CORNISH: That's Fanie Pelletier, a wildlife biologist in Canada who wasn't involved in the work. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. Unlike Savanna elephants, forest elephants don't have natural predators, such as lions. Mostup to 3,000were poached from 2005 to 2008. They set up camp and in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants. Im not an animal lover, he snaps. This is a photocopy of the diary of the LRAs Lt. Col. Vincent Binany Okumu, who, defectors say, was in charge of ivory hunting in Garamba National Park. Ranger Dieudonn Kumboyo Kobango, standing with his son, Genekpio, who escaped soon after the LRA seized him, says, I search for the LRA on every patrol.. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. The rangers also recovered a stamped Sudanese army leave slip granting three soldiers permission to travel from Darfur to a town near the Chadian border. The U.S. State Department named Kony a specially designated global terrorist in 2008, and the African Union has designated the LRA a terrorist organization. Turkalo is back in the U.S. now, living near Providence, R.I. She had to flee Africa last year because of the civil war in the country that is home to the elephants she shared a life with. You must be a real animal lover, I say. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. Its rare that you get such a dramatic example, says co-author Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. 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. That's so terrible! As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. "As a result there were large numbers of soldiers in the area and a lot of associated. Elephants gather in the Dzanga bai, a forest clearing the size of several football fields. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. The park has four mounted ranger teams because horses are the only way to effectively patrol during the wet season, when the elephants head to drier land outside the park. Kony was adamant in his radio transmissions. He asks for water for me and is led out of the building. Park rangers are often the only forces going up against the killers. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. Their lack of tusks was thought to be a consequence of another human creationthe Mozambican civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992 and was partly paid for by the killing of elephants for . We'll tell you more about them Friday, on NPR's Morning Edition. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before they're bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. The Rhodesian armed forces lacked the manpower to effectively protect its 1,300-kilometre (800 mi) border with Mozambique against entering ZANLA insurgents. Soumaine Abdoulaye Issa had been in Darfur, he told a team of African Parks investigators, when he heard about an elephant poaching mission to Chad led by a member of the Sudan Armed Forces. CORNISH: Campbell-Staton had heard all of this before. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. This behavior is associated with mourning, field researchers say. In 2013, Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzanias minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticated network, and he accused four members of Tanzanias Parliament of being involved init. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. The soldiers embrace Onen as one of their own, and in fundamental ways he is. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! Sudan. 'Everybody out, everybody out.' Radio Expeditions used interviews, narration, and on-location recording to bring listeners to exotic places around the world. So if a tuskless mom had babies CAMPBELL-STATON: She has a 50% chance of passing the trait on to her offspring. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? We were expecting to find an amazing new world of sound to record, and the experience lived up to its reputation the insects, the tropical downpours, and of course the cacophony of the elephants themselves. Eight more are considered of secondary concern: Cameroon, Congo, the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, and Nigeria. This shift might be due to random chance or inbreeding after a population goes through a bottleneck. The White Elephant symbolizes distinctive things for both the man and Jig. Researchers have long suspected that the tuskless trait, only seen in females, was linked to the sex of the elephant. Most illegal ivory goes to China, where a pair of ivory chopsticks can bring more than a thousand dollars and carved tusks sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ive met more than a thousand children who have been abducted, he says as we talk inside his church in the nearby town of Dungu. But in central Africa, as I learned firsthand, something more sinister is driving the killing: Militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. 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. She and other scientists also recorded their calls. Fish and Wildlife Service. World Elephant Day: Ten reasons we love elephants, Elephants counted from space for conservation project. 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. To me, it seems reasonable to think that the radiomans defection might have slowed the progress of the 25 elephants tusks headed to Kony. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. But in the generation born after the war, the rate was 33%, according to decades of observations by the nonprofit group ElephantVoices. According to Cline Sissler-Bienvenu, Francophone Africa director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who led a group into the park after the slaughter, the poachers were most likely from Darfurs Rizeigat tribal group, with ties to the janjaweedthe violent, Sudanese-government-backed militias that have committed atrocities in Darfur. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. When theyre abducted, theyre very young, and theyre forced to do horrible things. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. "It's another example of the imprint of [human] effect on nature," says wildlife ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. Sudanese and Chadian poachers were likewise implicated in the 2013 butchering of nearly 90 elephantsincluding 33 pregnant females as well as newborn calvesnear Tikem, Chad, not far from Bouba Ndjidah. Diya is for accidents, he says. His account was corroborated by Caesar Achellam, a former intelligence chief for Kony who is now in the Ugandan governments custody. In fact, she tells us, two weeks later she went back to the bai something we found pretty astonishing given the circumstances of the civil war. It also raises many questions. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. Instead of signing a peace agreement, Kony had his peace negotiator executed. So why elephants? The park has lost all its rhinos to poaching for their horns. Female elephants in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique evolved to be tuskless in response to intense hunting. Money is available to outfit the rangers with better equipment, but buying new weapons requires formal approval of the Congolese army, something Froment has been unable to get. Six antipoaching rangers and their cook, the entirety of the Hippotrague (French for roan antelope) unit, were awake, dressed in camouflage uniforms, and preparing for morning prayersdevoted even in the darkness. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. Then, like a bobber in a fishing hole, a nibble. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. So, they are actually teeth. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. Schreger lines, he says. 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. The last time an elephant was recorded killed by a poacher in Mozambique's Niassa Reserve was May 17, 2018, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York -based nonprofit that helps the Mozambican government manage the national reserve. 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. Other roads also lead to Sudan. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. Wittemyer wonders whether a similar phenomenon happened long ago in Asia, because both male and female fossil elephants there have tusks, but among living Asian elephants, only males have tusks. An official in Dar es Salaams international airport, in Tanzaniaone of several countries I scouted for launching my tusks into the illegal tradesquints at an x-ray screen as my luggage rolls through hisscanner. The Elephant Listening Project The New York Times Archives. The tension broke. Halfway through our patrol, we come upon a clearing of burned grass beside the Kassi River, the site of a recent battle between Garamba rangers and SPLA poachers, in which, rangers tell me, they killed two poachers. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. But seeing it in front of you, and knowing those individuals are related, that makes my day. MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? On January 2, 2009, the horror bled into Garambas headquarters, at Nagero, where Kony soldiers burned the park rangers main building, destroyed equipment, and killed at least eight rangers and staff members. "And they were yelling at us," she says. " Im a problem solver., I laugh. The rangers on Heban hill had little reason to be concerned for their safety. All rights reserved. "But I'm certain I knew a few of the elephants they killed," she says including some that the NPR team had recorded. RESEARCH: Heidi Schultz, Brad Scriber. MCCAMMON: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. ", Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. In . The women pushed on downriver. So support charities who put a stop to that. . Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. 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. In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. My tusks will have to act like ivory. A young elephant splashes in a stream that runs through the bai. Together we can make a difference. In 2009 Bashir became the worlds first sitting head of state indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. ", Turkalo says she walked up to the man in charge and saw he had an AK-47 assault rifle. These LRA defectorsall abducted as children and pressed into servicenow fight for the Ugandan military. "So we heard this 'rat-a-tat-tat.' Eventually, more than four tons was found, Africas largest seizure since the global ivory trade ban took effect in 1990. Kafia Kingi is so widely recognized as a Kony hideout that in April 2013 a coalition of groups, including Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and the Resolve, issued a report called Hidden in Plain Sight: Sudans Harboring of the LRA in the Kafia Kingi Enclave, 2009-2013. LRA defectors I spoke with consistently placed the warlord in the Kafia Kingi area too. Before the civil war, about 18.5% of females were naturally tuskless, but that figure has risen to 33% among elephants born since the early 1990s. Now its under siege for its ivory, mainly by rogue soldiers from national armies and by the terrorist group the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). Several Tanzanian officers who had presided over my arrest at the airport, including the wildlife expert, returned the next day to wish us bon voyage. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. It sort of found me. Click the arrow below to hear the amazing audio tale they brought home. We can't change the last bit we can shape the future. His control is absolute.. Maybe I could get my fake tusks to Konytoo. By the time you read this, my tusks might have gone to Khartoum. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. The results suggest that by killing elephants for their tusks, poachers selected for mutated versions of AMELX and MEP1a, which spread in the population and made tuskless elephants more common. Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist now at Princeton University, was curious about the elephants of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where tuskless elephantswhich are all femaleare unusually common. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. To look for genes that might be involved, the team took blood from 18 female elephants in the park and sequenced their genomes. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors who can deal not just with poachers, but with civil war, too. "They were terrified. Theyre looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way. Such genes ought to disappear, Roca says, because females that lack them would have more offspring. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project, Former Commando Turns Conservationist To Save Elephants Of Dzanga Bai. From Garamba, Kony signaled his desire for peace with Uganda, sending emissaries to neutral Juba, in southern Sudan, to negotiate with Ugandan officials while he and his men lived unmolested in and around the park, protected by a cease-fire agreement. We meet over Skype. Armed groups help fund operations by smuggling elephant ivory. Normally both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are really a pair of massive teeth. Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. Soldiers killed elephants to acquire ivory which was later sold to finance arms and ammunition. Then youre just the man for me.. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. Soldiers killed elephants for their ivory tusks, which were extremely valuable. Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. 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. The women motored downriver toward the Democratic Republic of Congo. Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. - during that 15-year period had all these cascading consequences, all the way up from, you know, a single gene to an entire ecosystem health. If he can do this, Ill ask him to make several more tusks. For his Judas pig project he built GPS satellite collars to enable pest control authorities in New Zealand to send feral pigs into the bush and locate their invasive piggy friends. A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. a. percentage of elephants killed only for their meat 19/129 = 14.7% b. percentage of elephants killed only for their tusks 75/129 = 58.1% c. percentage of elephants killed for both their tusks and meat 27/129 = 20.9% 5. Now, says the parks director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, my biggest fear is that theyll start coming in pairs.. Calculate the percentages of the illegally killed elephants between 2007 and 2013 represented by each group of elephants in Question 3. Konys response was immediate and savage. In June the Tanzanian government announced that the country has lost 60 percent of its elephants in the past five years, down from 110,000 to fewer than 44,000. When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. Researchers have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks. Garamba National Park, in the northeast corner of the DRC and on the border with South Sudan, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, internationally famous for its elephants and its boundless ocean of green. 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). 4. One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. You know, yet those actions - right? "During the war, Gorongosa was essentially the geographic center of the conflict," Long said via email. 19/129 = 14.7%. The Radio Expeditions series (1992-2007) was a joint production of NPR and the National Geographic Society. At least 26 elephants were massacred at the Dzanga Bai in the Central African Republic in the spring of 2013. According to CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon, Sudan does not appear on these lists because CITES sets priorities based mainly on ivory seizures, and there have been few ivory seizures linked to Sudan in recent years. Which raises the question: If ivory is poached by Sudanese, where is it going? The air strike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the U.S. In Tanzania and Mozambique, elephants . Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army . He wasnt contrite. "The people on the shore, they started discharging their automatic weapons in the air," she remembers. A small proportion of females . I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. "It was the 24th of March," she says. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. Killings of civilians have likewise dropped, from 1,252 in 2009 to 13 in 2014, but abductions are rising again, and it takes the arrival of only a few of the armed militants to send fear ricocheting through communities. Campbell-Staton points out that other species in Gorongosa rely on elephants having tusks to dig up holes for water and strip bark from trees. This ideathat an animal's perception of danger . Officials are pointing fingers and arguing. Widows now get a sum equal to six years of a rangers salary. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, I said, shaking their hands. Those looking at the x-ray screen, which shows the trackers inside, think Im smuggling a bomb. Zakoumas Mamba Team 1 antipoaching unit includes driver Issa Adoum (brown shirt). Accuracy and availability may vary. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). b. percentage of elephants killed . Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. Will they go north, the most violent ivory path on the African continent? The focus of the series was on nature, diverse cultures, and endangered environments.Its intent, according its creator Carolyn Jensen, who passed away in 2010, was to give listeners the sound equivalent of National Geographic photos. So why elephants? Despite Sudans role as a safe haven for groups known to traffic ivory, such as the LRA, janjaweed, and other poaching gangs, the country has drawn limited official attention as a poaching state. As long-ranging animals, they shape vast swaths of wildlands, stomping and chomping through them, sparring with trees, rearranging foliage. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. Meanwhile, flouting the cease-fire, his men crossed into CAR, where they kidnapped hundreds of children and made sex slaves of women they brought back to the park. DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Kevin DiCesare, Joel Fiser, Jaime Hritsik, Brian Jacobs. 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. According to Col. Mike Kabango, of the African Union forces, the image shows a large tent and two smaller ones; to Ryan Stage, a remote-sensing specialist in Colorado, it shows a large truck and two small tents. 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. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. 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. Show your work. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. First, Campbell-Staton wanted to make sure the proportion of tuskless elephants in Mozambique had indeed changed. "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' 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. We protect the elephant to protect the park. So far theyve traveled 600 miles from jungle to desert in just under two months. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. Ugandan soldiers with the African Unions Regional Task Force hunt for LRA leader Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic (CAR), pulling themselves along ropes to cross rivers. During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. Why are you collecting ivory? Otti demanded of Kony. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. This comment was removed because it broke the rules. I know which house theyre in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. I mean, I've been through a lot of poaching.". The elephants coat themselves in red clay. After three weeks the tusks turn north again, back into Sudan. for their tusks. Follow theirroute. Tusk inheritance patterns in the ElephantVoices database backed up that assumption. Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRCs wildlife department and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. In June three more Garamba-based officers were killed. 4. After Lucienne Lanziwas husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. Read about our approach to external linking. In three weeks Konys brutes killed more than 800 people and kidnapped more than 160 children. Andrea Turkalo looks through a scope in 2002 from the observation platform she built along the edge of the bai. Was it genetically inherited at all? During the civil war in Mozambique, soldiers killed elephants with tusks in order to sell the ivory, so fewer elephants with tusks survived. It was thanks largely to efforts by the group Invisible Children and its video Kony 2012 that Kony became a household name in the West. I will escape from your jail, and I will kill him. He did escape, and a rumor in Zakouma is that he fled south to CAR. Chad. The dogs are Belgian Malinois shepherds, famed for their use in military operations, especially in tough conditions like the dense central African bush. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . It was to become her home, and her life's work. Those looking at the tusks think Im an ivory trafficker. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. They included South Sudanese armed forces (SPLA) and Sudanese military, as well as defectors from those militaries and an assortment of Sudan-based rebels. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . Zakouma breathes its elephants. When ivory poachers target elephants, the hunters can affect more than just animal numbers. Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? It was just after 4 a.m. on Heban hill, in Chad, 80 miles from the Sudanese border and 60 miles northeast of Zakouma National Park, home to the countrys largest remaining elephant herd, 450 animals. 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