The Elephant Listening Project

The sixth year is a time of rapid change for the Elephant Listening Project (ELP); I am writing to bring you up to date with recent news and our most urgent need. To start with the grand view, we have achieved most of our preliminary goals, all of which can now be regarded as preparation for the next, rather different phase. If all goes well the immediate future will produce the following: 1) on-the-ground acoustic monitoring of forest elephants in west and central Africa; 2) grassroots education about those forest elephants for the people whose lives are directly affected by them; and 3) the publication of what we’ve learned so far about elephants’ calling behavior, social relationships, and a methodology for studying them. Finally, there are new investigations in the works; but I will save these for a later letter.

So far I have spoken only of good news. But there is bad news as well: the elephants at the heart of our work are newly and seriously threatened. This became apparent last October while I was visiting Bayanga, in the Central African Republic, with friends from the World Wildlife Fund. Bayanga is the closest village and the supply station for Dzanga, the site of our primary study on forest elephants. Two international conservation and development groups have headquarters in Bayanga, but the village’s main support system is a boom-and-bust logging enterprise. At the time of our arrival, hundreds of impoverished loggers were persuaded by their bosses that conservationists were threatening their livelihood. On this premise an uprising was directed at the western visitors.

The riot stopped short of injuring anyone, but the irony of the situation hit us all in the face. There are bitter circumstances under the surface: poverty (the loggers hadn’t been paid for three months), disillusionment, abuse of power. Such conditions set the stage both for civil unrest and for wildlife poaching. In fact, the Bayanga situation is a microcosm of what’s going on in the entire range of forest elephants. It is now clear, not only from our experience but also that of all other forest elephant researchers, that the survival of this species is in jeopardy. We must waste no time in implementing the two dimensions in which ELP is prepared to make powerful contributions -- monitoring for conservation, and grassroots education. The present letter will be restricted to notes on these two objectives.

Education (African): ELP’s research in Dzanga has yielded four hundred hours of video recording of the natural behavior of forest elephants. Much of the footage is beautiful and fascinating, and nearly 2000 digitized film clips are now accessible in a database, thanks to much diligent work just completed by Melissa Groo. With a touch of a button we can come up with the exact footage we are seeking, and play it instantly from a computer. This valuable educational material must now be made available to the Africans whose attitudes determine the survival of their wildlife.

How to bridge the gap between the database in America, and indigenous viewers in Africa? We have found a partner who is doing just this. This is a nonprofit institution, the International Conservation and Education Fund (web site at www.incef.org) run by Cynthia Moses, an accomplished filmmaker long acquainted with the politics, wildlife, and landscapes of equatorial Africa. Cynthia proposes to introduce a set of custom-made wildlife videos, in multiple languages, for viewing by logging companies, schoolchildren, and communities. The distribution of these materials will be handled by a network of local educators in central Africa. ELP is releasing its materials to INCEF for this purpose, and (thanks to a personal contribution from one of ELP’s friends), we have promised a small amount of time to help with the preparation of its curriculum. InCEF plans to raise its major support for this venture from foundations, a plan that so far appears successful.

Monitoring for conservation: Much of ELP’s first five years has gone into developing acoustic tools and methodologies for describing and measuring forest elephant populations. This is ground-breaking work, with a potentially enormous benefit to conservation. The tools have included hardware (for making long, unmanned, specifically programmed recordings in remote places) and software (for analyzing the recordings in such a way that relevant animal and human sounds can be quickly extracted and sorted). Meanwhile, we have made and documented the following discoveries: a) overall rates of elephant calling in long recordings reflect the numbers of elephants within range of the microphones; b) the structure of calls in long recordings contains information about the age and sex of calling elephants and their circumstances; and c) long recordings also contain signatures of human activities that are relevant to elephant conservation: gunshots, vehicles, chainsaws. With all of these factors encoded in acoustic recordings, it becomes possible to use them for remote assessments of the size, status, and movement patterns of elephant populations and for documentation of the sounds of poaching.

In order to use all of this for elephant conservation, we are urgently seeking funds to support a scientist to lead the implementation of acoustic monitoring in central and west Africa. These funds will release an international search for an experienced population biologist to work both in Francophone Africa and in our home institution, the Bioacoustics Research Program. Starting in Gabon (a currently stable country with many forest elephants, where we have identified research partners), this person will acoustically sample the range of African forest elephants. The data will be analyzed at Cornell; all findings will be integrated with relevant complementary information -- e.g., area censuses based on elephant dung counts for the CITES program called MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants); and local information from radio collars. The comprehensive results will be made widely available.

This conservation mission is urgent. We will be deeply grateful for any help you can give.

HOW CAN YOU HELP? A challenge grant for the new investigator’s position is sought: The Bioacoustics Research Program offers to contribute $75,000 toward three years of salary, if matching funds can be found to cover the other half. One of our generous friends has started us off with a promise of $10,000 toward that goal in the first year, with possible renewal providing we manage to find the rest of what we need. Please note that your contribution will be tax-deductible.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at ELP. I can be reached by phone at 607-254-2468 or email kp17@cornell.edu, and Melissa Groo is reachable by phone at 607-254-2135 or by email msg29@cornell.edu. We also welcome any ideas you may have on other fund-raising avenues.