During those years Sudanese poachers arrived in groups of more than a dozen armed men, camping inside the park for months at a time, killing, in one instance, 64 elephants in a single hunt. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous teams raid, the poachers had all fled home. Why are you collecting ivory? Otti demanded of Kony. c. percentage of elephants killed for . They say the more elephants they kill, the more ivory they get.. It was just after 4 a.m. on Heban hill, in Chad, 80 miles from the Sudanese border and 60 miles northeast of Zakouma National Park, home to the countrys largest remaining elephant herd, 450 animals. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the team into a collective crouch and wait silently. MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. After three weeks the tusks turn north again, back into Sudan. My tusks will have to act like ivory. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. 19/129 = 14.7%. Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. (Special thanks to the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for sharing the audio.). To her relief, the men turned out to be local. Elephants without tusks were normally left alone by hunters, so this made it more likely they would breed and pass on the tuskless trait to their children. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwartthem? Around us stroll Ugandan army soldiers, who make up the entire African Union contingent based in Obo and are committed to finding and killing Kony. Researchers took blood samples from elephants in order to sequence their genomes. Other roads also lead to Sudan. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. According to Cline Sissler-Bienvenu, Francophone Africa director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who led a group into the park after the slaughter, the poachers were most likely from Darfurs Rizeigat tribal group, with ties to the janjaweedthe violent, Sudanese-government-backed militias that have committed atrocities in Darfur. One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. Andrea says all she was able to rescue were electronic copies of her research data. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. ", Now, a year later, Andrea is stoic about the loss. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. 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. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Diya is for accidents, he says. On some days more then 100 elephants at at a time visit the clearing. He asks for water for me and is led out of the building. Researchers in Mozambique found a . They shot 26 elephants and cut out their tusks. Otti was furious, Onen says. Zakouma breathes its elephants. Eight more are considered of secondary concern: Cameroon, Congo, the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, and Nigeria. He said they bury sealed buckets of water along parched travel routes and bury ivory for safekeeping as well. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. Now, says the parks director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, my biggest fear is that theyll start coming in pairs.. "It's another example of the imprint of [human] effect on nature," says wildlife ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. CAMPBELL-STATON: You know, people during the Mozambican Civil War were not thinking about the evolution of elephants, I imagine, in the slightest. Kermeen started in the radio-tracking business when he was 15 and has since built electronic trackers and collars for wildlife from Andean bears to California condors to Tasmanian devils. Where did the tusks end up? Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. Meanwhile, flouting the cease-fire, his men crossed into CAR, where they kidnapped hundreds of children and made sex slaves of women they brought back to the park. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." The biggest is why a dominant gene associated with deadly effects for males would persist in the population during periods without poaching. He and his colleagues analyzed videos, taken before the civil war, of elephants in the park. 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. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, amineral-rich watering hole in CAR. I didn't go looking for this. We can't change the last bit we can shape the future. He was 22 years old the night in 1998 that Konys soldiers raided his village in Gulu, Uganda, and pulled him from his bed. All around me I hear the click-clack of automatic weapons being loaded. They killed fewer elephants per hunt but were much harder to track and stop. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. Then youre just the man for me.. One moves north toward Heban, the other west toward centralChad. Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks Elephants with a rare "tuskless" genetic trait had a better chance of surviving Mozambique's long civil war, financed in. "I heard they were on their way. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. 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. This paper is going to lead to a lot of speculation and modeling.. Being small, he balked at having to carry the heavy bundles that Konys militants ferry from camp to camp in their patrols across central Africa, and for his whining, he was beaten with a machete. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. But it could take a long time for tusked females to become as common as they once were. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so its difficult for them to find husbands. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. Radio Expeditions used interviews, narration, and on-location recording to bring listeners to exotic places around the world. Issa, who is Chadian, said he joined the team of three Sudanese men and that together they rode more than two weeks to get to Heban, where they killed nine elephants in four days. 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. The family of Idriss Adoum (top, second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. In a public square in Am Timan, shortly before his trial, he shouted, I know who betrayed me! The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The LRA sells to the Sudan Armed Forces, Onen said. These LRA defectorsall abducted as children and pressed into servicenow fight for the Ugandan military. Issa claimed he was merely a lookout, not a poacher. Gathering speed, they continue north before abruptly turning east, in the direction of Khartoum. They shift a few miles. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. This behavior is associated with mourning, field researchers say. During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. 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. On January 2, 2009, the horror bled into Garambas headquarters, at Nagero, where Kony soldiers burned the park rangers main building, destroyed equipment, and killed at least eight rangers and staff members. In Zimbabwe, a recent survey shows massive losses in some parks. Learn more about the Explorer series. After Zakoumas rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit. . 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. ", "We got into a boat; we went downriver," Turkalo says. In 1978, the elephant was listed as threatened under the United States' Endangered Species Act. But Turkalo decided not to leave the region right away. Later, when Labuschagne examined the trajectory of bullets at the scene, he concluded that the poachers had been trained in how to set up a cross fire, which, combined with evidence found at the scene, pointed to President Omar al-Bashirs Sudan Armed Forces. In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. No one has. That evening, they floated by a village. "The people on the shore, they started discharging their automatic weapons in the air," she remembers. 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Kiev's troops have big Nazi problem - ex-US soldier who escaped Ukraine; DESTRUCTION OF OUR CULTURE HAS SUCCEEDED; Most Ukrainian Soldiers On Bakhmut Front-Line Killed 'Within 4 Hours' URGENT: mRNAs jabs may have caused tens of millions of serious new health problems worldwide, a huge peer-reviewed study shows But that's not the end of the story. 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. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors who can deal not just with poachers, but with civil war, too. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. East Africa is now ground zero for much of the poaching. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. All rights reserved. They also had twice as many daughters as sons. only . Researchers looked at why female elephants in Gorongosa national park in Mozambique were frequently born without tusks, and found that the animals were in effect genetically engineered by mass . MCCAMMON: Around 90% of the elephants there were killed, but many female elephants without tusks survived and thrived. They all report to him, they all obey him. For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. When in 2008 the Wildlife Conservation Society introduced a surveillance airplane, poaching declined, but Sudanese marauders adapted, returning in hit squads of under six men, who infiltrated from outside the park on one-day hunts. 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