The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity will be held on 11 October in Kunming, Yunnan. Wild Asian elephant herds, which previously traveled north and eventually returned to their traditional habitats, have attracted widespread attention at home and abroad and become a business card for Yunnan's biodiversity.
"Where are the elephant herds" once became a daily news for netizens, and the wild Asian elephant search and monitoring task detachment of the Yunnan Provincial Forest Fire Brigade, one of the elephant chasing teams, is more like the "eyes" of the outside world to pay attention to the elephant herds - the elephants are sleeping peacefully, and the small elephants are rolling in the mud pond and other photos that netizens remember deeply, most of them are from drones in their hands.
In early September, the northward migrating Asian elephant herds safely crossed the Bianjiang River and entered the territory of Ning'er County, Pu'er City, a traditional habitat, and all the migrants were evacuated. So far, this group of "elephant guardians" has accompanied the elephant herd for more than 100 days. Recently, Yang Xiangyu, the leader of the wild Asian elephant search and monitoring detachment of the Yunnan Forest Fire Brigade, told nandu and N video reporters about their "elephant chasing things".
Firefighters reconnaissance of the fire began monitoring wild elephants
In March 2020, the Northward Migrating Asian Elephant Herd left its original habitat, xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in Yunnan, entered Pu'er City in July of the same year, and entered Yuanjiang County, Yuxi City, from Mojiang County, Pu'er City, on April 16, 2021, leaving its traditional habitat.
Since then, the elephant herd has gone all the way north, and gradually aroused widespread concern at home and abroad, and "where the elephant herd has gone" once became a daily news for netizens. The Wild Asian Elephant Search and Monitoring Task Detachment of the Yunnan Provincial Forest Fire Brigade, one of the elephant chasing teams, is more like the "eyes" of the outside world to pay attention to the elephant herd. This team has been protecting the elephant for more than 100 days.
Looking back on the scene at that time, Yang Xiangyu is still vividly remembered. After lunch on May 27, Yang Xiangyu received a special task: he was appointed as the leader of the Wild Asian Elephant Search and Monitoring Detachment of the Yunnan Forest Fire Brigade, and led nine members of the team to immediately rush to Eshan County, Yuxi City, to conduct an emergency search operation for Asian elephants.
Yang Xiangyu (center) with the team.
At about 15:00 on the same day, the monitoring detachment rushed to the Asan Provisional Headquarters to start the monitoring work. At that time, the elephant herd was on a hill next to the county seat, and there was already a tendency to descend the mountain into the county seat, and there were many residents around to watch. Immediately after the monitoring team reported the situation to the command, the local police force was quickly mobilized to control traffic and move the masses to safety.
That night, the elephant herd appeared in the county seat of Asan, but the crowd in the county seat had been evacuated and the streets were empty. "The elephant herds slowly and leisurely, moving back and forth around the county seat, and also going to places like residential areas and auto repair shops to find something to eat." Yang Xiangyu recalled that there were still baby elephants left behind that night, and seven or eight elephants turned back to the street to wait. After staying for more than 40 minutes, the elephant herd crossed the highway and left the county seat.
The first close encounter with wild Asian elephants, seeing them eating and playing in the mountains and forests, Yang Xiangyu thought they were very cute, and at the same time full of curiosity about this creature. But when he first started the mission, he and his teammates were a little nervous, because they had been engaged in forest fire fighting and rescue operations before, and monitoring wild Asian elephants was an unfamiliar and challenging task for them.
He told Nandu reporters that the Yunnan Provincial Forest Fire Brigade has a relatively formed UAV team and a mature command system, but it was mainly used to detect fires before, providing basic information for judging fires and formulating fire fighting plans, and basically had no experience in monitoring wild animals.
"There is a big difference between monitoring wild Asian elephants and previously surveying fire sites." Yang Xiangyu introduced to the Nandu reporter that wild Asian elephants have a sense of autonomy and their whereabouts are difficult to judge. To this end, as soon as he and his team members had time, they consulted the experts of the command and the forest and grass staff who had previous experience in monitoring Asian elephants to learn the living habits of Asian elephants and the monitoring skills of Asian elephants.
"If it rains heavily or when asian elephants move quickly, we may change a set of batteries and then go to the previous point to monitor it is a bit difficult to keep up, how to judge, and then to find them, you need to master the living habits and monitoring skills of Asian elephants."
In this way, Yang Xiangyu went from knowing very little about Asian elephants to being later called the "elephant expert" in the monitoring team.
"They're big but they're light."
More than 100 days of "intimate" contact, the intelligence of wild Asian elephants surprised Yang Xiangyu.
He recalled to Nandu reporters that Asian elephants captured by drone lenses can skillfully use some simple tools, such as unscrewing the tap with the tip of the nose to drink water, opening the lid of the water cellar in the field, and extinguishing the fire with branches. Downhill slopes are more difficult for large sizes, and when descending, the female elephant will use the foot pad to form a "step" to let the baby elephant step by step down the mountain.
In addition, whenever the elephants cross mountains, cliffs, rivers, and roads, they will send male elephants to higher ground to observe. "It gives us the feeling that after observing the terrain, the elephants will 'meet' together, and then they will choose a suitable route to pass. Because there are several smaller elephants in the herd, many times the elephant group will consider the safety of the baby elephant and whether it can pass when judging the terrain. ”
Day and night elephants are chased, and the situation of close "contact" between the monitoring detachment and the elephant herd also occurs from time to time. According to Yang Xiangyu's recollection, the first time the monitoring detachment encountered the elephant herd at close range was in the Hongta District of Yuxi City, when the team members happened to encounter the elephant herd crossing the road on the way to the transfer field. "Everyone suddenly woke up, quickly turned off the vehicle and turned off the lights." At that time, I was still nervous, holding my breath and not daring to speak loudly. Later, there were also cases where Asian elephants looked into the car and put their noses on the window glass to smell whether there was food inside. ”
In contrast to the large bodies of Asian elephants, they walk with very light footsteps. "Its foot pads are so thick that basically when we meet them, we are right next to us or in front of the vehicle, and we can't hear footsteps." According to its introduction, although the Asian elephant is large, it is very well balanced and can be maintained smoothly through narrow areas.
In June, a male elephant in the herd also moved alone. This also adds to the difficulty of the monitoring tasks of the team members. Since then, the monitoring team has carried out tasks in two lines, and in the middle and late stages, the maximum number of monitoring personnel has increased to 32.
Yang Xiangyu recalled that the elephants stayed quietly on the same hill for 3 days, "At that time, we were guessing, were they quarreling with the little male elephants who left, waiting for it to come back?" Later, the male elephants drifted farther and farther away from the group, and the elephants left the mountain to continue their march.
As for why the male elephants are out of the group, Yang Xiangyu believes that the outliers are about 10 years old and are close to sexual maturity, in order to ensure that there is no inbreeding, the general mature male elephants will leave the native population, or be driven away by the elephant herd. Some are little male elephants who are playful and mischievous and run away on their own.
During his daily monitoring, he found that the male elephants had already shown some "out-of-group" behavior before they left the group. "For example, when the elephants leave, they will return to the village to steal food. Or maybe after the herd has finished eating in the field, it knows that there is food here and comes back. ”
After the male elephants were separated, their behavior became more and more "arrogant". Yang Xiangyu said that the behavior of outliers is not constrained, sometimes sleeping directly in the field, in the homes of farmers, and often running to some dangerous areas such as roads.
On July 7, 32 days after the outliers were alone, in order to prevent the public elephants from entering the crowded area of Yuxi City, the on-site command department urgently launched emergency control measures for the capture and transfer of outliers, and the relevant work progressed smoothly, and the public elephants returned to their original habitat safely.
The distance traveled was 10 times that of the elephant herd
The elephant herd will lie down in the middle of the elephant to sleep, the baby elephants roll in the mud pond, the mother elephant uses branches to repel mosquitoes for the sleeping baby elephants, and the precious pictures are recorded by the monitoring team members with drones, "out of the circle" caused widespread concern among netizens, calling "warm" and "cured". Behind these pictures is more than 100 days of hard work by the monitoring team.
Because most of the elephant herds are rested during the day and active at night, the opposite work and rest time also tests the monitoring team members. In addition, the elephant herd sometimes travels long distances at night, and in order to avoid clashes with wild elephants and human elephants, they always maintain a high state of tension at night. The effective monitoring distance of the UAV in Yunnan is two to three kilometers, so the monitoring detachment can only continuously change the field at night, chasing and running behind the elephant herd.
According to Yang Xiangyu, at the beginning of the monitoring detachment, there were only 10 people, and more than 20 hours of monitoring were needed every day, so only when the elephant herd rested during the day, the team members could take turns to rest for three or four hours. What impressed him most was that once a unit monitored continuously for 26 hours without rest.
The local area prepared the hotel in advance, but the team members who rotated in two shifts did not have time to check in and rest in the early stage, and it became a daily routine to find time to squint in the car or monitoring point. "The early stage is still relatively boiling."
As the leader of the monitoring detachment, Yang Xiangyu also needs to undertake part of the coordination and coordination work in addition to normal business, so only when the elephant group rests at noon every day, he can take the opportunity to rest, and stay up late at night to monitor the dynamics of the elephant group. After a month, Yang Xiangyu lost more than a dozen pounds.
Yang Xiangyu recalled the situation at that time, saying that although everyone had heavy dark circles, they did not feel tired. "Everyone is more excited when they first come into contact with this task, and after the increase in personnel in the later stage, they relax a little to feel tired."
The team members watched the elephants eating and drinking through the drone camera and thought they were as cute as "piglets".
"When we encounter elephants a few times, in addition to being nervous, we are also very curious to observe what kind of state they are, but we will subconsciously react that Asian elephants are so big and wild animals, we still have to keep a relatively quiet state and not provoke them." Yang Xiangyu believes that monitoring wild animals is actually the protection of biodiversity.
He told the Nandu reporter that the team members felt that it was a very proud and proud thing to participate in this mission, and everyone was trying to overcome the difficulties and persevere. "Later, the leader came to ask the first batch of team members participating in the monitoring, the monitoring task is so hard, do you want to rotate? We all said we didn't need to, and we could stick with it. ”
He also remembers that the wife of a team member is imminent, on the one hand is an unpredictable Asian elephant, on the other side is the wife who is in labor, after a lot of communication and the support of his wife and family, the team member chose to continue to stick to his job. After the subsequent rotation of the team members, the team member rushed home immediately, "The day after he went back, the child was born, and we named the child 'Little Elephant'."
"The monitoring detachment undertakes 90% of the information monitoring work and is the eyes of the entire command system." The head of the Northward Wild Asian Elephant Front Command spoke highly of the monitoring team.
On Yang Xiangyu's computer, the Asian elephant herd traveled about 1,500 kilometers in a roundabout way, and the vehicle mileage of the monitoring detachment totaled 15,000 kilometers, and in order to monitor the Asian elephant, the elephant chaser traveled 10 times the distance of the elephant herd.
"Man and elephant seem to form some kind of tacit understanding"
In Yunnan, elephants are a symbol of auspiciousness, and elephant motifs can be seen everywhere. For example, the trimmed shape of landscape plants, the sculptures in the hotel lobby, and even the license plates of motor vehicles will have the watermark of an elephant.
When the elephant herds had gone all the way north before, most of the places they had not set foot in before. Yang Xiangyu told Nandu reporters that many local residents are seeing wild Asian elephants for the first time, and most of them have a curious and welcoming attitude. At the monitoring point, there will always be fellow villagers around, hoping to see the elephants up close through the drone screen. Coupled with the fact that local staff explained in advance that the losses of Asian elephants "caused" by the insurance company will be compensated, most people do not resent the elephants for "stealing" food from their homes or fields.
What impressed him most was that a villager in Kunming's Jinning District cut off all the corn in his field and provided it to the local government for free to feed the elephant herd. The villager said: "Our family has lived here for generations, and we have never seen an elephant, and the elephant came for the first time to worry about whether it would go hungry. We were very touched by this incident. ”
After a few months of getting along, Yang Xiangyu has a new understanding of wild Asian elephants. In his opinion, the average Asian elephant feels threatened when it calls, "In fact, in retrospect, when we met the elephant herd at close range, they did not make a sound, did not regard us as a threat, and were friendlier to us." ”
Yang Xiangyu felt that people and elephants seemed to form some kind of trust and tacit understanding. When guiding the target group, most of the staff will take the form of road closure and feeding.
"In fact, the size of an elephant, it has a way to break through the barriers we have set up or choose not to eat the food it is fed." For emotionally rich animals like elephants, I feel that they may feel the kindness of humans and understand that humans are helping them. Therefore, the elephant herd is more cooperative with our actions along the way, and there is no more out-of-the-ordinary behavior. ”
At about 20:00 on August 8, 14 Asian elephants that moved north safely crossed the main stream of the Yuanjiang River through the Yuanjiang Bridge and continued to return south, and decisive progress was made in the safety prevention and emergency disposal of the Asian elephants that moved south and north.
Why is the elephant herd crossing the main stream of the Yuan River a "decisive progress"?
Nandu reporter learned that when the elephant herd migrated north before, it had crossed the main stream of the Yuan River on the morning of May 11, when the main stream of the Yuan River was in a dry period. However, after entering July, the water flow of the Yuan River increased sharply, creating a huge obstacle to the "south return" of the elephant herd. Especially for elephants with young elephants, it is difficult to cross the river on their own.
Yang Xiangyu said that at that time, the staff made a lot of preparations for this, began to plan the route of the elephant herd across the river more than ten days in advance, set up an "elephant guest house", dug puddles on the riverside, and put food for the elephants to eat and drink.
"Before the expert told us that elephants do not like highways, bridges and other places, we were also more worried, and dispatched 3 units to monitor." However, the elephant herd crossed the bridge smoothly in only a few minutes, which made Yang Xiangyu and the staff feel surprised while breathing a sigh of relief.
Then, on September 1 and 10, the elephants crossed the Amo River and the Bian River in Pu'er City respectively, which made Yang Xiangyu more convinced that the elephants passing through the bridge was not an accidental phenomenon. "When crossing the Yuanjiang River, the elephant herd ran to a high place the day before to observe the terrain, and it could realize that the route designed for it by humans was safe and in line with its psychological expectations."
On September 10, the elephant herd crossed the Bian River and entered the territory of Ning'er County, Pu'er City, a traditional habitat. The provincial monitoring and relocation assistance action is basically over, all the relocation personnel are withdrawn, and the daily monitoring of the elephant herd is entrusted to the forestry and grassland departments of the city and county.
More than three months of chasing elephants have made the monitoring detachment target group have a deep feeling. Yang Xiangyu said that when he left, everyone was very reluctant, and he also saw many team members secretly wiping their tears. "They also create a lot of problems and troubles for us, but it still feels warm to see them every time we monitor them." Now I'm particularly sensitive to anyone who wants to mention the word elephant."
This elephant hunting trip made Yang Xiangyu feel that it was of great significance, and many people paid attention to wildlife protection through the elephant herd northward migration incident, which made him and his team feel that this mission was also a business card to promote China's biodiversity.
"We are proud." He said.
Producer: Nandu Instant
Written by: Nandu reporter Ma Minglong
Courtesy of Yunnan Provincial Forest Fire Brigade