The tour started with a cooking party and two other events in San Francisco, continued with a joint event at PAWS in San Andreas. You can see a video from this event here, including footage of Joyce’s talk and of the responses of Ruby, Maggie, Mara and Lulu to some elephant sounds that we played to them. Their response was so strong that some people were worried that the sounds were upsetting to the girls. While it may be rare for captive elephants to react so strongly to a stimulus, the responses were very typical of wild elephants and we were able to observe a range of responses from high social excitement to fierce defence. Their response showed just what a strong leader Ruby has becomes and how tight the bonds are between the four elephants. PAWS can be extremely proud of the work they have done to facilitate the development of this family unit.

We finally had an event and fundraiser in the home of a good friend in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, on Sunday 16th November.

Georja Umano, Petter and Joyce

The last three days of our visit ended up being much more hectic than planned, mainly because of meetings and press briefings related to our involvement in discussions regarding the future of elephants, including Billy, at LA Zoo. On Tuesday Joyce participated in a press conference arranged by councilman Tony Cardenas of Los Angeles County Council. NBC Los Angeles, CBS Los Angeles and dailybreeze.com, laist and Fox LA are among the media that have covered the case. The vote was planned for Wednesday, but after 5 intense hours on the floor it has been delayed until the first week of December. (Article in LA Times here) We strongly hope the LA County Council will decide to close the exhibit and send Billy to a sanctuary. An urban zoo cannot offer the space necessary for a such a large, active, social, and intelligent animal as the elephant.

Petter, Joyce and Councilman Tony Cardenas visiting LA Zoo.

We’re extremely grateful for all the support and help we have received during our trip - it’s been exhausting but has also given us lots of new energy. We have made new friends, even some through WildlifeDirect, and hopefully created more compassion for elephants among people that we have met on our way. We look forward to keeping in touch with all of you caring for elephants.

Thanks!

Petter and Joyce

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For those of you living in the US: Sandip Roy Chowdhury will be talking with Joyce Poole on “New America Now: Dispatches from the New Majority,” which airs Friday Nov 14th at 1:00 p.m. and repeats Sunday at 3:00 p.m. on KALW, 91.7 FM.

You can hear an interview with Joyce on AnimalVoices, an alternative radio in Vancouver, here. The interview with Karl Losken was aired on 31st October.

At 4 am this morning we were awoken by two alarm clocks - not wanting to risk that one would let us down. A couple of hours later we departed for our two week event and fundraising tour in California. We’re looking forward to see friends, elephant supporters and even elephants (at PAWS, where we have a joint event on Saturday 15th Nov.), while at the same time experience the excitement of an historical election. With strong roots in Kenya (and plenty of other good reasons, too) no-one should be surprised that we are happy that Barack Obama will soon be the new President of the United States of America. We are among those convinced that he will strengthen America in a way that will be good for everyone. Barack is Kiswahili for blessing and he is indeed a blessing.

Waiting at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for our next flight, we watched another BBC news piece describing the impact of increased ivory poaching on the world’s biggest land mammal - and expressing fears that the recent ivory auctions, sanctioned by CITES, will stimulate that growing threat. More and more elephants are succumbing to poaching fueled by the ivory trade and the press needs to bring this to the world’s attention.

Despite difficult times for the financial markets around the world, and for most of us as a consequence, we are hopeful that the people we meet during our California tour will continue to support our elephant conservation work. In the coming year we will be devoting a large portion of our time to our elephant conservation project in Sri Lanka.

We are also very grateful for any contributions towards our work from WildlifeDirect visitors!

Best wishes, Petter and Joyce

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As many of you have seen and know, Joyce and I will be visiting California from 6 to 20 November. Together with friends, supporters and collaborators we’re holding several fundraisers, as you will see from the linked event overview. The timing is, admittedly, a bit more exciting than we planned - considering the global financial unrest. The election of a new US President a couple of days before our arrival may trigger some new optimism, though, which could be good for all of us, including elephants…

We lean towards a statement from one of our SF friends: At this stage it is much better to think about elephants than finances! And what we do know is that elephants need us more than ever - and even more so because of what may follow this economical downturn.

If you would like more information about our work don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re currently doing a major revision of elephantvoices.org, and hope to launch the new version during December after some unfortunate delays. During the next few months the site will be expanded in ways that we believe many of you will like and find interesting, especially if you enjoy the voices of elephants. It will also include interactive information about our new elephant conservation project in Sri Lanka. Another of our goals is to improve how you can access and subscribe to our news. Please be patient while we are preparing the changes!

We hope you will follow the work of ElephantVoices in the years to come - it would be great to see you in person during our upcoming fundraising tour!

Best wishes, Petter

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Joyce is an expert witness in the trial for the plaintiffs and is scheduled to testify on Monday. The case is being heard in federal court in Washington DC, in courtroom 24A, and is expected to last for approximately three weeks. The court proceedings are open to the public.

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Thanks to the incredibly hard work of good friends and supporters in California, there are going to be several events in the San Francisco area and Los Angeles. There are smaller, more intimate events and some for a larger crowd - the gathering at the Bollyhood Cafe in San Francisco on 13 November and the luncheon at The Elephant Habitat at ARK 2000 (PAWS, San Andreas) on 15 November should be very lively! An informal talk, images and elephant vocals will be among the ingredients of the events.

Raising funds for our Minneriya-Kaudulla Elephant Project will be a main focus of our California 7 to 20 November tour. Come and learn more about it!

We would love to see anyone interested in our work at one or more of these quite different events - you can take a look at what’s on offer by reading or downloading a .pdf file with an overview of San Francisco events and contact names here. We have two events in Los Angeles, on 16 and 19 November, contact us on info(at)elephantvoices.org for more info.

We look forward to seeing you!

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In Minneriya we were treated to an aggregation of 53 elephants. The group split and reformed as elephants went about their business: cooling down in the reservoir, splashing in the water, young males sparring, a musth male testing females, calves suckling and getting lost.

As the crow flies these two national parks are about 8 km apart, but it takes almost forty minutes to drive from one to the other. Along the way Manori and I stopped to pay our respects at the many shrines to Ganesh.

Kaudulla and Minneriya are separated by forest reserve, which includes a couple of small villages, and are surrounded by a mosaic of different habitat types - some protected, some unprotected.

One of the goals of our project will be to understand how the elephant population is using this landscape so that the authorities can better provide for their conservation and at the same time reduce conflict with people. In order to do that we need to know exactly how many elephants there are, and who is moving where, when. We also need to know whether the population is increasing or decreasing. Because the habitat is primarily forest it isn’t possible to get an accurate count. The only way to get solid answers is, therefore, to get to know the elephants individually - which is why we have been so very busy taking ID photographs. Later in the year we will be able to introduce you to some of these elephants via an online identification database.

In the meantime, just looking at the elephants gives a couple of clear indications. If the population is growing it is at a much slower rate than in Amboseli, as there are relatively fewer calves and juveniles to adults. And males over approximately 20 years old are covered in bumps caused by buckshot. They are the big raiders.

It’s been an extremely interesting and busy visit. In addition to getting to know the elephants we had a number of important meetings and discussions with the Wildlife Department and others. I gave two lectures - one to the Wildlife Department staff in Minneriya and the other in Colombo to the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society.

On our last day Manori and I had a meeting with Dilmah Tea, whose Conservation Foundation is supporting our work. I planted a tree on the grounds of their main office in Colombo to commemorate the beginning of our joint endeavor for elephant conservation.

It’s been a great pleasure to experience the Sri Lankan warmth and enthusiasm - everyone we have met has been very welcoming and helpful. This includes the management and staff at Hotel Sigiriya, who have welcomed us back to our new “home”.

Petter and I are looking forward to what lies ahead with renewed commitment. Working with Manori is a great pleasure and we feel fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from someone with so much experience. Manori moves in an unusual circle of wildlife and elephant enthusiasts and we have slipped into this crowd with ease!

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Education is a core part of ElephantVoices’ goal - and even our blog here on WildlifeDirect is a consequence of that. We want share our knowledge and passion for elephants with you and, concurrently, stimulate interest in supporting elephant conservation and our work.

We have enjoyed participating on WD so far, and are happy to report back that your contributions have helped us to repair our field vehicle in Kenya. It is now ready for our next field trip which will take place between January and March 2009. Contributions through WD have also given us a much needed super-portable Asus Eee 901 computer, which Joyce has been using to write her field diary from Minneriya-Kaudulla - parts of which have been uploaded to this blog. The tiny Asus is a very lap-friendly device with a super-long battery which will serve her well for her 24 hour journey back to Norway… In other words - your support helps us do our job for elephants.

And this is partly how we see our blog efforts - writing the blog IS actually quite a lot of work. We provide you readers with news, experiences and facts from a world that not many have the possibility to be a part of. Those of you who do have the opportunity to support us may feel more connected with work that you believe is important. A win-win situation - for elephants, us, you.

Joyce “churping” - while recording during ElephantVoices’ visit to Udawalawe Transit Home 2003. Our friend R. Myunideen Mohamed, then Park Warden in Yala East National Park, is following a special kind of interview with curiousity…

We appreciate whatever you do for elephants - and continue to promise that if you support our work with a donation we will do our best to give you value for money. Elephants need and deserve no less.

It will be more quiet from Joyce now, by the way, she is soon at the end of this hectic start-up session of our new Sri Lanka research and conservation project. A couple of lectures and meetings in Colombo remain - and then, once she is back in the office, plenty of preparations related to field-work follow-up, proposal writing, web/database-development and our fund-raising trip to California in November await us. But that’s another story…

We’re happy to know that you are following our work - and we welcome any contributions!

Best wishes, Petter

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This morning Manori and I tried to solve some computer problems, sorted through ID photos and worked on a budget for the overall project. Our project will have quite a number of different components - social structure and demography, social behavior and communication, habitat use and movement patterns - with each of these informing recommendations for the design of a conservation landscape for this population of elephants. The area the elephants use is a mosaic of different patches of landuse types - national park, sanctuary, forest reserve, farmland and villages and small towns.

This afternoon we drove to a second national park, Kaudulla, about an hour from where we are staying, to see if we could find elephants there. Along the way the jeep that we had borrowed broke down with clutch problems. We managed to get into the park in another vehicle and, after some searching, found a couple of elephant groups. The first was a group of 10 males - including one just coming into musth and one young tusker (since very few males in Sri Lanka have tusks this is always noteworthy).

Around the corner from this group was a large mixed group (cows, calves and associating males). They were disturbed by the presence of several jeeps and were making quite a commotion. We waited quietly for them to calm down and then approached. But one young male came charging out of the forest again and gave us a lively challenge.

From my dictaphone notes:
17:44 I took some photographs of a young male who was demonstrating, threatening us and instead of doing that, sort of running at you and then kicking dust or throwing dust at you [that African elephants do in similar circumstances], they [Asian elephants] tend to collect dust [with their trunk and feet], kick the dust, and while standing in one pace throw the dust over their head in a display.

As I sit at my desk writing this piece I can  hear explosions in the distance: villagers trying to chase male elephants out of their farms…..

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