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  National Geographic 30 Aug 06
African Elephants Slaughtered in Herds Near Chad Wildlife Park
Brian Handwerk

Yahoo News 30 Aug 06
100 Slaughtered Elephants Found in Africa
Sara Goudarzi LiveScience

PlanetArk 31 Aug 06
Poachers Kill 100 Elephants in Chad - Survey
Story by Ed Stoddard
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JOHANNESBURG - The remains of 100 African elephants killed for their tusks have been found in Chad not far from Sudan's troubled Darfur region, conservationists said on Wednesday.

The discovery was made earlier this month by a team led by Mike Fay, a renowned conservationist and explorer with the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society and National Geographic.

"... his team discovered five separate elephant massacre sites totalling 100 individuals during a survey made Aug. 3-11 from their small plane," Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said in a statement.

WCS said most of the animals had their tusks removed and more than 50 of them appeared to have been slain just days before the team found their carcasses.

The discoveries were made near Chad's Zakouma National Park, one of the animal's most northern ranges in central Africa. "Zakouma is only about 150 miles (240 kms) west of the conflict area of Darfur and is in the path of recent rebel activity in Chad, thus security is low and borders are porous in this isolated region," WCS said.

An expedition in 2005 counted 3,885 elephants in Zakouma but a year later researchers could find only 3,020.

Wildlife groups say a rise in illicit ivory sales globally is being driven by new demand from China.

Elephants are especially at risk in lawless or violence-prone regions where their tusks are a ready source of income. With the exception of occasional one-off auctions in southern Africa, there has been a global ban on ivory sales since 1989, allowing elephant populations in many parts of Africa to recover.

Sprawling across nearly 1,900 square miles, Zakouma is a rare refuge for wildlife in central Africa. Within the park's borders elephants are protected by the Chadian government with assistance from the European Union.

But WCS said the elephants were vulnerable to poaching in the wet season when they forage outside the park's borders.

The Darfur conflict erupted in 2003 when mostly non-Arab tribes took up arms accusing the Arab-dominated Sudanese government of neglect. The government retaliated by arming mainly Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, but Khartoum says it is not responsible for their campaign of murder, rape, and plunder.

Yahoo News 30 Aug 06
100 Slaughtered Elephants Found in Africa
Sara Goudarzi LiveScience Staff Writer LiveScience.com

Researchers said today they found 100 slaughtered elephants near Africa's Zakouma National Park.

Until 35 years ago, Zakouma, located in the southeastern portion of the landlocked Republic of Chad, was one of the most undamaged wilderness areas in Africa. The region, then home to about 300,000 elephants, now only has about 10,000.

Most recently, during an aerial survey made from Aug. 3 to Aug. 11, Mike Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society conservationist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence found five elephant massacre sites.

"Zakouma elephants are getting massacred right before our eyes," Fay said. "We hadn't been in the air more than two hours when we saw our first carcass. It was fresh, maybe just a few weeks old, not far from the park headquarters, and the animal's face had been chopped off, the tusks removed."

The poaching of the elephants, Fay discovered, started in May. About 50 of them were killed only days before their carcasses were spotted. At one site, the team saw a poacher's camp from their small plane with five men and six horses. The men abandoned camp as soon as they spotted the plane.

"The second time we passed over I saw a guy and a horse and an assault rifle in the poacher's hands," Fay said. "The third time we flew over, this time only about 150 feet above the camp, I could see the man shooting at us." No one got hurt.

Although elephants are protected in the park, and hunting them is illegal in Chad, the many that leave the park during wet season are left open to attack. Conservationists are now worried that this latest find could mean that poaching is on the rise in the area.

The Chadian government and EU officials, which have provided funding to Zakouma, plan to increase protection for the region by increasing aerial surveys and providing patrols in the area during the wet season.

National Geographic 30 Aug 06
African Elephants Slaughtered in Herds Near Chad Wildlife Park
Brian Handwerk

A slaughtered elephant is a gruesome sight. Poachers hack off the animal's face to remove its ivory tusks--which are all the illegal hunters value--and leave the massive carcass where it lies. Herds of such kills are piling up on the borders of one of the elephants' last central African strongholds, Chad's Zakouma National Park, according to a disturbing new report.

Mike Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist on a National Geographic Society-funded expedition, recently spotted about a hundred dead elephants on an aerial survey just outside the park's borders

"Even for someone who's been around for 20 years watching elephants be killed in that area, that's a lot of elephants," Fay said of the massacre, which he observed in early August, while he was also on assignment for National Geographic magazine.

All of the elephants found had been killed since May, he adds. "And we certainly didn't find them all. It was just a sample survey that we did outside the park."

Fay also spotted camps of presumed poachers near elephant massacre sites. The armed horsemen fired automatic weapons at his small aircraft in an apparent attempt to drive Fay from the scene and cover their crimes.

But Fay's team, working with the Chadian government and the European Union, has succeeded in spotlighting a major poaching problem that they warn must be addressed immediately.

Stronghold Under Siege

Zakouma National Park is an elephant oasis in southeastern Chad. The park is located in a Texas-size wilderness region that was home to about 300,000 elephants as recently as the 1970s.

Wholesale slaughter fueled by the international ivory trade has left only about ten thousand elephants alive in the region today. The heavily patrolled park is key to the animals' survival, but its officials can't protect elephants that stray beyond its borders.

Though elephant hunting is banned in Chad, the black market trade in illegal ivory is becoming increasingly lucrative.

The Chadian government and the EU's CURESS (Sudanese-Sahelian Ecosystems Conservation and Rational Utilization) project invited Fay to survey the park's elephant population in 2005.

His comprehensive count indicated that 3,885 elephants lived in Zakouma. But a follow-up survey in 2006 yielded only 3,020 animals, suggesting that either a large herd was missed in the count--or that hundreds of animals had possibly been killed in a year's time.

The results led to the August survey aimed at gauging poaching activity during the wet season, from May to October. In the wet season elephants are known to wander outside the park's boundaries in search of better forage.

"During the wet season more elephants may be outside of the park boundaries than inside," Fay explained. "The corridors they use to leave have been known for a long time, but no one had surveyed outside the park in the wet season."

It did not take Fay long to uncover evidence of large-scale killings on the fringes of Zakouma. His team was in the air less than two hours before they began spotting dead elephants.

Killers, Kills Clearly Visible From the Air

Fay discovered five distinct elephant-massacre sites during flights between August 3 and 11. All of the animals found had been killed since the end of May, and more than half were slaughtered in the days just before the August survey started.

"Flying on the southern border of the park, we noticed dead elephants right on the border, both in and outside of the park, near where a massacre had occurred back in May when we were there," Fay explained. "They got zapped when they reached the park border, at a spot only 1 kilometer [0.6 mile] from the other massacre site [we'd seen] in May."

Poachers appear to have set up camps just outside the park near known elephant pathways. "We flew over a camp and there were a bunch of guys there with horses," Fay recalled. "They were packing up very quickly and looking very guilty, so our assumption was that if we find dead elephants, and five minutes away we find a camp with guys running around looking guilty, they must be poachers. "We found 20 carcasses right there surrounding that camp," he noted.

Two days later Fay had a much more direct encounter. His plane flew over another suspected poachers' camp, where he spotted a horseman with an assault rifle. The individual opened fire on Fay's plane as it made its third pass over the camp--flying just 150 feet (46 meters) above the ground. No one was injured in the attack

. Urgent Response in Motion

Chadian and EU officials armed with Fay's information have enacted an emergency effort to provide aerial and ground patrols outside the park's borders in hopes of protecting roving elephant herds through the end of the wet season.

"We've agreed to let them use our airplane for the next few months to do similar work to what we did: finding out where poachers are and letting them know that people are flying over," Fay said. "That scares [the poachers]. Then [government officials] can follow up with ground patrols on horseback like they do inside the park."

To ensure more permanent protection, funds may be raised to build a new wet-season antipoaching base north of the park near several massacre sites. The camp could allow officials to maintain the same kind of vigilance that has been largely successful inside the park.

"It's a very arduous way to protect elephants, all day every day," Fay said. "You've got to be there all the time, every day, year after year. If you're not there, they are going to poach--no doubt about it."

But Fay hopes to prevent the area's elephants from sharing the fate of the black rhinoceros, which was poached to local extinction in the 1980s.

The poachers "are still hammering away," he said, "and they will kill every single elephant if [the animals] are not protected."
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