Saving Kenya's Elephants With Drones
By Christopher Spillane October 31, 2013
In the hills above the Maasai village of Aitong in Kenya, Marc Goss is watching an elephant funeral. He squints a few dozen yards through the bush at 10 grieving pachyderms surrounding the carcass of a fallen comrade speared in its back, its face unrecognizable after its trunk was hacked off and its ivory tusks removed. It’s the third elephant Goss has found slaughtered in four days. “It’s pretty grim,” he says. “It’ll be eaten by hyenas now.”
Kenyan conservationists like Goss are facing what the United Nations Environment Programme calls the most serious poaching threat in a quarter century. Demand for illicit ivory in developing economies, including China and Thailand, has doubled since 2007, and elephant ivory sells for as much as $455 a pound in Hong Kong, according to UNEP. At least 232 of the almost 40,000 elephants in Kenya were killed during the first nine months of the year, and 384 were killed in 2012.
The country has only 2,800 park rangers, so Goss and others are turning to Google Earth and drone aircraft to track and protect the elephants. “Drones are basically the future of conservation,” says James Hardy, the manager of the Mara North Conservancy, a 74,000-acre private wilderness tract where Goss heads the Mara Elephant Project. “A drone can do what 50 rangers can do.”
VIDEO: Drones Fly Over Maasai Mara to Save Kenya Elephants
Goss’s team has put GPS tracking collars on 15 elephants throughout the reserve and can follow them online via Google Earth. If the animals stray into areas frequented by poachers—or nearby grazing land for cows that belong to the semi-nomadic Maasai tribe—Goss sends in one or more of his three drones. In his flatbed truck, he touches a button on his iPad 3 display labeled “take off,” and the $300 Parrot AR.Drone takes flight. About 2.5 feet long and 1 foot wide, the unarmed spycraft has four rotors that can carry it high above the savanna. It can spot poachers and divert elephants, which are typically frightened by the quadcopter’s buzzing rotors. “We realized very quickly that the elephants hated the sound of them,” says Goss, 28. “I’m assuming that they think it’s a swarm of bees.”
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/saving-kenyas-elephants-with-drones
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