Kenya's elephants send text messages to rangers
KENYA: The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard
Lesowapir's screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.
The huge bull elephant had a long history of raiding villagers' crops
during the harvest, sometimes wiping out six months of income at a time.
But this time a mobile phone card inserted in his collar sent rangers a
text message. Lesowapir, an armed guard and a driver arrived in a jeep
bristling with spotlights to frighten Kimani back into the Ol Pejeta
conservancy.
Kenya is the first country to try elephant texting as a way to
protect both a growing human population and the wild animals that now
have less room to roam. Elephants are ranked as "near threatened" in the
Red List, an index of vulnerable species published by the International
Union for Conservation of Nature.
The race to save Kimani began two years ago. The Kenya Wildlife
Service had already reluctantly shot five elephants from the conservancy
who refused to stop crop-raiding, and Kimani was the last of the regular
raiders. The Save the Elephants group wanted to see if he could break
the habit.
So they placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani's collar, then set
up a virtual "geofence" using a global positioning system that mirrored
the conservatory's boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual
fence, his collar texts rangers.
They have intercepted Kimani 15 times since the project began. Once
almost a nightly raider, he last went near a farmer's field four months
ago.
It's a huge relief to the small farmers who rely on their crops for
food and cash for school fees. Basila Mwasu, a 31-year-old mother of
two, lives a stone's throw from the conservancy fence. She and her
neighbors used to drum through the night on pots and pans in front of
flaming bonfires to try to frighten the elephants away.
Once an elephant stuck its trunk through a window into a room where
her baby daughter was sleeping and the family had stored some corn. She
beat it back with a burning stick. Another time, an elephant killed a
neighbor who was defending his crop.
"We had to go into town to tell the game (wardens) to chase the
elephants away or we're going to kill them all," Mwasu remembered.
But the elephants kept coming back.
Ol Pejeta, Sunday, AP z |
