One cannot ignore the immediate urgency of the relentless anticipation of waiting for the rains… If it is quite intolerable for us people, it’s hard to imagine how it must be for the wildlife in some regions… recently flying and observing the herds and movements of the various species have given us opportunity to witness their response and reactions to the environmental conditions.

Taking pride in Botswana and our national parks, we decided to ensure that the banks were clean and no harm would come to wildlife due to the deposited debris.

The elephant range in Botswana has expanded by 65%, during the last 15 years. Using our aerial survey and telemetry data from 55 collared elephants we estimate the current elephant range in northern Botswana to be…

The Okavango panhandle is a unique area… a system where wildlife, in particular elephants, and people struggle to live within a confined area.The purpose of the survey is to answer pertinent questions as to the area’s population of elephants, their growth rate, their limited movements, an insight to human-elephant conflict in the region, and to potentially be able to put forward various management options to relieve elephant compression and their conflict with people.

We had decided to focus on large bulls, as they are becoming a rarity seen in the Chobe water front area. Young bulls and breeding herds are plentiful, but we would like to learn more about the random, larger bulls that occasionally come to the river.

…main purpose of the site will be to assess methods and low-cost techniques that work best to reduce elephant crop raiding, train villagers in deterrence methods and productive conservation farming methods, and to motivate community involvement in human-elephant conflict resolution and adopt wildlife conservation practices

It was agreed that the remaining 9 elephants would be translocated and released back into the wild… Elephants Without Borders was approached to offer advice and to discuss the possibility of helping on the post-monitoring program of the herd. EWB suggested that satellite collars

We must appreciate and remember that the river systems and adjoining community conservancies are valuable habitats for wildlife.

This season, we were quite busy and took collars off eleven elephants and deployed eight others, in a wide-variety of areas, thus far!

Deploying collars on elephants is quite an event, perhaps one could say a production. Exciting… my adrenalin was high as we made our approach, spotting a bachelor herd of 8 elephants in the shade of a tree