Natural World (1983) s20e01 Episode Script
The Lost Elephants of Timbuktu
The African elephant upclose, magnificent We admire them and we think we know them And when confined to wildlife reserves they tolerate us But is this the real African elephant? The elephant our ancestors knew? Along the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, around Timbuktu there are rumors of a lost herd of elephants that are still truly wild Carved into the desert rocks is evidence of a relationship between humans and elephants that is 5,000 years old These pictures tell a story of struggle and one that remarkably is still very much alive The lost elephants of Timbuktu may offer a last glimpse of elephants that exist alongside humans in a relationship that can be both respectful and on occasion, bloody How elephants survive in this seemingly barren, desolate landscape called the Sahel is a mystery It's one that Anne Orlando, biologist from the University of California hopes to unravel She faces an enormous task No one is certain how many elephants might live in this wilderness Just finding one can take weeks of tracking You would think that it would be really easy to find an elephant in this big, open desert but it's not at all They just blend right into this landscape and they put the mud on their bodies when they're in the waterholes and they look just like everything else Hopefully for Ann, there're nomads in this desert who can help Did Matt show you how to use this? You can go wide and zoom You can keep zooming all the way Oh, I see them out The Touareg people have traveled the Sahel Desert and the west African country of Mali for generations If anyone comes across the elephants, it's them, and Ann needs their knowledge In this area of Mali, south of Timbuktu, the nomads speak of elephants that have come and go Vanishing for months and then reappearing out of the blue Elephants that are unpredictable and dangerous Learning from the Touareg nomads, Ann is beginning to get nearer to the elephants Sometimes I can just feel them if I'm close enough, you kind of feel the vibration from one direction or another and I just sort of know which way they are, but they have very low rumbles that you can hear There they are.
There's a trumpet They are not carnivores, not going to eat you, but they are enormous and they do kill people You don't want to push them, you want to respect elephants First contact is brief The elephants do not accept Ann's presence At the first scent of the unfamiliar, they disappear into the desert If Ann is to find out how these animals survive here, she has to work out a way of following them The local Touareg talk of a great elephant migration towards the south It would make sense for the elephants to move, The Sahel is one of the harshest environments on earth Food and water are scarce and patchy To survive demands constant movement to search for resources In up to 130 degrees of desert heat her mother must find at least 50 gallons of water every day to keep her calf alive Livestock also need daily access to water but all too often the story is the same: the nomad herd has arrived to find the waterhole is already taken Even though the goats are thirsty, the herder will keep them well back rather than risk the danger of challenging the elephants So for now, the goats must wait their turn It's February, and there's still enough of the muddy water to go around but the dry season is only just beginning Ann is on her last supply stop in the oasis town of Djenne famed for its huge mud-built mosque Djenne has long been a place for travelers to rest and to pray for a safe journey She has come up with a high-technology solution to the problem of following the elephants But to use it, she'll have to get closer to the elephants than ever before And at a camel market, the traders are quick to remind her of the hazards The elephants are not afraid of anything I have never seen anything the elephants are fearful of You can't have faith in something you're scared of If you're scared of something, you can't trust it If you walk off behind the elephants and you don't see them and you approach them too close at this moment, they will attack you, and only God can save you To carried out her plan, Ann must dart and tranquilize an elephant Even with the expect help of a vet, it's tense The wind is really in our favor.
It's perfect A cow, this is amazing.
I'm just amazed at the distance that we're getting from them, we're getting very, very close, and they don't see us at all But it's going to be very dangerous if someone makes a bad move and they do see us so we want to be very quiet and get just as close as we can to get a good shot Billy Karesh is a wildlife vet from New York He has years of elephant experience and he knows the tranquilized animal must be approached with extreme caution Let's give her a few more minutes Once the elephant begins the snore, the team knows it's safe Could you try and lift her head a little? The aim to attach a radio satellite collar that Ann hopes will enable her to follow the elephants Just pull the rope all the way through then? No, hold, don't pull yet One, two, there, lift Oh, well that worked well Why did you pull the rope? Oh, sorry, I I said don't pull the rope.
All right.
Give me that stick.
Ok, this is on top Is this a male? This is the female This is a male collar During the anxious preparations for this moment, a serious error has been made Did you think we'd get two bulls this morning? The team should carry two different collars a long one for a bull elephant and a shorter one for a female But the collars they've brought are both for bulls, and the animal they've tranquilized is a female It's four days before the team are able to try again From now on, there's no room for more mistakes Virtually nothing is known about these elephants Even at close quarters, they retain much of their mystery And just calculating the age of this female is going to be difficult How are you guys doing for measurements? Good shape? Yeah, good shape.
I'm going to do tusks It's really hard to age this population because they have really tiny tusks and of course, nobody has ever aged elephants in west Africa before so all I can do is base it on what we know from elephants in Kenya It's pretty exciting that we're working with elephants, because you need a lot of batteries to run these things They're really heavy so pretty much, it takes an elephant to actually carry enough batteries that we can follow them for a meaningful amount of time The large batteries run the onboard computer which will store two years worth of data and detail every inch of the elephants' movements I mean, I can't tell you what she's going to do.
I just, cannot predict Her head is up and everybody is going to back away, because she's going to be getting up pretty quickly You guys kind of be prepared with your stuff We're backing away slowly, but she's confused about what's just happened and she's looking right at us Oh, come on, come on, there we go This time, both the elephant and the team are okay But they'll have to go through the process 7 more times before all the tracking collars are attached Three weeks later and with all the collars safely in place, Ann is able to monitor 8 elephants as they move through this part of the Sahel And after a month of tracking, she's found that something very odd is happening When food and water are scarce, elephants herds are normally very small making the most of every individual's chances of survival There's no time to indulge in social gatherings But against all expectation, each one of Ann's tracking collars shows that the desert elephants seem to be grouping together I've got a signal on every collar.
They're all at the same place Appearing out of the Sahel's heartland, whole family groups and even the normally solitary bull elephants are assembling in one vast congregation Nothing has prepared Ann for this moment There are 100, maybe 200 elephants I've seen family groups that must know each other.
They've been separated all year and they'll see each other from across the forest and they get so excited The females just run towards each other.
And when the groups come together, they just trumpet and they all intertwine their trunks and it's called the greeting ceremony.
They greet each other, they put their trunks on each other's heads and in each other's mouths They're so happy and then they just go out in the water and splash around and play It's really nice to watch They elephants are gathering at a place called Banzena It's not sure why they collect here though it's one of the few remote marshes where for now, there's water and mud to enjoy There's a new crop of youngsters, some under a year old Elephants never forget each other After the months of isolation in the desert, this must be an important time to renew the bonds of friendship and test out the strength of old sparring partners As April wears on, the marsh begins to dry The stormy harmattan wind blows from the south, but it brings nothing but dust to the parched Sahel Without rain, all food will soon be gone By May, things are becoming desperate As the surrounding landscape dries out, cattle nomads and their livestock arrive at Banzena in increasing numbers pushing people and elephants together The herdsman and their cattle have trudged for miles in scorching heat to reach Banzena But they will not risk approaching the elephants too closely Only when the last elephant has left the pool do others get the chance to drink The months that will follow are always desolate and unpredictable For the local soothsayer, a giant African tortoise can prophesy the future The tortoise comes from God And if God gives you something, are you going to say that you don't want it Are you going to say you don't like it? It's a messenger He supplies the tortoise with food and water and makes his predictions by studying its eating habits Normally, it will taste the food.
But if it doesn't taste the food, then bad things will happen Or deaths will happen Deaths have already begun After carrying her calf for nearly two years, this elephant is too weak to give birth Already dehydrated, she's forced to disgorge liquid from her own stomach to cool her skin But it's no use Food for elephants and livestock is dwindling to nothing There is a stark choice ahead: move or starve The nomads say that there should be rain soon, but far away to the south To reach those rains and the promise of grazing means 100-mile walk across waterless desert Such a move must be perfectly timed Unless they can be sure that there will be pasture and water on the other side making the hundred mile journey across desert could be suicide So the nomads and their livestock wait It's the elephants who will be the ones to decide when the time is right How they are able to sense when it is safe to cross this desert is a mystery According to local belief, a lone scout elephant goes ahead to lead the way The rest of the elephants know when it's time And suddenly, they're on the move They may have arrived at Banzena in 2s and 3s, but now the whole herd departs together Some may have made this journey as many as 70 times before but for others, this trip must be their first From the collective memory of the herd, the novices will begin to build up a mental map of the lifesaving path to the rains For Ann, their sudden departure has caused a problem The collared elephants can quickly move out of range While she might expect to lose track of 1 or 2, today, the worst has happened The signal from each and every collar has disappeared I'm not getting one signal I knew they were probably going to head south but I didn't think they'd all pick up and leave in one big herd and just move all at the same time Ann has lost the entire herd But she has another trick up her sleeve The great group of elephants has moved 20 or 30 miles into new territory They're cautious, constantly testing the air for danger All over the region, villagers pack up their homes and prepare to head south putting their faith in the elephants' lead It's the elephants who are the first to know about the rains At the moment they travel, the owners of the animals prepare themselves and follow them I have seen it many times.
Each year they do it The elephants walk, and we know there will be water With the next water source so far away, the elephants must keep up their speed But the group can only travel as fast as its youngest members Inevitably, the Sahel claims its victims Everyone here lives on the edge From the air, it's possible to see the scale of the journey And up ahead is a massive sandstone escarpment rising 600 feet from the desert floor that seems to block the elephants' path It's clear from the microlight that the elephants have timed their journey correctly The rains have fallen in the south and the land beyond the escarpment is luscious and green A land of plenty awaits but to reach it, the elephants still have to find a way through this wall of rock There is only one way through This breach in the wall, a canyon through the escarpment And there's a problem.
The canyon has been settled by people and it makes the elephants very nervous to have to come close to large villages elephants may dominate the waterholes, but after the long march, the villagers and the smell of fires and people is enough to push the herd into a state of real anxiety Desperate to reach the pastures and with humans all around, the elephants make a run for it After the torment of the Sahel, paradise awaits For a few glorious days, the elephants have this Eden all to themselves In the elephants' wake, people and livestock soon follow And here, there is enough fresh grassland and water for all After a few weeks, the massed herd of elephants begins to split up But beyond that, no one knows what happens to them for the next couple of months They just disappear into the green wilderness Because this area is a temporary swamp and impassable, Ann can follow no further It's now that the collars really come into their own Using satellite positioning the onboard computers will log the precise location of each of the 8 elephants every two hours So Ann must wait It won't be long before the heat builds up and the rainwater pools start to be sucked up into the sky There's no permanent water here and cattle and people will eventually have to move on The elephants may be elusive, but it's remarkable they exist here at all All the other African plains animals that were once here have died out and been replaced I envision to myself that the donkeys are zebras and the sheep are gazelles and that the camels are giraffes and then it's just like East Africa But most of the wildlife here have been completely decimated There used to be lions and leopard, ostrich and giraffe right here and now they're all gone It's amazing there's just elephants that are left I think there's a few reasons, one is the tolerance of the local people They've never hunted elephants, they don't eat elephants I think they have a reverence for elephants, they really respect them It's probably why they still exist today Two months later, the land is drying in the south The grasses have withered away.
However, there is fodder to be found high in the acacia trees Getting leaves for goats is hard work But help is at hand, because some of the elephants have reappeared in the woodlands The Touareg boys soon find and follow them They've learned that these mysterious elephants can be useful Their sheer strength enables them to reach food where others fail When there's no more grass, they tear down branches and even whole trees And the crumbs that fall from the elephants' table are very welcome to the goats The young herders get close to the elephants at this time, and the elephants just about tolerate them But the truth is uneasy Soon, everyone is competing for water in these woodlands and cooperation can easily tip into conflict Young lads are impatient and foolhardy And they're desperate to get their goats in to drink The elephants generally don't react to boys throwing stones but every so often, the results can be tragic This young Touareg herder and his friends had the misfortune to surprise an elephant Attacked and seriously injured, he saw him companion killed outright, crushed to death in the attack This boy in hospital.
An elephant, an angry elephant came out When he saw those two boys, he chased them, grabbed the first one, throw him.
Threw the small boy away Chased the second one, until he reached him, then after 10 meter he grabbed him, and that second one, he just smashed him The elephant smashed the boy until he was dead So this is why elephant are dangerous By feeding in the way they do, the elephants support human life Occasionally, they take life.
It's been this way for as long as anyone can remember It's 4 months since the rains.
Ann is sure there can e no water in the south and that the elephants will be forced to return north Only one place has enough water all year round, Lake Gossi There are rumors that elephants will soon appear at the lake, but Ann is anxious Gossi is many miles from the southern feeding grounds All Ann can do is to check her monitor and wait And then out of the vast emptiness of the Sahel, the first signal Lake Gossi is a magnet which attracts all life including hundreds of thousands of quilia The arrival of the elephants after their long journey will disrupt the routine of daily life around the lake Trying to catch catfish here will now be dangerous It's only now that Ann will be able to find out whether the collars have worked Each one should contain data that has chartered the exact position of the elephant 12 times a day To fully access this incredible detail, she'll have to wait another year and somehow manage to get the collars off But for the moment, if she can once again get close enough, she can download the initial batch of GPS information and it'll be enough to reveal the first tentative outline of an ancient mystery the survival route of these desert elephants I normally wouldn't get his close to download collars The cow calf groups are really nervous and defensive but these two big bulls here, they're really mellow Now that I've got the collar downloaded onto the receiver, I can hook it right into the laptop You can see all their locations for the last two months on this bull I just have to make a link, and I've got all my GPS locations coming Up to now, these elephants have been the most elusive on earth But back at her base camp, Ann can start to put together the beginnings of a map of their movements These are collar downloads from a bull and a cow They went way up the north, far from just about any people to this Indoman Central and then moved way off to the westernmost point where I've ever seen the elephants go So Ann has begun to unlock their secrets The elephants have traveled across the desert through the canyon to their wet season feeding grounds From there, they spread out and left Mali to cross the border into another country all together, Burkina Fasso And that's why they disappeared for 2 months Eventually, the drying Sahel sent them north again towards Gossi At over 700 miles, it's the longest elephant migration in the world What the data on these collars are really showing me is a survival strategy or a life strategy They're showing me how these elephants are able to survive in one of the harshest places on the face of the earth Obviously, movement is just crucial to the elephants and I already know that it's crucial to the people who live here, to the nomads Their whole lives circulate around moving, waiting for the rains, looking for the water But if the development of Mali means that people stop moving, what does the future hold for the elephants? At Gossi, there may be a glimpse into that future, and it doesn't look good Once, elephants and people share Lake Gossi by sticking to the rules of an uneasy truce But now, the lake is changing Before, we were herders.
But then all our animals were finished by the droughts So we started work in the garden.
And we found that the work was good for us so we did it The reason we can work here is because of the water in the marsh But the water brings the elephants The people's new settled lifestyle is in turn transforming their ancient relationship with the elephants Goats and cattle hold no interest for elephants.
A carefully tended market garden does In this charged atmosphere, coexistence is turning into battle We are afraid of them, and they are destroying our crops They eat whatever we have, and we are forced to accept it When they come, they can catch a man and just beat him Even their touch can kill someone We want to push the elephants away from us But first of all, we want God to help us At night, the fight begins The farmers attempt to scare them off by hurling balls of flaming elephant dung After a night of pitch battle, their enemy is driven off But not for long I saw them in the gardens.
I prayed in the gardens When I finished praying, I came back to get the others to say the elephants have come back I called everyone and we chased them For now, the farmers may have won the battle, but this is a war that can only continue We have seen how they've killed people in the bush We have seen how they are more powerful than us One day, they will come and you will die.
So this power makes us fear them A thing that can beat you like this and has control over your food and can frighten your family, you have to hate him I hope they will be chased away.
I have nothing more to say Mali is one of the last places in Africa to bear witness to an ancient struggle Human against elephant, elephant against human At the heart of the struggle is a complex coexistence that may be about to change forever With settlement on the increase, the scenes at Gossi could be repeated at the other marshes it can only be a matter of time before people will want to kill the elephants And with maybe just 300 left, the elephants' numbers are already critically low Ann believes the detailed data in the collars may hold the keys to the elephants' survival But collaring elephants at random was hard enough To remove them, Ann will have to get close to 8 specific elephants in the scattered herd It's going to be just a monumental task, and with these animals being so shy and so skittish and so dangerous to get close to being able to just select one particular animal out of a herd and tranquilize it again and get the collar back is really going to be a challenge I don't like to think about the possibility of not getting the collars back, because I'm really devoted to understanding what these elephants are actually doing At this point, I have all these theories and all these stories and all these little bits of information, and it'll be success for us if I can just get the whole picture which is what these collars are going to show for us.
Just get the whole story Ann's research may provide the first complete picture of Mali's elephants giving the knowledge to save them Or it could be the final scientific record before the elephants of Timbuktu are lost forever
There's a trumpet They are not carnivores, not going to eat you, but they are enormous and they do kill people You don't want to push them, you want to respect elephants First contact is brief The elephants do not accept Ann's presence At the first scent of the unfamiliar, they disappear into the desert If Ann is to find out how these animals survive here, she has to work out a way of following them The local Touareg talk of a great elephant migration towards the south It would make sense for the elephants to move, The Sahel is one of the harshest environments on earth Food and water are scarce and patchy To survive demands constant movement to search for resources In up to 130 degrees of desert heat her mother must find at least 50 gallons of water every day to keep her calf alive Livestock also need daily access to water but all too often the story is the same: the nomad herd has arrived to find the waterhole is already taken Even though the goats are thirsty, the herder will keep them well back rather than risk the danger of challenging the elephants So for now, the goats must wait their turn It's February, and there's still enough of the muddy water to go around but the dry season is only just beginning Ann is on her last supply stop in the oasis town of Djenne famed for its huge mud-built mosque Djenne has long been a place for travelers to rest and to pray for a safe journey She has come up with a high-technology solution to the problem of following the elephants But to use it, she'll have to get closer to the elephants than ever before And at a camel market, the traders are quick to remind her of the hazards The elephants are not afraid of anything I have never seen anything the elephants are fearful of You can't have faith in something you're scared of If you're scared of something, you can't trust it If you walk off behind the elephants and you don't see them and you approach them too close at this moment, they will attack you, and only God can save you To carried out her plan, Ann must dart and tranquilize an elephant Even with the expect help of a vet, it's tense The wind is really in our favor.
It's perfect A cow, this is amazing.
I'm just amazed at the distance that we're getting from them, we're getting very, very close, and they don't see us at all But it's going to be very dangerous if someone makes a bad move and they do see us so we want to be very quiet and get just as close as we can to get a good shot Billy Karesh is a wildlife vet from New York He has years of elephant experience and he knows the tranquilized animal must be approached with extreme caution Let's give her a few more minutes Once the elephant begins the snore, the team knows it's safe Could you try and lift her head a little? The aim to attach a radio satellite collar that Ann hopes will enable her to follow the elephants Just pull the rope all the way through then? No, hold, don't pull yet One, two, there, lift Oh, well that worked well Why did you pull the rope? Oh, sorry, I I said don't pull the rope.
All right.
Give me that stick.
Ok, this is on top Is this a male? This is the female This is a male collar During the anxious preparations for this moment, a serious error has been made Did you think we'd get two bulls this morning? The team should carry two different collars a long one for a bull elephant and a shorter one for a female But the collars they've brought are both for bulls, and the animal they've tranquilized is a female It's four days before the team are able to try again From now on, there's no room for more mistakes Virtually nothing is known about these elephants Even at close quarters, they retain much of their mystery And just calculating the age of this female is going to be difficult How are you guys doing for measurements? Good shape? Yeah, good shape.
I'm going to do tusks It's really hard to age this population because they have really tiny tusks and of course, nobody has ever aged elephants in west Africa before so all I can do is base it on what we know from elephants in Kenya It's pretty exciting that we're working with elephants, because you need a lot of batteries to run these things They're really heavy so pretty much, it takes an elephant to actually carry enough batteries that we can follow them for a meaningful amount of time The large batteries run the onboard computer which will store two years worth of data and detail every inch of the elephants' movements I mean, I can't tell you what she's going to do.
I just, cannot predict Her head is up and everybody is going to back away, because she's going to be getting up pretty quickly You guys kind of be prepared with your stuff We're backing away slowly, but she's confused about what's just happened and she's looking right at us Oh, come on, come on, there we go This time, both the elephant and the team are okay But they'll have to go through the process 7 more times before all the tracking collars are attached Three weeks later and with all the collars safely in place, Ann is able to monitor 8 elephants as they move through this part of the Sahel And after a month of tracking, she's found that something very odd is happening When food and water are scarce, elephants herds are normally very small making the most of every individual's chances of survival There's no time to indulge in social gatherings But against all expectation, each one of Ann's tracking collars shows that the desert elephants seem to be grouping together I've got a signal on every collar.
They're all at the same place Appearing out of the Sahel's heartland, whole family groups and even the normally solitary bull elephants are assembling in one vast congregation Nothing has prepared Ann for this moment There are 100, maybe 200 elephants I've seen family groups that must know each other.
They've been separated all year and they'll see each other from across the forest and they get so excited The females just run towards each other.
And when the groups come together, they just trumpet and they all intertwine their trunks and it's called the greeting ceremony.
They greet each other, they put their trunks on each other's heads and in each other's mouths They're so happy and then they just go out in the water and splash around and play It's really nice to watch They elephants are gathering at a place called Banzena It's not sure why they collect here though it's one of the few remote marshes where for now, there's water and mud to enjoy There's a new crop of youngsters, some under a year old Elephants never forget each other After the months of isolation in the desert, this must be an important time to renew the bonds of friendship and test out the strength of old sparring partners As April wears on, the marsh begins to dry The stormy harmattan wind blows from the south, but it brings nothing but dust to the parched Sahel Without rain, all food will soon be gone By May, things are becoming desperate As the surrounding landscape dries out, cattle nomads and their livestock arrive at Banzena in increasing numbers pushing people and elephants together The herdsman and their cattle have trudged for miles in scorching heat to reach Banzena But they will not risk approaching the elephants too closely Only when the last elephant has left the pool do others get the chance to drink The months that will follow are always desolate and unpredictable For the local soothsayer, a giant African tortoise can prophesy the future The tortoise comes from God And if God gives you something, are you going to say that you don't want it Are you going to say you don't like it? It's a messenger He supplies the tortoise with food and water and makes his predictions by studying its eating habits Normally, it will taste the food.
But if it doesn't taste the food, then bad things will happen Or deaths will happen Deaths have already begun After carrying her calf for nearly two years, this elephant is too weak to give birth Already dehydrated, she's forced to disgorge liquid from her own stomach to cool her skin But it's no use Food for elephants and livestock is dwindling to nothing There is a stark choice ahead: move or starve The nomads say that there should be rain soon, but far away to the south To reach those rains and the promise of grazing means 100-mile walk across waterless desert Such a move must be perfectly timed Unless they can be sure that there will be pasture and water on the other side making the hundred mile journey across desert could be suicide So the nomads and their livestock wait It's the elephants who will be the ones to decide when the time is right How they are able to sense when it is safe to cross this desert is a mystery According to local belief, a lone scout elephant goes ahead to lead the way The rest of the elephants know when it's time And suddenly, they're on the move They may have arrived at Banzena in 2s and 3s, but now the whole herd departs together Some may have made this journey as many as 70 times before but for others, this trip must be their first From the collective memory of the herd, the novices will begin to build up a mental map of the lifesaving path to the rains For Ann, their sudden departure has caused a problem The collared elephants can quickly move out of range While she might expect to lose track of 1 or 2, today, the worst has happened The signal from each and every collar has disappeared I'm not getting one signal I knew they were probably going to head south but I didn't think they'd all pick up and leave in one big herd and just move all at the same time Ann has lost the entire herd But she has another trick up her sleeve The great group of elephants has moved 20 or 30 miles into new territory They're cautious, constantly testing the air for danger All over the region, villagers pack up their homes and prepare to head south putting their faith in the elephants' lead It's the elephants who are the first to know about the rains At the moment they travel, the owners of the animals prepare themselves and follow them I have seen it many times.
Each year they do it The elephants walk, and we know there will be water With the next water source so far away, the elephants must keep up their speed But the group can only travel as fast as its youngest members Inevitably, the Sahel claims its victims Everyone here lives on the edge From the air, it's possible to see the scale of the journey And up ahead is a massive sandstone escarpment rising 600 feet from the desert floor that seems to block the elephants' path It's clear from the microlight that the elephants have timed their journey correctly The rains have fallen in the south and the land beyond the escarpment is luscious and green A land of plenty awaits but to reach it, the elephants still have to find a way through this wall of rock There is only one way through This breach in the wall, a canyon through the escarpment And there's a problem.
The canyon has been settled by people and it makes the elephants very nervous to have to come close to large villages elephants may dominate the waterholes, but after the long march, the villagers and the smell of fires and people is enough to push the herd into a state of real anxiety Desperate to reach the pastures and with humans all around, the elephants make a run for it After the torment of the Sahel, paradise awaits For a few glorious days, the elephants have this Eden all to themselves In the elephants' wake, people and livestock soon follow And here, there is enough fresh grassland and water for all After a few weeks, the massed herd of elephants begins to split up But beyond that, no one knows what happens to them for the next couple of months They just disappear into the green wilderness Because this area is a temporary swamp and impassable, Ann can follow no further It's now that the collars really come into their own Using satellite positioning the onboard computers will log the precise location of each of the 8 elephants every two hours So Ann must wait It won't be long before the heat builds up and the rainwater pools start to be sucked up into the sky There's no permanent water here and cattle and people will eventually have to move on The elephants may be elusive, but it's remarkable they exist here at all All the other African plains animals that were once here have died out and been replaced I envision to myself that the donkeys are zebras and the sheep are gazelles and that the camels are giraffes and then it's just like East Africa But most of the wildlife here have been completely decimated There used to be lions and leopard, ostrich and giraffe right here and now they're all gone It's amazing there's just elephants that are left I think there's a few reasons, one is the tolerance of the local people They've never hunted elephants, they don't eat elephants I think they have a reverence for elephants, they really respect them It's probably why they still exist today Two months later, the land is drying in the south The grasses have withered away.
However, there is fodder to be found high in the acacia trees Getting leaves for goats is hard work But help is at hand, because some of the elephants have reappeared in the woodlands The Touareg boys soon find and follow them They've learned that these mysterious elephants can be useful Their sheer strength enables them to reach food where others fail When there's no more grass, they tear down branches and even whole trees And the crumbs that fall from the elephants' table are very welcome to the goats The young herders get close to the elephants at this time, and the elephants just about tolerate them But the truth is uneasy Soon, everyone is competing for water in these woodlands and cooperation can easily tip into conflict Young lads are impatient and foolhardy And they're desperate to get their goats in to drink The elephants generally don't react to boys throwing stones but every so often, the results can be tragic This young Touareg herder and his friends had the misfortune to surprise an elephant Attacked and seriously injured, he saw him companion killed outright, crushed to death in the attack This boy in hospital.
An elephant, an angry elephant came out When he saw those two boys, he chased them, grabbed the first one, throw him.
Threw the small boy away Chased the second one, until he reached him, then after 10 meter he grabbed him, and that second one, he just smashed him The elephant smashed the boy until he was dead So this is why elephant are dangerous By feeding in the way they do, the elephants support human life Occasionally, they take life.
It's been this way for as long as anyone can remember It's 4 months since the rains.
Ann is sure there can e no water in the south and that the elephants will be forced to return north Only one place has enough water all year round, Lake Gossi There are rumors that elephants will soon appear at the lake, but Ann is anxious Gossi is many miles from the southern feeding grounds All Ann can do is to check her monitor and wait And then out of the vast emptiness of the Sahel, the first signal Lake Gossi is a magnet which attracts all life including hundreds of thousands of quilia The arrival of the elephants after their long journey will disrupt the routine of daily life around the lake Trying to catch catfish here will now be dangerous It's only now that Ann will be able to find out whether the collars have worked Each one should contain data that has chartered the exact position of the elephant 12 times a day To fully access this incredible detail, she'll have to wait another year and somehow manage to get the collars off But for the moment, if she can once again get close enough, she can download the initial batch of GPS information and it'll be enough to reveal the first tentative outline of an ancient mystery the survival route of these desert elephants I normally wouldn't get his close to download collars The cow calf groups are really nervous and defensive but these two big bulls here, they're really mellow Now that I've got the collar downloaded onto the receiver, I can hook it right into the laptop You can see all their locations for the last two months on this bull I just have to make a link, and I've got all my GPS locations coming Up to now, these elephants have been the most elusive on earth But back at her base camp, Ann can start to put together the beginnings of a map of their movements These are collar downloads from a bull and a cow They went way up the north, far from just about any people to this Indoman Central and then moved way off to the westernmost point where I've ever seen the elephants go So Ann has begun to unlock their secrets The elephants have traveled across the desert through the canyon to their wet season feeding grounds From there, they spread out and left Mali to cross the border into another country all together, Burkina Fasso And that's why they disappeared for 2 months Eventually, the drying Sahel sent them north again towards Gossi At over 700 miles, it's the longest elephant migration in the world What the data on these collars are really showing me is a survival strategy or a life strategy They're showing me how these elephants are able to survive in one of the harshest places on the face of the earth Obviously, movement is just crucial to the elephants and I already know that it's crucial to the people who live here, to the nomads Their whole lives circulate around moving, waiting for the rains, looking for the water But if the development of Mali means that people stop moving, what does the future hold for the elephants? At Gossi, there may be a glimpse into that future, and it doesn't look good Once, elephants and people share Lake Gossi by sticking to the rules of an uneasy truce But now, the lake is changing Before, we were herders.
But then all our animals were finished by the droughts So we started work in the garden.
And we found that the work was good for us so we did it The reason we can work here is because of the water in the marsh But the water brings the elephants The people's new settled lifestyle is in turn transforming their ancient relationship with the elephants Goats and cattle hold no interest for elephants.
A carefully tended market garden does In this charged atmosphere, coexistence is turning into battle We are afraid of them, and they are destroying our crops They eat whatever we have, and we are forced to accept it When they come, they can catch a man and just beat him Even their touch can kill someone We want to push the elephants away from us But first of all, we want God to help us At night, the fight begins The farmers attempt to scare them off by hurling balls of flaming elephant dung After a night of pitch battle, their enemy is driven off But not for long I saw them in the gardens.
I prayed in the gardens When I finished praying, I came back to get the others to say the elephants have come back I called everyone and we chased them For now, the farmers may have won the battle, but this is a war that can only continue We have seen how they've killed people in the bush We have seen how they are more powerful than us One day, they will come and you will die.
So this power makes us fear them A thing that can beat you like this and has control over your food and can frighten your family, you have to hate him I hope they will be chased away.
I have nothing more to say Mali is one of the last places in Africa to bear witness to an ancient struggle Human against elephant, elephant against human At the heart of the struggle is a complex coexistence that may be about to change forever With settlement on the increase, the scenes at Gossi could be repeated at the other marshes it can only be a matter of time before people will want to kill the elephants And with maybe just 300 left, the elephants' numbers are already critically low Ann believes the detailed data in the collars may hold the keys to the elephants' survival But collaring elephants at random was hard enough To remove them, Ann will have to get close to 8 specific elephants in the scattered herd It's going to be just a monumental task, and with these animals being so shy and so skittish and so dangerous to get close to being able to just select one particular animal out of a herd and tranquilize it again and get the collar back is really going to be a challenge I don't like to think about the possibility of not getting the collars back, because I'm really devoted to understanding what these elephants are actually doing At this point, I have all these theories and all these stories and all these little bits of information, and it'll be success for us if I can just get the whole picture which is what these collars are going to show for us.
Just get the whole story Ann's research may provide the first complete picture of Mali's elephants giving the knowledge to save them Or it could be the final scientific record before the elephants of Timbuktu are lost forever