Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. She's bundled in a heavy coat rarely needed during her years in the African bush. Chad. In a public square in Am Timan, shortly before his trial, he shouted, I know who betrayed me! The story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. First, Campbell-Staton wanted to make sure the proportion of tuskless elephants in Mozambique had indeed changed. That's so terrible! "The people on the shore, they started discharging their automatic weapons in the air," she remembers. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. 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. Its easier to live with things, she says. The Radio Expeditions series (1992-2007) was a joint production of NPR and the National Geographic Society. 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. October 21, 2021 at 3:01 pm. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. ", Turkalo says she walked up to the man in charge and saw he had an AK-47 assault rifle. Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. Back in 1969 Gorongosa National Park was home to over 2200 elephants, but now there is just over 700 in the park. 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. PRODUCER: Janey Adams. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. Or you hear a rumble, and you know it's probably an adult female, rumbling for a family either saying, 'I'm here,' or 'Let's go.' The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. 'Everybody out, everybody out.' Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, I said, shaking their hands. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Large-tusked elephants in Gorongosa were killed for their ivory, which was sold to buy arms and ammunition. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. Those looking at the tusks think Im an ivory trafficker. Inside the fake tusk, I want him to embed a custom-made GPS and satellite-based tracking system. 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. They set up camp and in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants. 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. It hadnt explodedyet. for their tusks. 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. Michael K. Nichols/National Geographic/Getty Images. Copyright 2021 NPR. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army officers assisting with patrols. He said: "We actually expect that this syndrome will decrease in frequency in our study population, provided that the conservation picture continues to stay as positive as it has been recently. Konys army had arrived in Garamba in 2006 with little ammunition left to continue its war, Onen tells me. This comment was removed because it broke the rules. PHOTO EDITOR: Kathy Moran. Then youre just the man for me.. Sudan is not on these lists, even though Sudanese poachers are a primary reason elephants are killed in several of the countries listed by CITES as of primary or secondary concern. His army farmed vegetables. Schreger lines, he says. Sudan is also a well-documented supplier of ivory to Egypt and is the recipient of substantial Chinese infrastructure investment, which typically comes with Chinese workers, a source of ivory smuggling in many parts of Africa. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwartthem? In 2012 as many as a hundred Sudanese and Chadian poachers on horseback rode across central Africa into Cameroons Bouba Ndjidah National Park. My interpretation, says Jean Marc Froment, then director of the park, is that the Ugandan military is conducting operations inside Garamba and at the same time taking some ivory. But, he adds, the poachers could be SPLA, which uses the same type of helicopter seen over the park. 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. 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. Andrea Turkalo looks through a scope in 2002 from the observation platform she built along the edge of the bai. They used Historical records to collect height (estimated to the shoulder), tusk length, and tusk circumference from approximately 600 elephants that were culled in Tsavo East National Park (Kenya) and Mkomazi National Park (Tanzania) between 1966 and 1968. After three weeks the tusks turn north again, back into Sudan. Froment uses the word war to describe the fight Garambas 150 rangers are in with poachers. 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. - 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. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. 5. 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. In Tanzania and Mozambique, elephants . Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. But instead, that morning the poachers were hiding among trees surrounding the rangers camp. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. All rights reserved. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. 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. Researchers took blood samples from elephants in order to sequence their genomes. During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. a. percentage of elephants killed . The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous teams raid, the poachers had all fled home. Year after year, the path to many of the biggest, most horrific elephant killings traces back to Sudan, which has no elephants left but gives comfort to foreign-born poacher-terrorists and is home to the janjaweed and other Sudanese cross-continental marauders. But she knew she had to leave; she's a researcher for a non-governmental wildlife organization, not some kind of soldier-of-fortune. CAMPBELL-STATON: But then I realized that there wasn't actually a lot of empirical data about what the response was from, you know, what the genetic basis of the trait was. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Some elephant populations seem to be missing their tusks. 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. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. 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. 4. "When it gets bad we leave.". But a new study suggests there is a serious reason for why lots of tuskless elephants can now be found in the country of Mozambique in Africa - poaching. If he can do this, Ill ask him to make several more tusks. Park rangers are often the only forces going up against the killers. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. The operation was designed by Kony himself, Onen says. At the time Sudans north and south were in a civil war, and Kony offered Sudans government, in Khartoum, a way to destabilize the south. Forest elephants linger on a misty morning at the Dzanga bai. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. ", Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. 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. In June three more Garamba-based officers were killed. Andrea says all she was able to rescue were electronic copies of her research data. Accuracy and availability may vary. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. Bryan Christy sets out on his groundbreaking mission to track down the kingpins of the ivory trade. We would follow them using Google Earth. But time is stalking our team: Months later, on April 25, 2015, while on patrol, the ranger who led me into Garamba, Agoyo Mbikoyo, was shot and killed by a gang of poachers. At that time, about 18% of females there were born without tusks. But a computer simulation, which examined the probability of tusked and tuskless females surviving the war, suggested the increase in tuskless females was far more likely to have resulted from selection, the team reports online today in Science. When humans hunt, they can cause their quarry to evolve by targeting individuals with particular traits, like big fish or sheep with hefty horns. 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. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . An estimated 25,000 elephants are killed every year in Africa for their tusks, double the number killed in 2007. Gathering speed, they continue north before abruptly turning east, in the direction of Khartoum. Do not lose even one tusk, he instructed the group, according to Onen, who said the plan was to carry the ivory to a rendezvous in CAR and then on to a market town in Darfur called Songo, not far from the Sudan Armed Forces garrison in Dafaq. Members of the Ugandan armys dog-tracking team lift weights at the African Union base in Obo, CAR. No one has. Show your work. The Central African Republic was peaceful back then. Seven surgeries later shes forgiven them. The soldiers killed the elephants. 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. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. 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. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so its difficult for them to find husbands. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . Ivory poachers are killing some 22,000 African elephants a year. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? But when I ask a gathering of children and elders in the village of Kpaika, about 30 miles from the parks western border, how many of them have visited Garamba, no one raises a hand. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Their own families are afraid that theyre devils, or forever soldiers, who might kill them in the night. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. "But I'm certain I knew a few of the elephants they killed," she says including some that the NPR team had recorded. MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. Next, researchers wanted to pin down the mechanism of inheritance for tusklessness. By Jake Buehler. These jumbo foragers are masterful engineers of their surroundings. A booming Chinese middle class with an insatiable taste for ivory, crippling poverty in Africa, weak and corrupt law enforcement, and more ways than ever to kill an elephant have created a perfect storm. Fish and Wildlife Service. His control is absolute.. Since the 1980s, and beginning in Uganda, Konys minions are alleged to have killed tens of thousands of people, slicing the lips, ears, and breasts off women, raping children and women, chopping off the feet of those caught riding bicycles, and kidnapping young boys to create an army of child soldiers who themselves grow into killers. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before theyre bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. We protect the elephant to protect the park. Dry season in, rainy season out. Seleka and its rival, anti-Balaka, have set fire to people, thrown them off bridges, and murdered people wantonly, turning CAR into a lawless statethe kind of place where Konys group and other terrorist organizations thrive. 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. 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. We meet over Skype. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. Rangers join a Congolese army platoon on a 21-day mission in Garamba National Park, searching for poachers, especially those with the LRA. I mean, I've been through a lot of poaching.". Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. Why are you collecting ivory? Otti demanded of Kony. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. The elephants coat themselves in red clay. hide caption, "We didn't know anything about (the forest elephants) in terms of their social structure, numbers, genetics, communication," Turkalo explained back in 2002 when the NPR team visited. Otti was furious, Onen says. He was 22 years old the night in 1998 that Konys soldiers raided his village in Gulu, Uganda, and pulled him from his bed. An adviser to the Ugandan military rejects the helicopter accusation, and suggests that the elephants might have been shot in the top of the head after they were down. The result: Some 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year, more than 100,000 between 2010 and 2012, and the pace of killing is not slowing. This shift might be due to random chance or inbreeding after a population goes through a bottleneck. In 2002, NPR host and correspondent Alex Chadwick and sound engineer Bill McQuay went to central Africa to see and gather sound from the rare forest elephants of the Dzanga bai. A young elephant splashes in a stream that runs through the bai. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. Poachers killed at least 132 last year, and as of this June, rangers had discovered another 42 carcasses with bullet holes, more than 30 attributed to a single Sudanese poaching expeditiona combined loss amounting to more than 10 percent of the parks entire population of elephants, estimated now to be no more than about 1,500. 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. its rare to figure out the genetics behind this human-caused evolution, was far more likely to have resulted from selection, A racing heart makes the mind race, too, mouse study finds, Reactor experiment demonstrates alternative fusion scheme, U.K. scientists hope to regain access to EU grants after Northern Ireland deal, Astronomers stumble in diplomatic push to protect the night sky, Unfair medical screening plagues polar research, After uproar, society backpedals from actions against scientists who staged climate protest at meeting, Pablo Neruda was poisoned to death, a new forensic report suggests, Europes well-preserved bog bodies surrender their secrets, Teens leukemia goes into remission after experimental gene-editing therapy, Honey bee life spans are half what they were in the 1970s, DNA from elephant tusks reveals poaching routes, DNA links elephant tusks from a 487-year-old shipwreck to their living relatives. Im not an animal lover, he snaps. Where did the tusks end up? Then, like a bobber in a fishing hole, a nibble. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. Earlier this year Kony suffered the defection of his commander of operations, Dominic Ongwen, who told African Union forces that Konys desire for ivory was reinforced by Seleka. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. During a civil war in the country, that lasted from 1977 to 1992, up to 90% of Mozambique's elephant population was killed, mainly for their ivory tusks. Critical role in sustaining this effort have finished building a new headquarters and acquired airplanes... They could use their tusks, but now there is just over 700 in the of. Things, she says, referring to the park rangers protecting elephants elephant splashes in public... 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