Counting Elephants

By George and Lory Frame

Clang, clang, clang! The rude bell awakened everyone in camp. The time was only 2 A.M., and the sliver of a moon still hung in the sky over the West African bush country.

Sixty sleepy people began emerging from the odd little tents made of mosquito netting hung from trees. Flashlight beams flitted, and voices murmured. Someone started a campfire and made tea.

We are wildlife scientists, and today we were going to do a foot count of elephants living in the Nazinga Game Ranch. No, we weren’t going to count elephant feet! The term foot count means counting the animals we see as we walk on foot.

The game ranch was created in the country of Burkina Faso to help both the wildlife and the people in the area. To see how the ranch was affecting the elephant population, we did a foot count three times a year.

There weren’t enough of us to count all the elephants in the entire park. Instead, we were going to do a sample count. That means counting elephants in just a portion of the park. From that number, we could estimate how many live in the whole park.

This kind of survey is no picnic!
We gathered around the truck’s headlights and looked at the twenty straight, parallel pencil lines called transects drawn across the map of the park. We would break into teams of three persons each, and each team would walk a ten-mile-long transect.

Each transect would be eight hundred feet wide, or four hundred feet on either side of the walking team. Beyond that distance, we couldn’t be sure of spotting an elephant in the thick bushland.

Soon all of us climbed into trucks for the bumpy, dusty ride to our starting points. Our team consisted of the two of us (George and Lory) and a hunting guide named Elie. We were dropped off near the river, where the grass is tall. The sky was still dark.

Something big rustled the grass. “What was that?” George said. We could hear it breathing. But it crashed away in the other direction.

A faint light appeared in the east, then grew bright as the sun rose. Two miles to our right and left, the neighboring teams were doing the same. We wouldn’t see them until noon.

Lory, our team’s leader, checked her compass, and off we went.

Startled Wildlife
Dainty little duiker antelopes stared at us in surprise before they sprang away. Lovely honey-colored kob antelopes, in family groups of four or five, looked uncertain but stood and watched us pass by. Baboons were astonished by our sudden, silent approach. They dropped from the trees and fled to a safer distance, screaming as they ran.

“Oh, hush,” we muttered, and hurried on quietly.

Sometimes the animals detected us before we saw them. Maybe they heard us or smelled us, but didn’t know exactly where we were. There is nothing quite as heart-stopping as the sudden rumble of heavy, panicked animals coming your way through the bushes and tall grass. We bumped into and fell over one another as we scrambled out of their way.

“Just waterbuck,” George said. The sun was high overhead now, and it was very hot. We all drank water from our canteens.

“What on earth-?” said Elie. We saw what appeared to be a single, smooth tire track. A poacher on a motorbike? The trail was right on our transect, and ended at a hole in the ground. We cautiously looked inside and saw a huge python, sound asleep!

Elephants
We also came across elephants, the animals we were there to count.

Sometimes they were close by. The sounds of their heavy breath-ing and their low, rumbling calls to faraway elephants came from the dense vegetation.

Sometimes they were far away. Their broad gray backs floated silently above the bushes.

Once we saw a newborn elephant calf. It was endearingly wrinkled and hairy, as new baby elephants are, and small enough to walk under its mother’s belly.

It wasn’t easy staying on our transect. We pushed through fields of grass ten feet tall, climbed over piles of rocks as tall as a house, slid down erosion gullies on the seat of our trousers, and crawled beneath the low-hanging branches of thorny trees.

“What are they doing here?” said Lory. On a ridge opposite us was another counting team. The two team leaders looked at each other with such dismay that the rest of us exploded in merriment. Parallel lines are not supposed to intersect!

Lory and the other leader argued politely, consulting maps and compasses. The rest of us—hot, sweaty, and our nostrils filled with the day’s dust—looked for a shady place to sit down. The temperature must have been over one hundred degrees. We drank more water.

Startled People
Suddenly, the snapping of twigs under heavy feet and the shrieks of an elephant sent us running.

We regrouped a safe distance away. “That was our elephant,” our panting team leader insisted.“You can have it,” conceded the other team.

That day, our foot count resulted in a total of 31 elephants in the thirty square miles that all twenty teams searched. Since this was one-tenth of the protected area, we were able to estimate the number of elephants in the whole area by multiplying 31 elephants by ten, which is 310 elephants.

That was good news: about the same number as the previous year! The number of elephants had leveled off. If all went well, there would be just as many of them during the next foot count.