The male elephants of the Makgadikgadi

Dear GlobalGiving Community, 

We hope this message finds you well and in good spirits. It's time for an update on the male elephants of Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. First and foremost, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your generous support of our research objectives in Botswana. Your contributions allow us to continue tracking the movements of our collared elephants and understanding the environmental challenges they face in an ever-changing world. Despite recent difficulties, knowing that you and others support and champion our cause lightens our load..

You may remember from the last report that one of the collared elephants had died, and we recovered the collar, since then another elephant dropped his collar. We found the collar with the webbing broken in two….this webbing is tough, and it is very rare for it to split; perhaps the intense heat weakened it somewhat, but still, it would have taken quite some force to break it! How did this happen? We will never know for sure; my best guess is that he was in a fight; he was in his prime after all – perhaps there was competition for a mate? The only other potential scenario is that he got it caught on a tree or something– the latter is unlikely as we take great care when we fit them to lessen the likelihood of doing this,  but not impossible. Either way, we have two collars now, not on the elephants we had put them on, which is frustrating. We would love to have a full data set of 10 male elephants for at least 2 years, but that is one of the many challenges of fieldwork. I recently collected them from camp and took them to the manufacturers in South Africa, where they will be refurbished for us; meaning we will soon be able to get our hands on the accelerometer data, which will help us interpret behaviours. Exciting stuff.

We are planning, permission and funding permitting, to re-collar the males that still have their collars early next year. Then we can select two others to collar with the refurbished collars, taking our collared male elephants back up to 10.

Once again, we extend our heartfelt thanks to you for your support. Your contributions enable us to continue our research and conservation efforts for the long-term conservation of this majestic and vital species. 

With many thanks and appreciation,
The Elephants for Africa team