Interview with Adrea Turkalo - Part I
Andrea Turkalo has lived in a small forest camp in the southwest of the Central African Republic. Every morning she walks to a shelter hidden at the edge of a unique "forest elephant clearing". Supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the US government, she conducts research into the life of forest elephants and tries to contribute to their protection.
Who discovered this "elephant clearing" and when?
This clearing is called Dzanga and and it has always been known for the wildlife. I have a German friend who first came here in the 1960s and he filmed here. Now he is in his 70s but he comes back periodically to film. He came here when there was no road to Bayanga, he walked all the way with his equipment. He walked all through this area and filmed. Before he came in the 1960s, the areas was, of course, known to the BaAka, Pygmies. When you talk to them about this area, even the older ones, they remember as very small children walking to this area and hunting. Now, it is a national park, so hunting is not allowed but they have always known this area. There are also other clearings in this area but none of them are alike Dzanga where you can see 40-100 elephants a day.
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Why do so many of them come to the clearing?
They come for minerals. They dig big holes in the dry season and now you see them pumping through water and that's to get down below to the minerals. These minerals are probably helping them digest the food they are eating. A lot of the food they get in the forest is very poor quality. The best quality food they get is fruit but it is very seasonal, that only found during a certain period of the year. So when they cannot get fruit, they are eating leaves and bark and whatever they can get, and it probably has a lot of poisons in it. So they come here to eat the soil and it is sort of medication because it lessens the toxicity of the food that they are eating.
When did you first came here and why?
I came here first in 1987 or 1988, because at that point I was married to someone was doing research on gorillas and I was working on his thesis. We came here for the first time in 1987, went to the clearing and actually slept on the ground. I remember hearing elephants all night. This was one of the most amazing places I had ever experienced in terms of wildlife. I also lived in the north of the country, on the northern border with Chad and there were a lot of elephants there. Now, they have been all poached by Sudanese and Chadians. In 1990 I worked for WWF in Bayanga, helping direct the project, and then I came here and started the study. So, since 1990, I have been here full-time. I usually go to the US for about six week every year. I am basically addicted to elephants.
What is the main objective of your research?
When I started the study in 1990, no-one had ever been able to study forest elephants by seeing them. The only work that had been done was in Liberia and I think Sierra Leone, and it was based on what elephants left behind - their feeding trails. People looked at what they ate and were done. This place presented to first opportunity to see forest elephants in the open. We realised you can identify individual elephants. This has been done in Manyara, Tanzania, by Iain Douglas-Hamilton in the 1970s. Here is the only place where you can actually see large numbers of elephants and be able to know them. The limit to the study is I am only at the clearing. You cannot follow these elephants in the forest.
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How do you recognise elephants from each other?
The first thing you use to identify elephants is their ear. You look at their ears and they have holes and tears. I draw those. I make little identity cards for each elephant. And there I put the sex of the elephant, the age class, and if they are females - females generally live in groups - so I describe the other individuals in the group. For males it is different. Most adult males are solitary, they travel alone. So, you look at them as individuals and you also draw their ears. But I also do a lot of photography and also video. I have a library of pictures of individuals that I can use to identify them in the future. So, when I come home in the evening, I also have work to do. There is a lot of elephants here. I have IDed about four thousand in the last nineteen years. Out of those four thousand, I only see 600 or 800 regularly.
Do you give names to the elephants?
Yes, they all have names. In some studies, they give animals numbers but for me numbers are very difficult to remember - is that twenty-seven or is that eighty-four? I prefer to give them names.
How do you choose the names?
It's random. I don't have any system. Some people have systems where in one group, all the names begin with one letter like M. I don't do that. I just name them.
You are currently focusing in your research on elephant communication.
Correct. I am looking at their language and how they talk to each other. Elephants have a repertoire of different vocalisations and they mean different things. I have been trying to record that and videotape. I then look at those sounds in a software programme to see how they are structured because different calls have different structures. Because I know them so well I know what each social situation means. For instance, two sisters meet, I haven't seen them for months and maybe they have not seen each other for months, and they do a greeting ceremony and they get very excited. I have colleagues in the US who are developing a monitoring programme using recordings of elephants in places where we cannot see them to find out what is going on. We are trying to collect these sounds to build a dictionary of elephant sounds to use in the interpretation of recordings when we cannot see them.
So you are creating a dictionary...
Yes. If I hear sounds, I sort of know what is going on. I know it's an elephant who is protesting when its mother is pushing it away. Or if I hear a rumble, it is a very low sound, usually produced by a female trying to locate her offspring. We have had a group of elephants at the camp and one female does these rumbles. It is a wonderful sound. It sounds like a cat purring, a low sound. I'd like to record a cat to see what it looks like in the software. This female is doing it to locate her offspring - one of them may be over here, one may be over there. She will make a rumble and they will recognise their mother's voice.
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Do you have a favourite elephant at the clearing?
I do have a favourite elephant. It's a male. His name is Hilton, like the hotel. He is the biggest bull and he has long thin tusks, almost two metres long. For many years, he has been the dominant bull at the bai. When he came, everybody went "wow, it's Hilton". He would come in must looking for females. I haven't seem his this year, so maybe he died because he was pretty old. Maybe somebody killed him. He would only come in the period from December to March in must and he would usually find females to make babies. He was very special. He wouldn't be there all year round and in January, February, he would come. And then my year would be complete because he would be in the bai.
16.11.2009 Twiggs was born in the wild in Cameroon around the year 1997. She and another female gorilla, Brighter, was smuggled across the border to Nigeria as infants to be sold as pets on the locale pet marked.
09.11.2009 When Pitchou was very small, she was brought to Hotel Ilomba in Kribi to be sold, after her mother had been killed by hunters. She stayed there for three days, until the hotel owners could no longer bare to watch her suffer. The family donated her to the LWC.
02.11.2009 Chella came to Limbe Wildlife Centre when he was only two years old. He was found in the back of a bush-taxi sitting on his dead mother. Wildlife officials confiscated him and kept him three weeks before bringing him to the Wildlife Centre.
21.09.2009 Adjibolo came to Limbe Wildlife Centre when she was only about 6 months old. She was confiscated by senior civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Adjibolo, from a hunter who tried to sell her.
