. We are looking for a young boy or girl who speaks good English to do the voice-over in English – if you think you can, we would love to hear from you.
The Wild Elephant Research Fund, Khao Yai grew out of a 3 year research project on the elephants in Khao Yai, largely due to a teenage male known to many around Thailand as Dengrue. In August 2004, Dengrue was seen limping along the Park road and the Park Superintendent invited elephant researcher, Alongkot Chukaew, and his friend Dr Put, a qualified veterinarian, to see if they could help the injured elephant. Despite lack of funds Alongkot and Dr Put decided to do all they could to help Dengrue and were soon feeding him bananas filled with antibiotics and painkillers. The story came out in both local and national press and, soon after people from all over the country were visiting the makeshift camp and donating money, bananas and medicines to help the injured elephant. Thanks to these donations, Dengrue survived and is now regularly seen by our Elephant Team.
One of the visitors was Khun Anusorn Yuktanan from iTV who decided to organize a concert to raise funds for the project. The concert was held in September 2004, raising over 800,000 Baht and the Fund was formed. The aims of the project expanded to include:-
Research Our research aims include estimating the total elephant population size in Khao Yai, finding out the distribution and density of elephants throughout the Park, their seasonal movements of different areas, a focus study on bull elephant home ranges and behavioural changes during musth, studying the genetics and reproductive endocrine (hormones to you and me!) cycles of the elephants and conflict between people and elephants around the park. Hopefully, we will do all of this in 5 years!
Outreach and Education Elephants feeding in adjacent farmland cause problems in 12 of the 49 protected areas in which elephants are found. These problems have been recorded most recently in Khao Yai. In some parts of Thailand, this conflict has led to deaths on both sides – the elephants and people, though the former are the more usual losers. Helping people living around protected areas to understand about the needs and lives of elephants is one one way to reduce this problem. Working with Park officials and locals, we hope that we can find ways to reduce its impact on both the local communities and the elephants.
We feel that education about wild elephants is fundamental to their future survival. Without knowing about something, how can people value it? How can they want to conserve it? So we regularly run activities for students from around the country, though our main focus is the young people who live around Khao Yai.
Mobile Veterinary Clinic Our qualified Vet is working with local Tambon offices to help provide veterinary care for pets and livestock in the communities around Khao Yai. Sometimes, young vet students on work experience go with him. In addition to providing a service for the community, this is an excellent way to meet local people, talk about their lives and problems and also talk about the elephants and our work.