Veteran ranger Jean Claude Mambo Marindo sits beside almost a hundred tusks seized from elephant poachers at Garamba National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). ". "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. RENAMO also had imposed a system it called Gamdira whereby villagers were required to produce food, transport goods and ammunition, and village women were forced to be sex slaves. Ive flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. Kermeen started in the radio-tracking business when he was 15 and has since built electronic trackers and collars for wildlife from Andean bears to California condors to Tasmanian devils. The poachers opened fire, killing five rangers. An adviser to the Ugandan military rejects the helicopter accusation, and suggests that the elephants might have been shot in the top of the head after they were down. The dogs are Belgian Malinois shepherds, famed for their use in military operations, especially in tough conditions like the dense central African bush. So we Bill McQuay and Chris Joyce, who've worked together on stories from the mountains of China to the copper mines of Michigan recently decided to go see Turkalo and find out what happened. Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lords Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africas most wanted terrorists. Theyre in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps theyve been buried in the backyard. Its not clear why a mutated version of AMELXwhich is located on the x chromosomewould be fatal to males, but researchers suspect one or more nearby genes come along for the ride. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army officers assisting with patrols. This ideathat an animal's perception of danger . Read about our approach to external linking. MCCAMMON: But the number of tuskless elephants was multiplying in Mozambique during and after the country's decades-long civil war, which ended in 1992. Turkalo's pretty famous in the world of elephant research, as one of the first to study forest elephants. This is the long shadow of that human imprint that is going to take generations to erase, Pringle says. To test ivory, dealers will scratch a tusk with a knife or hold a lighter under it; ivory is a tooth and wont melt. Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRCs wildlife department and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. That evening, they floated by a village. The study is extremely thorough and ticks off all the boxes, Roca says. We meet over Skype. Sudan. The recent death toll of elephants in Garamba has been staggering, even by central African standards. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. Learn more about the Explorer series. Learn more about the Explorer series. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. In village after village along the road between Father Sugules church and what is now South Sudan, I meet Kony victims who describe being fed elephant meat and how, after elephants were killed, militants took the ivory away. HOW MANY TIMES ?? During the failed peace talks with Uganda, while Kony hid in Garamba from 2006 to 2008, Onen had been assigned to Konys lead peace negotiator, Vincent Otti. They were relieving a ranger team that had raided a Sudanese poachers camp three weeks before and seized more than a thousand rounds of ammunition; mobile phones holding photographs of bloated, dead elephants; a satellite phone with a solar panel charger; two elephant tusks; a pair of camouflage pants; and a uniform with the insignia of Abu TiraSudans notorious Central Reserve Police, alleged to have committed mass killings, assaults, and rapes in Darfur. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. Now, researchers report this intense hunting dramatically altered a major elephant population there, favoring female elephants born without tusks. One moves north toward Heban, the other west toward centralChad. His control is absolute.. After Zakoumas rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. In ten years hes never made a mistake, he says: The tusks are real. In March 2015 Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and his group was renamed Islamic States West Africa Province, giving that Middle East terrorist group a foothold in WestAfrica. Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty organization that governs international trade in ivoryand its continuing banhas identified eight countries of primary concern when it comes to international ivory trafficking: China, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Uganda, Tanzania, and Vietnam. To identify the elephants, Turkalo learned to draw the animals' ears each ear's shape and markings are unique to each individual. The New York Times Archives. ", Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. only . In January 2014, while x-raying a Vietnam-bound container declared to hold cashews, Togolese port authorities saw something strange: ivory. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. Andrea Turkalo looks through a scope in 2002 from the observation platform she built along the edge of the bai. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. The tension broke. It was reassuring to find the Tanzanian law enforcers so vigilant, because the country is plagued by perhaps the worst elephant poaching in Africa, and corruption is rife. "I heard they were on their way. A global march demanding action to stop elephant and rhino poaching will be held . Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? A small proportion of females . "Not only do they recognize each other's calls, but the calls go far," she told NPR correspondent Alex Chadwick, who spent days with her back then, observing the elephants with Bill McQuay. But it could take a long time for tusked females to become as common as they once were. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. When Ele, a female elephant, died, other elephants approached one-by-one and touched their trunks to the body. Bill McQuay now works as a sound engineer with the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. Later, when Labuschagne examined the trajectory of bullets at the scene, he concluded that the poachers had been trained in how to set up a cross fire, which, combined with evidence found at the scene, pointed to President Omar al-Bashirs Sudan Armed Forces. To gain more troops it recruited civilians into its armyincluding child soldersafter mass abductions. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. At the time Sudans north and south were in a civil war, and Kony offered Sudans government, in Khartoum, a way to destabilize the south. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. Mostup to 3,000were poached from 2005 to 2008. PELLETIER: The reason why that's important is because if you stop the killing right now, you know, the time it would take for the population to, you know, restore that traits would be much longer now that there's been a change in the genes than if it wasn't. She looks at the floor while her friends whisper to each other, smile radiantly, and nibble on cookies weve brought for them. Will artificial tusks planted in a central African country head eastor westtoward a coast with reliable transportation to Asian markets? Im not an animal lover, he snaps. Margaret Acino was 23, pregnant, working in the fields near Gulu, Uganda, when an LRA commander called for a razor and ordered his boy soldiers to slice off her lips, ears, and nose. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. Those looking at the x-ray screen, which shows the trackers inside, think Im smuggling a bomb. Eventually, more than four tons was found, Africas largest seizure since the global ivory trade ban took effect in 1990. The cook, Djimet Said (below), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. You can hear the original field recordings and interviews from Radio Expedition's 2002 elephant story, and see photos and night-vision video from the elephant bai, on the archive's website. We protect the park to give the people something of value. He fights for elephants because he knows that without the animals presence, no one will support Garamba, and the parkwhich he calls Africas heartwill be lost. A study in Gorongosa revealed that while male elephants did have tusks but almost 50% of female elephants above the age of 20 did not. "This time they covered most of country," she says, "pillage, rape and kill. On the 15th day after they began to move, they cross into South Sudan and from there make their way into the Kafia Kingi enclave, a disputed territory in Darfur controlled bySudan. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? The Elephant Listening Project We meet in a busy coffee shop full of students from nearby Brown University. Gorongosa - that's a national park in Mozambique. A pilot study published this year showed that the presence of a beehive fence reduced the odds of an elephant crossing the river by 95%. On September 11, 2014, Michael Onen, a sergeant in Konys army, walked out of Garamba National Park carrying an AK-47, five magazines of ammunition, and a story. The rangers Im going out with have each been allocated a handful of rounds for old and unreliable AK-47s, most of them seized from poachers. In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, a screener at Tanzanias airport accuses Bryan Christy of smuggling. for their meat. It is believed they do this either to cool themselves off or as a reaction to the annoyance of parasites of the skin. Gathering speed, they continue north before abruptly turning east, in the direction of Khartoum. All rights reserved. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. 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