"The news says 'people are like peace' every day, and behind these simple four words is actually a lot of investment and the efforts of countless people."
| Author: Feng Qunxing Yang Wenming
| Editor: Curry
In the early morning of September 10, the good news came: the "short-nosed family" of elephants that "left" from Xishuangbanna in March last year and went all the way north had safely crossed the Bianjiang River in the process of returning to the south and completely entered the territory of ninger city, a traditional habitat.
At this point, this huge wild elephant migration operation came to an end.
The herd of elephants returned home, and the helpers who had been chasing the elephants out of the night could finally go home. The more than 3 months of displacement after the elephant's ass is the most significant journey in Yang Xiangyu's life.
In May this year, when 15 wild Asian elephants appeared in the county seat of Asan County, Yuxi City, for the first time to "approach" the "urban forest" of reinforced concrete, the Yunnan Provincial Forest Fire Brigade set up a wild Asian elephant search and monitoring task team. Yang Xiangyu, who was appointed as the captain of the detachment, and 9 teammates rushed to this "elephant covenant".
Later, the videos of wild elephants sleeping, playing and playing with mud that were circulated on the Internet were almost all from the hands of this team. In the news of "human elephant peace" reported every day, only Yang Xiangyu and his teammates know the meaning behind these four words best.
Follow the elephants 13 times in one night
In Yunnan, the symbols of elephants can be seen everywhere: the decoration of the street, the bonsai of the park, the sculpture of the hotel lobby... Even the watermark on the license plate in Yunnan is an elephant with its nose on its back.
As a native of Yunnan, Yang Xiangyu has been familiar with these symbols since childhood, but in the process of tracking down the northward elephant herd, he first really came into close contact with wild elephants and learned about the group named "Short-nosed Family".
The Yunnan Provincial Forest Fire Brigade has a mature UAV monitoring mechanism and command system, but it was previously mainly used to survey fire sites and extinguish fires. When he first started tracking the "Short Nose Family", Yang Xiangyu and his teammates were nervous.
"It's basically only recognizable by the naked eye during the day, because the body temperature of elephants is about 36 degrees Celsius, which is similar to the surface and environmental temperature." Infrared cameras can be used at night, but sometimes the forest is too dense to see them. Yang Xiangyu told the "Global People" reporter.
Yunnan Provincial Forest Fire Brigade organized assembly monitoring tasks. Courtesy of respondents
Once, at night, the elephant herd walked into the dense forest at the junction of the two counties and disappeared into the drone footage. The team divided into 2 crews and searched all night, until noon the next day when they found a resting herd of elephants in a clearing.
Over time, the team members have also experienced: if there is no wind, and a certain tree in the forest is constantly shaking, it is likely that the elephant herd is passing. With good luck, the green mountains and forests will reveal a touch of gray, and the team members can see the nose or butt of the wild elephant.
The monitoring team photographed elephants walking through the forest. Courtesy of respondents
After the wild elephant pictures taken by the monitoring team were exposed, many netizens directly called for healing. Yang Xiangyu is also often impressed by wild elephants: "Watching from a distance on the drone is like a group of piglets eating in the arch, which feels particularly cute." ”
He was also amazed at the cleverness of the wild elephants: every time they ate corn, the wild elephants would gently step on the corn cob, break the corn husks with their noses, and eat only the cores inside. When passing through the highway, adult elephants flatten the guardrail on the side of the road to facilitate the passage of baby elephants. When encountering the most difficult downhill for this large animal, the mother elephant will use her feet to form a "staircase" and let the baby elephant step by step down.
Sometimes, the wild elephants captured by the surveillance team resemble a flock of gray piglets. Courtesy of respondents
However, for the monitoring team, more moments in this "super long standby" mission are boring. At first, when the numbers were small, the team members could only follow the "short-nosed family" day and night, taking turns sleeping in between the rest of the elephant herds - the most rushing night, they stopped and walked, and followed the wild elephants 13 times.
The summer heat in Yunnan is unbearable, the drone battery is overheated and cannot fly, and the team members have to hold electric fans from time to time to cool down the machine. Some team members had mouth sores full of mouths.
Yang Xiangyu (center) and his teammates monitor wild elephants while eating a late-night snack. Courtesy of respondents
After the initial exploration and adaptation, the search group of elephants no longer made Yang Xiangyu so nervous and worried. He even vaguely felt that the "Short-nosed Family" and humans had formed some kind of tacit understanding, following the direction of human help in finding their hometown.
"There have been many times when wild elephants have been able to easily cross makeshift barriers, but they have not. After arriving in Kunming, they may also feel that the personnel are getting denser and the temperature has become lower, so they have been guided out of Kunming and have not continued to the north. Yang Xiangyu recalled to reporters.
In early August, the "short-nosed family" of Nangui arrived on the banks of the Yuan River. When they passed by here in May this year, the Yuanjiang River was still in a dry period, and a group of wild elephants waded directly across the river. This time it was a period of abundance, and the elephants needed to pass over a bridge they were not familiar with.
In order to induce the "short-nosed family" to follow the planned route, the staff threw a corn cob on the road every 5 to 10 meters, and set up barricades at some small intersections that could descend to the riverbank.
The water is turbulent, the bridge to be crossed is an old bridge with a low guardrail, and the elephants are accustomed to nocturnal activities. Once a wild elephant falls, the chance of survival is very small. During that time, Yang Xiangyu and his teammates' hearts have been hanging.
On the evening of August 8, the "Short-nosed Family" began to cross the bridge. To everyone's surprise, the wild elephants once again showed extraordinary "spirituality" and quickly passed through the bridge deck. "It took almost 3 minutes and 15 seconds." Yang Xiangyu remembered it very clearly.
The monitoring team used an infrared camera to take a picture of the elephant group crossing the river. Courtesy of respondents
For the elephant herd, the Yuanjiang River is the biggest natural danger on the Road to Nangui. Thus, the elephant herds crossed the Yuan River, which meant that they had made decisive progress in their return to the south. At the end of August, the monitoring team members began to evacuate one after another, leaving only a small number of personnel for normal monitoring.
Love and hate for elephants
Many places were visited for the first time during the herd's journey north. Local people are often nervous and expectant of the arrival of wild elephants. Yang Xiangyu recalled that in Yuxi, the proverb "auspicious elephant into jade" soon spread in the street. Many times, when the team members use drones to monitor wild elephants, villagers stand huddled behind them, hoping to catch a glimpse of the wild elephants.
What impressed Yang Xiangyu was that a villager knew that wild elephants might pass by, and went to his own field to harvest all the corn and provided it to the local government for free for feeding. "Many villagers feel that elephants are rare to come back, and they are not distressed when their crops are eaten, so they are afraid that elephants are hungry."
Villagers often follow behind the team members. Courtesy of respondents
In the Xishuangbanna area, where wild elephants are often infested, the feelings of monitors and people about wild elephants are even more complicated.
Zhao Ping, 48, is a wild elephant monitor in Mengxiang Township, Menghai County, Xishuangbanna. It is not easy to track the elephant herd at close range, raise the nose, erect the ears, and the tail, which means that it is going to attack people and must run quickly.
Zhao Ping remembered that in the early years, the villagers lit torches and roared to drive away, and the wild elephants slowly walked back to the jungle while issuing threatening warnings to humans; slowly, the wild elephants found that humans did not really hurt them, but their courage grew larger and larger, and they often patronized the fields in the village.
"The forest is still that forest, but there are more elephants, there is not enough food in the forest, and the wild elephants are forced to come out helplessly." Zhao Ping also couldn't tell whether the wild elephant patrons Mengxiang was happy or sad. Experts say that Asian elephants are "flagship species", and the presence of wild elephants shows that the ecology of their hometown is good. However, looking at the fields trampled by wild elephants for food, the villagers were really not happy. Fortunately, in the first two years, the government established compensation for wildlife accidents. The compensation standard is not high, but the villagers finally have something to say.
In recent years, wild elephants have visited the fields near the reserve more and more frequently. Graph source network
In the process of the northward migration of the "short-nosed family", wild elephant monitors also witnessed an important moment in the survival and reproduction of the elephant herd.
One night in November 2020, the roar of elephants was heard in the forest near Minle Village in Meizi Town, Ning'er County, Pu'er City. The shouts alarmed local monitors Bi Shixue and Fu Qiyou, who quickly notified the nearby villages and evacuated the villagers.
Did the elephants fall behind, or did something unexpected happen? The next day, the two people who could not be relieved quietly went to the scene. The herd had shifted, and in the clearing they had stepped on, Bi Shixue and Fu Qiyou found a huge red flesh membrane, like a placenta.
In the afternoon, Bi Shixue and Fu Qiyou saw the trail of the elephant herd again. To their surprise, there were new members in the elephant herd: a baby wild elephant about 40 centimeters tall, constantly circling around the belly and legs of a female elephant. From time to time, the mother elephant lowers her head and plays with the baby elephant with her nose, like a human mother coaxing a newborn baby.
Bi Shixue and Fu Qiyou found an object suspected of being an elephant placenta. Source: The Paper
An elephant expert who follows the herd to "pick up dung"
"The news says 'people are like peace' every day, and behind these simple four words is actually a lot of investment and the efforts of countless people." As a witness, Yang Xiangyu felt that this experience was quite valuable. "I have also read many media reports, including foreign reports, and everyone's evaluation of this relocation is still very high. Many friends have told me that because of this matter, they will pay more attention to biodiversity and wildlife conservation in the future. ”
What pleased him the most was that on the way home, the wild elephants had visibly become fat. "The experts would tell us to check if there were any pregnant elephants, and when we looked, all the female elephants had rounded bellies, either pregnant, but fat." He laughed.
The monitoring team captured the image of adult elephants sleeping in clusters of baby elephants. Courtesy of respondents
And when the "cute" and "cute" of the northward moving elephant herd stirred up the public opinion field again and again, experts repeatedly called on the society to pay attention to the habitat of the large population of wild elephants. After all, the northward movement of wild elephants may be an unexpected attempt, but the expansion of the range of wild elephants is a trend.
In March 2020, when the "short-nosed family" first left, Chen Fei, director of the Asian Elephant Research Center of the State Forestry and Grassland Administration, did not pay much attention to this matter – in the past 30 years, as the population of wild elephants in Yunnan has grown from more than 150 to about 300, the spread and migration of wild elephants has become very common.
"The first time the northward migrating elephant herd caught our attention was when they could enter the town of Tongguan in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County, Pu'er City." Chen Fei said. Based on past experience, wild elephants are often more likely to cause trouble when they enter a certain area, and the probability of casualties increases.
The local government urgently arranged electronic pulse fences, physical blocking, food induction and other means to guide the wild elephants to change their routes. After installing and debugging the electronic pulse fence, the bold and careful Chen Fei tried it himself, "It will not hurt, but it should have a deterrent effect." ”
In the process of elephant herd migration, local governments use truck blocking and other methods to guide. Graph source network
In the end, the elephant herd did not enter the town of Tongguan. When the wild elephant left, Chen Fei quickly took out his self-sealing bag, grabbed the elephant dung and withdrew. "According to the standard procedure, it should be extracted with a test tube with gloves, but the wild elephant may not give us this time, or safety first, just in case."
Chen Fei introduced that at present, metagenomic sequencing and microbial culture research is currently being carried out on wild elephant feces, hoping to study the health status of wild elephants through molecular means to provide support for the protection and management of wild elephants.
Elephant experts picking up elephant dung. Graph source network
During the movement of the elephant herd to the north, Chen Mingyong, a professor at the School of Ecology and Environment of Yunnan University, monitored the early feeding work at the headquarters. He had to worry about how much food to prepare for wild elephants every day, how to put it in, and the details of the size.
In the long run, he said, the key to reducing human-elephant conflict is to reduce human-elephant mixed habitation as much as possible, especially to avoid the disorderly spread of wild Asian elephants.
"It is not necessary to establish new nature reserves, but consider meeting the needs of Asian elephants." Chen Mingyong told reporters that the construction of wild Asian elephant habitats should be carried out as soon as possible in the traditional activity areas of wild Asian elephants, and the construction of food sources through artificial intervention to provide richer plants for wild Asian elephants, so as to control Asian elephants in a certain area.
However, Chen Mingyong said that this is only a stopgap measure. In his view, it is fundamental to accelerate the revision of the "Regulations on Nature Reserves", break down the legal obstacles to the implementation of restoration and transformation measures such as forest thinning and planned burning in the protected areas, and replant and replant plants suitable for Asian elephants to feed through manual intervention, so as to make the original protected areas more suitable for the survival of wild elephants.