Norah in the classroom with ID photos

In September I was called upon in my role as Training Coordinator with the Amboseli Trust for Elephants to share my knowledge of elephants with the rangers operating in the Segera Conservancy in the Laikipia area of Kenya. The Conservancy is a private ranch of 50,000 acres owned by the Zeitz Foundation, which is a non-profit organization registered in Germany with its headquarters in Kenya. The Foundation employs 18 community rangers whose purpose is monitoring the wildlife in the Conservancy.

I was asked to conduct a week-long training course for 18 rangers to teach them how to monitor elephants. Gabriel Njega, Deputy Director of the Zeitz Foundation, and Steve Macharia also of the Foundation assisted me. Gabriel and Steve covered the basics of the Segera Conservancy in the introduction and then I began my training sessions, which covered the following:

• Approaching elephants
• Counting elephants
• Identifying group types and composition
• Determining sex and ageing free ranging elephants
• Ageing elephants using molar evaluation techniques
• Photographing elephants for identification purpose

The Segera Conservancy is covered by thick vegetation, which makes it challenging to track elephants. Also approaching elephants can be difficult because the population has been frequently harassed by farmers and has experienced poaching as well. Luckily we were able to find and observe enough elephants to conduct the training.

At the end of the course, everybody appreciated and acknowledged ATE for sharing its knowledge of elephant behaviour and monitoring techniques. On our part we are happy to teach people about elephants and to know that with their new skills there is one more place where elephants are being watched over and protected. 

Harvey Croze and I started the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in September 1972 with the goal of studying one of the few relatively natural populations of elephants remaining in Africa. We chose Amboseli because the elephants were wandering freely over migration routes that they had been using for hundreds of years. They were not fenced or compressed into a protected area and they were not being heavily poached. Another good reason for choosing this population was that it was small enough (600-700) to get to know every animal individually. We wanted to study the life histories of individuals. Therefore, we set out to get recognition photos of first the adults and much later the calves as well.

We worked for the first three years on a part-time basis, both of us actually based in Nairobi with other jobs. On the field trips we would take photographs of all the adults we encountered and then try to figure out who belonged with whom. We knew that elephants lived in female-based families but we didn't know how many families there were or who made up the families in Amboseli. As we began to work out the composition and felt relatively secure in our designation of a family we gave that family a letter of the alphabet and then named all the adult females with names starting with that letter. Thus the first family we recognized and got good photos of was the AA family.