To enjoy the CBBC Newsround website at its best you will need to have JavaScript turned on. Its easier to live with things, she says. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. "This time they covered most of country," she says, "pillage, rape and kill. There, Onen says, Konys men trade ivory with the Sudanese military for salt, sugar, and arms. 3. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. This project was made possible by a grant from The WoodtigerFund. I find a human skull fragment, and I nearly pick up a live hand grenade near where the SPLA had camped, mistaking it for a baby tortoise. For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. CORNISH: So he made some calls and assembled a team. This find suggests the mutation for tusklessness may kill male elephants, per the New York Times. So I said to myself, 'I better go into a very passive mode.' When Ele, a female elephant, died, other elephants approached one-by-one and touched their trunks to the body. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. Ive flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. Mozambiques civil war from 1977 to 1992 had a grim outcome for elephants: During that time, some 90% were killed for the ivory in their tusks, which were sold to finance the war. She and other scientists also recorded their calls. One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. If true, Soumaine Issa will find poachers working with Seleka. It's called the Dzanga bai a clearing the size of several football fields that's rich in the mineralized mud that the elephants depend on. My tusks will have to act like ivory. only . 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. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. He said they bury sealed buckets of water along parched travel routes and bury ivory for safekeeping as well. Maybe I could get my fake tusks to Konytoo. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. At that point she'd already dedicated more than a decade of her life to studying forest elephants, which for centuries had remained hidden within the dense canopy of the rain forest. "And they were yelling at us," she says. " Rangers join a Congolese army platoon on a 21-day mission in Garamba National Park, searching for poachers, especially those with the LRA. Traits that are beneficial in one environment may not be beneficial in another. To follow my artificial tusks from the jungle to their final destination, I need a tracking device capable of transmitting exact locations without dead zones. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. From March 2014 to March 2015, Garambas rangers recorded 31 contacts with armed poachers, more than half of whom were with groups traveling south from the direction of South Sudan and Sudan. You can hear the original field recordings and interviews from Radio Expedition's 2002 elephant story, and see photos and night-vision video from the elephant bai, on the archive's website. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. While Dante set about embedding Kermeens tracker inside his tusk mold, a third team member, John Flaig, a specialist in near-space, balloon-based photographyimages taken from at least the height of spy planeswas preparing to monitor the tusks as they moved. I will use his tusks to hunt the people who kill elephants and to learn what roads their ivory plunder follows, which ports it leaves, what ships it travels on, what cities and countries it transits, and where it ends up. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. Those elephants were featured in an NPR program, Radio Expeditions, in 2002, when former NPR host and correspondent Alex Chadwick and sound engineer Bill McQuay went to central Africa to record them. RENAMO also had imposed a system it called Gamdira whereby villagers were required to produce food, transport goods and ammunition, and village women were forced to be sex slaves. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. He wasnt contrite. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. Professor Robert Pringle of Princeton University said: "Tusklessness might be advantageous during a war, but that comes at a cost.". CORNISH: You see; while most African elephants have tusks, some female African elephants are born without them and never grow them. Hed grown up not far from Garamba at a time when it was possible to fly over the park and see 5,000 elephants in a single gathering. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. This ideathat an animal's perception of danger . Mozambique's elephants declined from an estimated 20,000 to 10,300 during the same period. Follow theirroute. During the same period, neighboring Mozambique is reported to have lost 48 percent of its elephants. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. I know which house theyre in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. PRODUCER: Janey Adams. "I don't know which ones they killed," she replies. 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. Kony is a former Roman Catholic altar boy whose stated mission is to overthrow the Ugandan government on behalf of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, and to rule the country according to his version of the Ten Commandments. They shift a few miles. Michael Onen, the defector from Konys army, told me that the LRA and the janjaweed had battled over ivory, with one group robbing the other, and that it was the janjaweeds success in trading ivory that originally gave Kony the idea to start killing elephants. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Konys son Salim. To her relief, the men turned out to be local. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. ", But Turkalo's 22 years with those elephants came to a disastrous end last year, when civil war in the republic found its way to the Dzanga bai. 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 pushed on downriver. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border-hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." The poachers opened fire, killing five rangers. Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. Will they go north, the most violent ivory path on the African continent? Armed groups help fund operations by smuggling elephant ivory. This is the long shadow of that human imprint that is going to take generations to erase, Pringle says. HOW MANY TIMES ?? This story was originally published in the September 2015 issue of National Geographicmagazine. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. I want Dante to design an artificial elephant tusk that has the look and feel of confiscated tusks loaned to me by the U.S. Bryan Christy sets out on his groundbreaking mission to track down the kingpins of the ivory trade. She had gone to Africa to do aid work, but was drawn to the intricate lives of these elephants. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwartthem? When he shows up, he picks up a tusk and runs his finger over the butt end. ", World Elephant Day: Ten facts about amazing elephants, Elephants and the ivory trade: The crisis in Africa, Safer Internet Day: Top tips for when you're online, Rescue services helping as big quake hits Turkey and Syria, We speak to Junior Bake Off champion about winning the show. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. 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. The family of Idriss Adoum (top, second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. Seven surgeries later shes forgiven them. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. They shot 26 elephants and cut out their tusks. Copyright 2021 NPR. Bill McQuay now works as a sound engineer with the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. Konys response was immediate and savage. In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, amineral-rich watering hole in CAR. When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. 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. Park rangers are often the only forces going up against the killers. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. Three more are classified as of importance to watch: Angola, Cambodia, and Laos. Five of the worlds least stable nations, as ranked by the Washington, D.C.-based organization the Fund for Peace, are home to people who travel to other countries to kill elephants. In June three more Garamba-based officers were killed. Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. With an average of 16 years in the bush with the LRA, the men bring a wealth of experience to the hunt for Kony and his fighters. In three weeks Konys brutes killed more than 800 people and kidnapped more than 160 children. 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. I need Schreger lines too, George, I say, referring to the cross-hatching on the butt of a sawn tusk that looks like growth rings of a tree trunk. 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. TEXT EDITOR: Oliver Payne. 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 several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. "The people on the shore, they started discharging their automatic weapons in the air," she remembers. That evening, they floated by a village. 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. At the same time, the apartheid government and the Smith regime lost Portugal as an ally and with it the tens of thousands of soldiers that had been deployed in the Portuguese colonial wars. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. Back in 1969 Gorongosa National Park was home to over 2200 elephants, but now there is just over 700 in the park. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. He designed a GPS tracker that the U.S. Geological Survey embedded in live Burmese pythons to monitor the invasive snakes in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. Those looking at the tusks think Im an ivory trafficker. 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