WILD

Action at Lake Banzena, the lynch-pin of the elephants’ migration

Update from the Mali Elephant Project... Lake Banzena in the elephant reserve is the only place with water that elephants can access at the end of the dry season. However human activity is threatening to drive the elephants away, as it has already done in the Niger Delta and Lake Gossi. The difference is that this time they would have nowhere else to go. Since a well was constructed next to Banzena in 2000, people have begun to settle  in the area. At the same time numbers of migratory livestock herds have mushroomed, and commercial interests are cutting wood to sell in the ... Read More

Conservation is about people, as much as it is about wildlife

As I was reading through the excellent review in the New York Review of Books, by John Terborgh of Caroline Fraser’s “Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution”, I was gratified to find several points that resonated strongly with our experience in Mali. During my last visit, somebody remarked that it must be wonderful to study the ecology of the elephants, but it set me thinking that while that was the focus of the first phase of the project, the work since then has been all about managing people -individuals and collections of them - and that evolutionary psychology was ... Read More

Community engagement process for Lake Banzena

[caption id="attachment_12120" align="aligncenter" width="403" caption="The 8th – 10th September - Field visit to the sites selected for relocation by the community consultation process: the team arrives."][/caption] The first step to find a solution to the problem of Lake Banzena was to survey all stakeholders to obtain their views and ideas and devise a plan that all could agree with. The solution was to move the people out of the elephant reserve and provide clean water for them in areas with good pasture but currently no water. This would leave Lake Banzena for the elephants. Read More

Elephant Death Rites

One of those small happenings where the elephant and the human worlds meet ….. Villagers from Wami told me about an elephant that had died nearby from natural causes (old age or disease). A group of about 6-8 elephants remained, standing around and apparently watching over the dead body which they covered with earth and branches. They stayed for around 4 days before moving on and leaving just one elephant who stayed for another 3 or 4 days before she left too. Read More

John Muir Trust Launches Wild Land Campaign in UK

The John Muir Trust has launched two petitions to urge the UK and Scottish governments to give greater protection to the country’s last remaining wild land.  The petition in Scotland calls for wild land to be protected by a new environmental designation. The petition for the UK calls for National Park areas to be expanded and created to cover the best areas of wild land. Read More

The Rain has arrived in Mali!

We are breathing a sigh of relief as it has been raining since the beginning of June and so far the rains are good! This year was very tough for the elephants. Usually they rely on the lake of Banzena for water at this time of year, but this year it was crowded with huge numbers of cattle and reduced to a muddy puddle. The cattle returned to the river Niger where water is plentiful, but the journey was too far for the elephants who needed water quickly and they cannot use water from the wells along ... Read More

Healthy Elephants = Healthy People

“We don’t want the elephants to disappear, because if the elephants disappear, it means the environment is no longer good for humans,” Malian villager. This statement has stayed with me throughout the work of this project, and particularly as I travel between Mali and the UK, engaging with approaches to combat ecosystem degradation in both countries. It was in reply to a question I asked at the first village I visited in the Gourma. I was traveling with the field team in their search for elephants . The team would travel through an area asking local villagers whether there were elephants ... Read More