Two-thirds of forest elephants killed by ivory poachers in past decade

Damian Carrington in the Guardian (UK): The forest elephants of Africa have lost almost two-thirds of their number in the past decade due to poaching for ivory, a landmark new study revealed on Tuesday. The research was released at an international wildlife summit in Bangkok where the eight key ivory-trading nations, including the host nation Thailand and biggest market China, have been put on notice of sweeping trade sanctions if they fail to crack down on the trade.

"The analysis confirms what conservationists have feared: the rapid trend towards extinction – potentially within the next decade – of the forest elephant," said Samantha Strindberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), one of 60 scientists on the research team.

There are about 100,000 forest elephants remaining in the forests of central Africa, compared with about 400,000 of the slightly larger savannah elephants. The total elephant population was over 1 million 30 years ago, but has been devastated by poaching driven by the rising demand for ivory ornaments in Asia.

Prof Lee White, head of the National Parks Service in Gabon, once home to the largest forest elephant population, said: "A rainforest without elephants is a barren place. They bring it to life, they create the trails and keep open the forest clearings other animals use; they disperse the seeds of many of the rainforest trees – elephants are forest gardeners at a vast scale."

Forest elephants have suffered particularly badly because they range across central Africa, which has been left lawless in large areas by war, and where poachers have ready access to guns. Furthermore, the tusks of forest elephants are longer, straighter and harder than savannah elephants, making them particularly sought after. "A lot of carvers prefer forest elephant tusks," said WCS's vice president, Elizabeth Bennett....

An African elephant in Tanzania, shot by Gary M. Stolz, US Fish and Wildlife Service

Western Uganda: crop-raiding elephants call for plan bee

Peter Jones in globaldevelopment, one of the Guardian's blogs (UK), describes a clever way of protecting crops without harming the elephants: Among the rolling volcanic hills in western Uganda lies Queen Elizabeth National Park, famed for its natural beauty and wildlife. The park's varied fauna has spawned a productive safari industry. However, more recently, the animals have been destroying, rather than supporting, local people's livelihoods.

"Elephants from the park have raided my fields for beans, maize and matooke," says Mohamood Mwapiri, a farmer in Kibodi, a village on the edge of the park. "When they come to eat they also destroy everything. At its worst, the effect was close to famine. We had nothing to eat and nothing to sell – they ate or destroyed all we had."

...Stopping the elephants is no easy task. Innocent Kahwa used to work for the UWA trying to prevent crop raiding by elephants. "We tried digging deep, steep-sided trenches around crops," he says. "But elephants are intelligent. They just used dirt to fill in the trenches and crossed over." In the absence of effective prevention mechanisms, farmers have been watching over their fields at night, attempting to scare off animals by shouting and banging empty jerry cans, or calling in the UWA to fire shots in the air.

... King began researching elephant reactions to bees after reading that elephants tended to avoid acacia trees that were hosting beehives. "I saw just how much elephants were running away from disturbed bee sounds," she explains. This, she says, inspired the idea of a beehive fence deterrent system. The system uses trip wires to link beehives together, forming a protective fence around land that is raided. When elephants trip the wire, the bees are disturbed and emerge from their hives, scaring the elephants away....

Get those bees away from me: Elephant in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda, shot by Daryona, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported