Regular followers of ATE will know that with the help of KWS, Space for Giants and Savannah Tracking, we recently collared five female elephants from five of the Amboseli elephant families. Although our work is normally totally non-invasive, we took this decision in order to gain more detailed information on the migration routes elephants use within the Amboseli ecosystem.

If you feel strongly about the future of elephants, particularly our very special population in Amboseli and the work ATE is doing to understand and protect them, why not consider becoming an Amboseli Elephant Sustainer?

If just 1,000 of our website visitors would make a modest recurring donation, say, the price of a couple of cappuccinos, it would meet our core operating costs.

Cynthia Moss has joined the BEADS Board of Directors.

BEADS – Beads for Education, Advancement, Development and Success – steers the talents of young Maasai women towards productive and fulfilling enterprise.

From the very beginning of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project we had a system of naming. As we took identification photos, sorted out the members, and got to know the various families we assigned each a letter of the alphabet and then everyone in that family was given names starting with that letter. We did this as an aide memoire and it certainly did help. Eventually when we had reached 27 families and the letter ‘X’ we had to start going through the alphabet for the second time, the A family became the AAs, the second A family became the ABs.

Today I had the luck to see the EB family, now headed by Echo's niece Eudora, marching back towards the Amboseli swamp from the north after not being seen for 6 weeks.

The group now numbers 24 after losing about 10, including Echo, during the prolonged draught before this rainy season. Another part of the EBs, headed by Echo's sister Ella, counts 8 and was not nearby.

At least one bull had temporarily joined the group.

The good folks at GoogleEarth have been providing ATE with a complimentary license for GoogleEarth Pro for several years. We have used the facility a number of times, for example, in reporting in these pages on seismic events in the ecosystem.

We shall be adding other coverages for viewing on GoogleEarth (you can download GoogleEarth for free from here), for example, realtime tracking of Amboseli elephants with GPS satellite collars.

A new paper led by one of our research collaborators, Lucy Bates from St. Andrews University, has shown it is quite likely that experienced females demonstrate to their naive young daughters in their first oestrus how to attract the attention of appropriate bulls.

It's another example of the amazing depth and subtlety of elephant behaviour that we can only come to understand through our long-term research.

As we continue to despair over the lack of rain Amboseli when it seems to be raining all around, we scratch our heads wondering why? We have a theory...

In September 2009, ATE and KWS started a quarterly ground wildlife count in Amboseli National Park and Kimana Sanctuary. The long term monitoring program aims to better understand how wildlife use the park and the surrounding core areas. Results of the September count reveal the severe impacts of the current drought. Grass in the perennial swamps, a lifeline of the park had been depleted following influx of wildlife (grazers) into the park. Over 10,000 zebras and wildebeest had sought refuge in the park, with a substantial number dying.