AMBOSELI ELEPHANT RESEARCH PROJECT REPORT
JANUARY 2002
Cynthia Moss

I feel that I have been out of touch over these last few months and so it gives me pleasure to be able to write this report to update you on my activities and those of the Project. 

After two months in the US in September and October for surgery I am now happily back in Kenya.  I’m doing fine.  The recovery is slower than I’d like, but I will be back to normal very soon.  Luckily, it was not a life-threatening problem.

On December 1, I returned to Amboseli after a three-month absence.  It was the longest I had ever been away. Seeing the elephants, sleeping in my tent to the wonderful night sounds, and waking up to Kilimanjaro was just what I needed. I’ve been feeler better and better ever since.

Amboseli

It’s just after the “short rainy season” and the Park is turning from green to gold. The rains were late and we didn’t have enough during the period when the rains were supposed to come, but just a few days ago we had 47mm (1.88 inches) all in one huge downpour. In recent years there seems to be either too little or too much rain with no year being “normal”. Old-timers in Kenya say it was never like this before, but memory sometimes smoothes things out.  Certainly we didn’t have such spectacular El Ninos and in any case heavy rains and flooding didn’t have an evocative name back then. I think we just have to accept that global weather patterns are changing.  While the north and south of the African continent are predicted to get drier, East Africa is supposed to get wetter. 

The Camp

While I was away in the US the whole camp was renovated.  The camp consists of nine tents all of which have makuti (a kind of coarse grass) roofs built over them.  The makuti has to be changed every few years and some of the posts and roof beams also have to be replaced from time to time.  We got a contractor in to redo all the roofs and to rebuild the shower, storeroom and windbreak for the fire.  Much to my delight Harvey Croze (the scientist who started AERP with me back in 1972 and is now one of the Trustees for the Amboseli Trust for Elephants) oversaw all this work while I was away.  He also got a carpenter in to build completely new cupboards for the kitchen.  With four new tents including a dining tent and a fifth tent newly repaired, the camp is looking very smart indeed. 

Vehicles

My 17-year-old short wheelbase Land Rover is back in Amboseli after a complete overhaul, which cost much more than I would have liked, but it will give us a good five more years of service.  I’m far too attached to it to retire it yet. 

Here I am in my old Land-Rover on December 2, looking very happy to be back in Amboseli after three months away.

Our two new vehicles have changed the lives of my research assistants and colleagues in Amboseli.  The Land Rover and the little Suzuki are reliable and relatively comfortable.  Both are usually out in the field on any given day, the Land Rover for monitoring and censusing the elephants and the Suzuki for collecting DNA and behavioral data.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all those who donated to the purchase of the new Land Rover.  Some of the sponsorship only came through recently so I have not had a chance a chance to thank those donors, in particular Land Rover U.K. who very generously paid for half of the cost of purchase.  In addition the following organizations donated substantially to the cost of the Land Rover: the Born Free Foundation, the Humane Society of the U.S., and the Habitat Council. I also want to thank the individuals who sent in checks to help in getting us back into the field with reliable vehicles. 

The Elephants

The elephants in Amboseli are doing well in general, but we’ve had some disturbing losses in the last few months.  An ivory poacher, probably working on his own or with only one or two others, has been operating to the south of the Park.  Tragically he has been targeting large adult females.  He has killed at least four of the big well-known females who move in that area.  They were all important members of their families and each left orphans. One was a matriarch, Penelope of the PA family, who was in her early 60s, but amazingly had a calf born in January 2000.  The others were Patricia of the PCs, who was about 59, Evangeline (about 44 years old) of the EAs and Tilly (only 31 years old) of the TAs. In addition a young male was also poached. 

Tilly’s death is particularly tragic because her family has suffered such devastating losses.  It was Tilly’s older sister Tuskless who was mistakenly killed by KWS for killing a cow.  Tuskless had taken over as matriarch of their family at a very young age when poachers killed her mother in 1976, and considering her youth did a good job of keeping the family together.  Now only Tonie is left to lead them.  Tilly’s calf born in February 2000 is being cared for by Tuskless’s daughters Tulip and Tecla, but her chances of survival are not good.

Altogether we have lost five matriarchs during this year.  Some were old and had had full, successful lives with many offspring and we suspect they may have died of natural causes.  Others were probably speared or poached. Aside from Penelope who was mentioned above, the other matriarchs were: Kleo of the KBs, who was relatively young at only 49, appeared to die of natural causes.  Omega (about 48 years old) of the OB family disappeared and we did not find her carcass.  She had been speared in October last year and had apparently recovered but perhaps she had an infection that never cleared up.  Slit Ear of the TCs, who was a major character in my book Elephant Memories, was a grand old matriarch at an estimated 65 years old.  We hope she died naturally but we suspect that she was speared.  And finally Ysolde of the YAs, who was about 56, also disappeared.  Her daughters Yvonne and Yvette stay permanently with the JA family.  

Provisionally there were 38 births and 27 deaths during 2001.  The births are very low compared to some other years, for example in 1999 we had 107 births, but there is a good reason for this difference.  Elephants within a population tend to get into synchrony in their births for two reasons: one, they tend to conceive in years with high rainfall; and two, females have an average birth interval of 4.5 years.  Thus many females in the population will conceive in the same year and then they won’t be ready to conceive again for another 4.5 years.  For example, 1997 was a year with high rainfall, which resulted in many births in 1999 after a 22 month gestation period.  Those females were then suckling those calves and not ready to conceive again until 2001.  So what we have in Amboseli is peaks of births every four to five years.  We expect another peak in 2003.  In between the peak years females not in synchrony for one reason or another (for example, they might have lost a calf or they may be young females who have recently reached sexual maturity) will give birth. 

A typical Amboseli family with three small calves all about the same age.

The 27 deaths recorded so far for 2001 consisted of four adult males, ten adult females and 13 calves. (We may discover more births and deaths when we census family groups and males that we don’t see as often as others.) Although the ten adult females is exceptionally high, the other numbers are fairly low indicating that it has not been a bad year environmentally nor has there been intense human-elephant conflict.  However, there continues to be “cultural spearing”, that is young warriors proving their bravery.  In November a large, well-known bull named Clement, was speared while minding his own business feeding in the swamp.  A young warrior took advantage of his immobility in the swamp and speared him from above piercing one kidney.  Clement ran out of the swamp and was spotted by my staff when he ran through our camp bleeding profusely.  The KWS vet team came down from Nairobi to treat him two days later.  They immobilized him and removed the spear, but soon realized that he would not recover.

Each warrior makes his own mark on his spear, so the Maasai community was able to find the culprit.  He was arrested but after much negotiation was released to the community to punish him in their own way.   In his case, he has to slaughter a bull, which will be expensive, and a definite loss to him.  In addition a number of strict conditions was set down by KWS for the community as a whole. We hope that other young warriors will be discouraged from spearing in the future.

The spearing and poaching is the bad news, but on the whole the Amboseli elephants are very lucky indeed.  Babies are being born, calves are growing up, families are growing, middle-aged bulls are coming into their prime and starting to father calves, old bulls like Bad Bull and Dionysus are hanging in there, still breeding at over 60 years old, and young bulls are striking out on their own and learning how to survive without the wise and reassuring leadership of their mothers and grandmothers.  Ely is one of those young bulls.  At almost 12 years old he is still with Echo but he also spends time away from the family along with his age-mates, Esau and Erwin. I think he’ll be independent very soon.   Enid and Erin both gave birth to daughters this year increasing the EB family to 27. 

Community Relations

This year has been much better than last in terms of elephants speared (7) and livestock killed by elephants (3).  Our Consolation Program continues to be popular with the Maasai and we believe that it goes a long way in reducing spearing incidents.  During the drought year of 2000, 28 cows, sheep or goats were killed by elephants and we gave out consolation payments amounting to 400,000/- Kenya shillings, ($5128).  That was by far the worst year since we started the program in 1997 (see Table 1 below).

Table 1

 With additional costs for fuel and other contingencies the total we have spent so far is 592,989/- ($7602) not counting the salaries of the staff that work on community issues.

 Starting in August of this year we hired seven Maasai scouts to patrol outside the Park in order to report on where elephants are seen and whether any problems are occurring.  We have also engaged Saruni Seleka to be our Community Officer.  He and Project Manager Soila Sayialel oversee their work. This new system has already paid off in terms of information relayed about speared and poached elephants.

Training Course

A training course was held October 8-18 with three participants. I was still in the US at the time but the course was ably conducted by Norah Njiraini, our Training Coordinator. The training component of the Project is still carried out jointly with the African Wildlife Foundation which provides logistical support as well as one or two days of training by Dr. Philip Muruthi. On this course, the students were all from Kenya.  They were: Juma Bakari from Tsavo National Park, David Daballen from Iain Douglas-Hamilton’s Samburu Project, and Bernard Lesowapir from Meru National Park. 

The whole Training Program continues to be supported by Carol and Joseph Reich and their generosity is greatly appreciated. I believe that the young men and women who come to Amboseli to learn how to study elephants become ambassadors and advocates for elephants when they go back to their own study sites. We plan to continue this program for many years to come because the future of African elephants will be in these students’ hands.

Research Activities and Staff

The research work continues to go well and be fascinating.  Beth Archie, who is working on genetics and social behaviour, just finished another field season. She carried 400 dung samples back to Duke with every permission, paper and stamp she could get.  With the anthrax scare we thought it might be more difficult to get the samples into the US but she had no problem. Soila and Norah have been carrying out the regular monitoring of the whole population for demography, social behaviour and ecology. Joyce Poole’s study of the vocal repertoire is finding more and more about the complexity of elephant communication and behaviour.  Hamisi Mutinda has finished writing his Ph.D. thesis on ranging and decision-making and is awaiting his supervisors’ final comments.  In the meantime he is working with Earthwatch and other research groups in the Tsavo area.

While I was in the US my fantastic AERP team took care of everything.  Soila, Norah, Peter, Saibulu, Saruni and Nkashopu kept things going in Amboseli.  Our Office Manager in Nairobi, Purity Waweru, handled all the administrative work and Joyce Poole and Harvey Croze oversaw things in general and came to anyone’s assistance when it was necessary. I was proud of everyone and very grateful. 

Katito Sayialel, our third research assistant in Amboseli, was on maternity leave for three months and returned for work on December 2.  The baby, Chaka Sokoine, an adorable boy born on August 10, is with her.  The proud father will be visiting frequently and Katito will spend some time in Nairobi.

Left to Right: Sian (Soila’s daughter) Katito, Chaka and Soila a few days after the birth.

Publications

In my last report, I mentioned three important papers that were published.  I now have the full reference for each of them:

McComb, K., Moss, C., Durant, S.M., Baker, L, Sayialel, S. (2001) Matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge in African elephants. Science 292: 491-494. 

 Moss, C. (2001) The demography of an African elephant (Loxodonta africana) population in Amboseli, Kenya. J. Zool., Lond. 255: 145-156.

 Slotow, R., van Dyk, G., Poole, J., Page, B., Klocke, A. (2000) Older bull elephants control young males. Nature 408: 425-426.

We continue to work on the Big Book as I’ve come to call it, that is, the scientific volume that will bring together all the elephant studies done in Amboseli. Progress has slowed to some extent because of my long trip to the States, but there should now be a good, long space to work in the coming year. This year we received generous support from the Donner Foundation for writing stipends and another writing retreat.  We have also been promised support in the form of expertise, software and hardware from ESRI a GIS software company.  The President, Jack Dangermond, has taken a personal interest in the Amboseli Project.

  MacArthur Award

 The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have greatly honored me with one of their five-year fellowships.  The announcement was made on October 24 and I am still stunned.  Aside from the freedom it will give me to pursue my dreams for elephants, it is also a wonderful validation of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project and the work that my colleagues and I have been doing over all these years.

 Amboseli Trust for Elephants

 Fund raising for AERP, the endowment for the Amboseli Project, got a boost in October with a very successful Kilimanjaro Climb for Elephants.  The participants raised $1 for each foot they climbed and they all made it to the top.  For a delightful story about the climb and safari see Harvey Croze’s article on our website. Harvey, as one of the Project’s trustees and founders, accompanied the climbers in Amboseli and Tsavo and to the top of Kilimanjaro.

The trip was enjoyed so much by everyone that we plan to make it a yearly event or at least an every-two-year event.  For anyone interested, please keep checking the website for the dates for the next Climb for Elephants or phone our Chairman Susannah Rouse on 610-415-9601.   

 Wish List

 Many friends and donors have asked me to make up a wish list of what the Project needs and here is a partial one.

 General Funds:

Ø      Support for the general running of the Project including salaries for the staff, vehicle and camp running costs, and Nairobi office.  These are the absolutely essential costs to keep us in the field studying and protecting the elephants. 

Ø      Funds for two part-time staff members in the US.  I know this is the less glamorous thing to support but I can’t run the Project without administrative and development back up in the US.

 Specific Projects:

 Ø      Building a causeway and repairing the road to our camp.  In the rainy season this road floods and we have to drive our vehicles through two to three feet of water to get to camp.  During the last El Nino we almost had to abandon the camp altogether. Kenya Wildlife Service does not have the funds to build the causeway and I would very much like to help the Park in this way.  The road is used by tourists as well because it leads to a favorite area for lions, hyenas and elephants. Estimated cost is $12,000.               

 Ø      Aerial surveys.  During this recent spate of poaching we hired a plane (Harvey is a pilot) several times to try to find fresh carcasses.  We also tracked where the elephants were going outside the Park. This aerial surveillance along with our Maasai scouts on the ground is revealing important information.  Again this is a way to help the Kenya Wildlife Service which does not have an airplane stationed in Amboseli. We always take one of the KWS wardens with us on the flight.  I want to have a regular program of monthly flights to gather information.  Estimated cost is $10,000.

 Any and all contributions would be greatly appreciated.  Please send your donation to: 

Amboseli Trust for Elephants
10 State Street
Newburyport, MA 01950.  

Indicate with a note or on the check that the donation is for AERP and specify to which part of the Project you would like it to apply. Thank you very much. 

 Thoughts for the End of 2001

 The events of September 11, which I watched on the TV above my hospital bed in California, have changed the world. They have and will affect everything—our personal lives, our view of the world, all the other people and animals and habitats in our world.  It has been a time of re-examining what matters to us.  In some ways we may turn inward, become closer to family and friends, to our villages, towns, cities, states and country, but at the same time it has forced many of us to look outward and much farther outward than before--to other peoples, other lands. The Earth seems to be smaller.  A stone thrown in a pond in what previously seemed to be a distant country sends ripples out around the whole planet.  

In light of these changes, I have had to ask myself if what I have spent the last 33 years of my life doing is still relevant.  It didn’t take long for me to answer my question positively.  I think it is essential that we maintain wild places in which the whole amazing panoply of plants, insects, birds, reptiles and mammals can interact in the way that they have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.  These life forms may one day be our only salvation.  With elephants as a keystone species, that is, a species that helps to maintain the ecosystem in which it lives, it seems obvious to me that we cannot turn our backs on elephants and other wildlife now. We need them not as a luxury to be appreciated by rich Westerners, but as a necessity for our planet. 

I also believe we need them in a spiritual (in the broadest sense of the word) way.  Romain Gary in his extraordinary novel THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN understood the need of humans to experience a sense of wonder in nature. His character Morel had been in a concentration camp during the war and the way that he kept up his spirits and those of his companions was to think about elephants:

Every time we looked at the barbed wire or were almost dying from misery and claustrophobia in solitary confinement, we tried to think of those big animals marching irresistibly through the open spaces of Africa, and it made us feel better…they were the very image of an immense liberty. 

I agree that we need these images and particularly in this frightening and tragic time.  People don’t even have to travel to Africa to see elephants in the wild, but just to know they are there is heartening.  Well, I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for elephants to be out there roaming free, inspiring and creating wonder in our lives.

Cynthia Moss

January 20, 2002

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