This year, I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of the proceeds of my annual calendar to the amazing research and conservation work Bring The Elephant Home is doing on elephant behaviour, habitat, and wellbeing in South Africa and Thailand (and soon other parts of Africa, like Zimbabwe, Uganda, and more!).
The calendars are available in my photography shop. Just select the SHOP button, go to Specialty Products, and scroll down to the calendars.
Currently, I’m only able to ship within the US, but send me a note if you’re out of the US and want a calendar…we’ll figure something out.
While you’re in my photography shop, browse around… you may find something fun as a holiday gift. The photo lab I use does amazing prints, and we can ship pretty quickly for holiday gifts.
I started writing this post on a dark plane flying North over the African continent, visions of elephants and African wildlife swimming in my head. Now I’m home, back from another trip to Kariega with the BTEH team to do additional observations and work on an exciting elephant ID project that blossomed from that first trip.
How it started: I went down to South Africa last March sort of blindly. I had signed up for a volunteer program with an NGO called Bring The Elephant Home to help the researchers do behavioural studies on elephants at Kariega Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape. We spent 10 days there, in the field and in the classroom, learning about and studying these amazing creatures. Just a few months before that trip, they had removed the interior fences in the reserve, so one of the key questions we tried to answer was “what happens with the eles when you remove fences?” I wrote about that amazing experience here.
Fast-forward a year and a few months, and these elephants have been living in their expanded habitat for some time now.
5 observations after another 10 days in the field:
The herds seem to be thriving. There are new-ish calves and lots of mud wallowing. The eles really seemed jovial and happy.
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All the herds seem to be spending a lot of time in the Harvestvale section of the reserve. There are still 3 matriarchs with GPS collars (Half Moon, Beauty, and Bukela), and the BTEH team has tracked them over the past year in a sort of migration pattern with the seasons. Last year, Bukela’s herd was very cautious about crossing over into their new territory, so it could be that the Kariega West herd has benefitted most with the new habitat.
They’ve made new friends and acquaintances. One of the most beautiful things to observe was that all the herds seem to be affiliating, if not intermingling. Time will tell whether this leads to new mini-herds or one giant one.
The bulls are roaming about in bands of 2s and 3s, and even these guys have crossed clans. We observed Matchstick hanging around with Holy Moly, and Sean (one delegate from each of the herds). Maybe Matchstick (from Harvestvale) is playing mentor – or host – to the other two (from KW).
Kambaku was in musth. He’s from the Kariega West side. It seemed probable that he mated with Mavis (from Harvestvale), so the bulls are probably enjoying the fact that they have more ladies to choose from.
Exciting news.
Last year, I left feeling like there had to be an easier way to ID individual elephants. So I organised a Hackathon team to work on an AI model that would help speed up and automate the identification process. While we didn’t fully solve the problem for Hackathon, we came close… and that led to a partnership of sorts between our Hackathon team, Bring The Elephant Home, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, and WildMe, the internationally-known NGO that works to identify and track endangered species worldwide. To date, WildMe’s WildBook population monitoring doesn’t have elephants in their re-ID model because they didn’t have a large enough data set to train the AI. So through this collaboration we are going to first train their re-ID model to include elephants, and then work on a mobile app that can be used in the field.
To say that we are very excited is an understatement!
More exciting news.
All research points to the fact that habitat expansion leads to thriving herds, lower environmental impact, less human/elephant conflict, less human intervention needed for elephant population control, and a healthier ecosystem for many of the interdependent species in the area. Together with the Elephant Reintegration Trust, BTEH is working on creating the world’s first elephant rewilding reserve. BTEH also supports initiatives to create an “elephant corridor” in the Eastern Cape that aims to pull down more fences between private reserves and build a network of connected wild spaces up to Addo National Park.
This year’s program felt like both a summation of research as well as a lens into the future. Many thanks to Antoinette and Brooke at Bring The Elephant Home for creating these exciting programs to promote elephant wellbeing and more successful human-elephant coexistence.
More to follow, with photos and stories, from an amazing 10 days with the elephants and the BTEH volunteer team.
Okay, so every day wasn’t elephant counting and monitoring and dung sampling. Yes, I really went to South Africa for my vacation and spent at least a small amount of time looking at, taking photos of, measuring, and rooting around in, elephant dung.
The Bring the Elephant Home program was structured to give us several days in the field, a day or two in the “office” doing projects (I wrote a blog post, created a few new visuals for the team, and contributed a BUNCH of photos for the ID project… and I’m trying to put together a Hackathon project to use AI for elephant ID. More to come on that as it progresses!), and time to see the local area and learn even more about Xhosa culture.
We watched some presentations on other conservation being done in South Africa and abroad, one by Bring the Elephant Home’s Antoinette van de Water on her work on the value of elephants [read the white paper here, or take a look at her TedTalk here], and by the amazing work being done in rewilding by Brett Mitchell of the Elephant Reintegration Trust. Their motto, “helping elephants in captivity or distress to gain the freedom they deserve” says volumes about the work they’re doing. (Know any gajillionaires? A new project they’re working on to create a sanctuary and rewilding center near Kariega needs funding. Let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the right people!).
A small public service announcement: If you are fortunate enough to see elephants in their native land and have the opportunity to ride or touch captive elephants, please DON’T! Just please don’t patronize these businesses. These types of business exist at the expense of the health and welfare of the animals. [read more here]
Elephants are sentient, endangered beings, mistreated and quite often drugged in order to be submissive enough for human entertainment; in the process they suffer years of emotional and physical hardships. Having seen captive elephants first-hand in Thailand and India, and wild elephants in Africa, I can assure you that there is nothing more exquisite than watching a wild elephant in its natural habitat. There is absolutely nothing satisfying about watching a captive elephant. [rant off]
One of the events later in the week was an offsite visit to the home of one of the Kariega Foundation’s staff for an afternoon cooking demonstration! Xhosa cuisine is comprised of quite a lot of meat, but also their staple starch called samp, a corn meal derivative that seemed a lot like the East African fufu or ugali, made with cassava, that I tried in Botswana and Zimbabwe. Beans or sauces (meaty and non) are poured over the samp, as other cultures would use rice or potatoes.
Lunch!
Fears of cultural appropriation dancing in my head, our faces were dotted with Xhosa-style paints, and we donned handmade clothes and beaded neck wraps. Our smiling hosts guided us into the kitchen and outside to the fire upon which we heated stews and baked the bread we had just hand-rolled. Note: It was a bad time to have quit bread, as these hot-off-the-fire rolls were simply divine. The afternoon culminated with a demonstration of local song and dance by kids from the neighborhood, replete with drums and chanting. This dancing show gave me pangs, as in cultural experiences I’ve had elsewhere in Africa: I wondered if the kids participating in the show resented their elders for making them show off for the visitors, or if the joy on their faces during the dancing and singing was genuine, and whether they were grateful to share this expression and pride of culture. I hoped for the latter, as they did appear to be quite enjoying themselves. The smiles were genuine. Ours too.
Over the course of the 10 days, we learned, we did research drives, we walked along the white sand beaches of Kenton-on-Sea, and even did a night drive through the dirt roads we spent so many days travelling in our quest to find the herds. Jackals and kudu, white rhinos and rhinoceros beetles (one, landing on my neck, was an unwelcome visitor!)…and the Southern Cross in the Milky Way-spattered sky. But the highlight of the evening, as we were heading back to camp in the darkness, was a weird little creature we saw scampering down the dusty road, looking like a cross between a tiny bear and a marmot. He ducked down into a dry gully as we stopped, popping up only a metre away from the vehicle to stare down his smarmy nose at us. A honey badger! To quote even our naturalist, “I’ve never seen one of these in person before.”
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We went up to Addo, a national park an hour away that boasts an elephant population of ~300. It’s rumored that a couple of Addo bulls are planned to be transferred to Kariega to help balance out and give some adult supervision maybe to a young and randy bull population over there (stay tuned, maybe that will be a new research opportunity!). The day was drizzly and spitty, but it was still fun to see dozens and dozens of eles at the different watering holes throughout the park.
It’s not without irony to me that there are really no wild wild animals remaining in South Africa. Their wild stocks have been poached and hunted to near-extinction; the wild lands, animals and all, are all now locked behind fences to protect them from the most alpha predator of all.
It was fitting, then, on our last day, that we spent time in the pouring rain visiting the APU, the Anti-Poaching Unit, at Kariega. These rangers steadfastly protect their eles and rhinos (black and white) from said predators. In fact, while visiting the team, we were privileged to a sighting of Thandi and two of her calves. Thandi is famous in these parts for being the only rhino to have survived a brutal poaching attempt in which two others in her crash (an apt collective noun for rhinos!) where brutally murdered. Thandi’s face was mauled when they hacked off her horn, but hers is a survival story that speaks to the valiant efforts of surgeons and conservationists alike to restore her face and her family. Since the poaching in 2012, she has created a small battalion of rhinos and now has grand-babies roaming the thicket and savannah of Kariega in her honour. On our first game drive, we met Colin, Thandi’s 2nd calf. According to Kariega’s website, that calf was named Colin in memory of the reserve’s founder, a man loved and admired by many, who had died just days before Thandi gave birth. The name Colin means ‘victory of the people’. White rhinos in this case.
Colin
Black rhino
Black rhino (notice the radio collar on his leg?)
Not a rhino 😉
Thandi and 2 calves
The skies cleared just as we realised we were running late for lunch and our ride back to Port Elizabeth. We hadn’t managed to spot more than one or two elephants in the distance all day. But just like a cheesy movie, as we were losing hope, we managed to get a ping from Beauty’s collar – the one that had been malfunctioning all week. She was about a kilometer away from the fence at the edge of the Kariega Conservation Center. Of course she was. So as it turned out, in our last moments of our last game drive on our last day in Kariega, we were treated to a close encounter with the whole of Beauty’s herd, a brightening sky, and baked-in memories to last half a lifetime.
Late that night, in a hotel room in Cape Town, which felt like a million light years away from the reserve, I saw a WhatsApp message to our group from Brooke, the PhD researcher: “Beauty and Half Moon came up to the fence to say goodbye.” Later still: “Bukela’s herd crossed the river!” This was the exact thing we were there in South Africa to help observe: What happens when you remove a fence.
Next up: a few days in Cape Town and a long trip home.
THIS JUST IN: Want your very own elephant prints or cards? I just launched my new print store… take a look HERE. And use coupon code TGM-15 for a 15% site-wide discount!
Big news at Kariega Game Reserve! In December of 2023, in association with the Kariega Foundation’s habitat expansion project, BTEH supports the removal of one of the internal fences connecting the Kariega West and Harvestvale areas of the park. A key mission of the project is to give herds on opposite sides of the fence (and river) access to a broader habitat. I mean, who wouldn’t want a larger area in which to play and explore? One of BTEH research objectives is to see, in short, what happens when you remove fences and how that impacts herd behaviour and population health.
I’m reporting from the BTEH elephant research program at Kariega, March 2024. This is the first time BTEH researchers Brooke Friswold (PhD student) and Antoinette van de Water (PhD) have observed the different herds here post-fence removal. It’s an exciting time to be a part of this! [Aside: if you’ve always wondered how to get involved with elephants, are a little nerdy about research stuff, and think the idea of a safari seems a little too much like a canned experience, you’ve got to try this program! 😉]
Drive by
Collecting data
Dung sampling
Materials reclaimed from taking down the fence
Brooke trying to get a signal
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Here are 5 observations (expected and otherwise) after fence removal:
New places to explore! Not surprisingly, we’re already seeing herds and individuals that were once confined to the Kariega West area exploring into the Harvestvale section, and vice-versa. Elephant location, movement and interaction are monitored via GIS (geographic information systems) tracking and low range radio collars which were fitted to 6 elephants of varying ages/sexes in August of 2022. Fitting collars is a complicated and costly operation, requiring veterinarians, helicopters and scientists (plus some luck), so it was devastating to learn that more than half of the collars have failed (full collaring report here) due to twisting and malfunction. The elephants are fine, but the science is impacted. Findings during our time here in March will assist with on-the-ground identification, behaviour tracking, and dung sampling (yep!).
You see Brooke tracking Beauty’s herd via a telemetry antenna contraption in the pictures above because a 4th of the 6 radio collars is malfunctioning.
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The bulls are a little, erm, randy. Think of it like spring break: you put a bunch of single college guys in a new environment with a bunch of cute and possibly available chiquitas, what do you get? Well, scientifically, many of the males (bulls) have gone into musth, or a state of pre-musth (though per the science-y folks, this observation is still anecdotal but we found out this week that there are 3 (!!!) bulls in musth right now here at Kariega). In general musth is a stage of the mating cycle when adult or sub-adult bulls experience testosterone levels of 60 times greater than average. This makes them do weird and not-so-weird things like Following sub-adult females (cows), Touching genitals (their own and cows’), placing their “Trunk over back” of desirable cows, chasing zebras, walking around Sniffing the air, wandering far and wide, and generally getting excited for the “new meat” in the vicinity. We’ve observed and logged many of these behaviors in the Zoomonitor app, and we’ll see how this plays out (stay tuned to the BTEH updates page for details).
Amazing social excitement and interaction. In our first days of observation here, we noticed some of the Kariega West and Harvestvale herds have meshed. Our first morning, we saw the Half Moon herd mix with Beauty’s herd. This of course throws off the ID database, which had neatly arranged individuals by herd by area, and means that our ID work this month will be crucial to not only identifying individual cows and bulls assimilating into different herds, but also tracking the potential new herds that may form as a result (see point 2). Per Antoinette, “It’s amazing to observe elephants that fully have the freedom to explore and interact and make new social connections. This is the best way to see elephants completely in their element.
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Some are travellers, some are not. Kariega’s elephant population is roughly 75 individuals. Elephants are social and highly intelligent: emotionally and mentally. They are said to never forget, and can hold onto traumas just like people. Herds are traditionally led by an old and wise female (I began writing this post on International Women’s Day, so of course they are 😉) So with all the exploring and commingling some of the elephants are doing, one matriarch, Bukele has still not crossed the river from Kariega West to Harvestvale. Whether it is because the way to the other side is around or that the river is saltwater and thus creates a natural fence (elephants love to swim and bathe, but prefer freshwater), this remains to be seen. Camera traps, GIS tracking, and future research trips will help answer these questions…and more.
Happiness is contagious. During our initial drives, we observed un-stressed, curious, social, and thriving elephants. As with humans, lack of stress reduces cortisol, which leads to overall better health and well-being. Additionally, seeing happy and healthy elephants put a smile on the face of everyone in our vehicle. Per Antoinette, “What we observed yesterday is like the best example of how range expansion contributes to animal well-being.” When elephants are happy, so are the people watching them. Want to learn more?
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When I asked Brooke what her biggest surprise was, she commented that it is so exciting to see the different herds socialising and commingling like this. “It remains to be seen,” she said, “whether this is just exploratory because it’s new, if the new commingled herds and interactions will persist, or if they will go back to their original structures in time.”
Interested in getting involved (highly recommend!)? Go here. Now.
A final note… this blog has been cross-posted on the BTEH website (HERE). Please take a look at all the amazing articles they have on their site. The eles will thank you.
THIS JUST IN: I just launched my new print store… take a look HERE. And use coupon code TGM-15 for a 15% site-wide discount!
I didn’t know how to write about this trip. It’s been 5 years since I’ve been on a proper tour and half of those were spent while my life was sideways, treading water in an upside-down world changed forever by a plague and other mishaps. So in trying to compare and contrast my experiences, it dawned on me yet again that places have spirits or souls or essences that invite you in or spit you out, like Rajasthan or Istanbul or Botswana or Sardinia or Belize or Aachen or Marrakech or Amsterdam or wherever you call home…each has left its mark on me in a different way.
In Rwanda, I felt held. I felt fed – with local foods, recent history, a collective passion; with knowledge about conservation and community, with a shared compassion and humanitarian heart, eyes towards the future.
In Kenya, I felt sold-to, as if consumerism and capitalism and commercialism had woven its way into the fibers of existence there. It felt like a place that wanted to be so much of what my country stands for that they have shed their own identity. And while the pockets of the natural world there are being protected and nurtured, the delicate balance between selling eco-tourism as a commodity and believing that conservation is the right thing to do felt like a grand fuzzy line.
That said, I still had two days on my own at the end of the trip. So I spent my last couple of days in Nairobi learning more about how the country came to be, and seeing some of Nairobi’s conservation efforts for the Rothschild’s giraffe.
Stop #1 was the National Museums of Kenya (and snake house). The museum itself was a pictorial and diorama-ish narration of the country’s history from essentially prehistoric man to the present. If nothing else, the snake house was an opportunity to see their deadly (“a bite from this snake is considered a major medical emergency”) reptiles in a controlled environment.
The most disturbingly fascinating part of the museum, though, was the Birds of East Africa gallery. I wandered in, completely unaware, and was presented with what was functionally a life-sized Field Guide to the Birds, but instead of photos, each Kenyan bird was represented as a taxidermied example, meticulously arranged in plexiglass cases, labelled and numbered as in a bird book.
Stop #2 was the Giraffe Centre. What I thought would be a serene giraffe sanctuary turned out to be a breeding center and chatty tourist attraction. You are given a coconut shell full of snack pellets when you enter. Then you walk up to the viewing platform, where you can hand-feed and interact with the giraffes. It is a legitimate reintroduction program, as there are only approx. 1600 Rothschild’s giraffes remaining. They are at the centre to be bred, then released into the wild in protected parks throughout the country.
Looming large (and lovely) in the background was the renowned Giraffe Manor, where for $1000 USD a night (or more) you can stay in an enchanting stone manor that sits within the sanctuary’s grounds, as you commune with the resident long-necks. It was a weird but oddly satisfying visit, giving me hope that perhaps the commercialism of this place would help its natural beauty thrive.
Flying back home, I had a couple of distinct thoughts: I left Kenya with more things bought. I left Rwanda with more experiences sought. Yet it’s the little memories that pop into my mind as I digest my experiences:
The night I stood along the fencing separating the Lake Nakuru lodge from the reserve proper, watching a mass of dark hulking beasts make their way to the watering hole, grumbling and chatting amongst themselves in a low snuffling murmur. It was only once I shined my flashlight on the herd and saw 50 eyes staring back at me in the black night that I realised they were buffalo.
The night I went out to look for rhino in the weird Lake Naivasha camp, instead finding bushbabies skittering about (baby tree, said the night watchman). And maribou storks, dozens of the immense and bizarre creatures, using the half-dead and waterlogged trees as their base camp.
A lunchtime impromptu tour of the bush camp in the Maasai Mara, spotting hippos and monkeys and crocodiles, guided by a kind and eager Maasai warrior.
An exploration of the little paths along the park fence in Akagera National Park, wondering what might be stirring in the long grasses or what critters lurked just beyond the wires. I had a staring contest with a baboon in a nearby tree and spotted a family with the tiniest baboon baby (babette?) I’ve ever seen.
That night the Land Cruiser broke down on a long stretch of road between the Northern Province and Kigali and we were rescued (luggage and all) by a park ranger (and a veritable stranger) on his way back to Kigali.
The bicycles piled high with sugar cane. The lush hillsides. The milky way and the Southern Cross. The shoebills and hornbills and storks and kingfishers…brightly-coloured birds of all shapes and sizes.
A flash of history: We drove back from Giraffe-land past the new president’s house at about the same time the Kenyan supreme court awarded Ruto the win. The street outside his gates was lined with cars and photographers.
And the food…Dinner in the gardens at Hôtel des Mille Collines, staring out over the pool and pondering what Kigali’s people went through during the 90s. A homemade Rwandan lunch in the cook’s own kitchen, probably the best meal I had in the 2 weeks there. Dinner on my last night at an Eritrean restaurant in Nairobi, complete with injera.
I’ll come back to Africa. There’s so much more of this amazingly diverse land to experience. I want to see the Serengeti and Amboselli and Madagascar and Uganda…and return to Rwanda to hike more in the Virungas and return to Botswana and camp for longer, deeper in the Okavango. I want to eat injera in Ethiopia, and I want to see Deadvlei and Sossusvlei in Namibia. There’s probably more, not to mention the East African coast, that I don’t even know I want to see yet!
Travel is a privilege and an education. And for me, it is a prescription for the part of my soul that feels lost and wild and homeless and restless much of the time.
