Dzanga Forest Elephants

Category: Elephants | Date: Feb 12 2008 | By: admin

First I would like to thank Therese Siskind for her donation to the Dzanga Study. We depend upon people’s generosity to continue the work helping protect one of the important sites for forest elephants in the Central African region. This is the time of the year when donations determine whether or not we continue. So thanks Therese for your thoughtfulness.

I apologize for not blogging more but it has been difficult to access the internet to upload recent entries. Our internet access here is via satellite link and the site is not close to camp and the best time to upload is at night when there are fewer users.

The dry season seems to be longer than usual this year and their is little sign of rain in the air. With this continuation the clearing is still attracting more and more elephants, some of which I haven’t seen in a few years. For three days we were observing a large bull who planted himself in the favorite hole in the southern section of the bai. He would spend the entire afternoon dominating the hole, never leaving it during two afternoons of observation. From a distance I could see that there were two notches in the ear as well as a small slit on the edge of his lower ear lobe. Since he was standing in profile that was the only information I could glean in order to identify him from the present collection of identity cards. This is the most exciting part of the study, seeing individuals you see infrequently and only during the dry season. Returning to camp I combed through the identity cards but found no card and then I tried again since there are so many cards and sometimes it takes several scans to find it. I finally found the card, Stasny, a male with the marks matching the right ear I had drawn and the left ear had one notch on the upper half. All the other criteria fit, a big bodied male with a noticeable large head and full tail. I then went to the computer file which contains the visitation data consisting of the dates the elephants have been sighted in the clearing. Stasny had last been seen in February of 2003 for three days in the clearing. The timing was astounding because this time it was also a visit in February for three days. I discussed this with the staff here and they too were amazed saying that the elephants have internal clocks to return to the same place at the same time of year. The bigger bulls adhere to this rule whereas the younger elephants and females are more random in their visitation to the clearing.

Stasny

Later after returning to the camp there was again a visit from Maddy and her two calves who were in the forest at the edge of camp. This was her third visit during the last month and her arrival time was the same: dusk. She could clearly see us and was a bit perturbed and reacted to us by breaking a small branch but then she calmed down as we stood and watched her with her two calves behind her. She stood still waving her tail and was clearly interested in our presence. She comes into camp when it is dark and eats the surface soil where we have carelessly drained the dish water, which contains something that the elephants need in their diets since they are able to find each spot where the waste water has been dropped. This was a mystery to me for many years as to why elephants would dig in certain areas in camp.

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