Dong Nai province, Vietnam — Dinh Quan understands simply the ideal area to hang out on a warm day.
A swimming pool of tidy water with fresh turf and some bamboo shoots close by, ideally with vines hanging within simple reach and revealing no indications of being dangerous.
Trailing behind Dinh Quan is his junior, Bien Dong, which implies “South Sea” in Vietnamese. He is discovering the ropes of jungle living from his senior who is at least 15 years of ages.
The 2 tusk pals are wild Asian elephants residing in the Dong Nai Biosphere Reserve, a sanctuary in Vietnam that includes the Cat Tien National Park, and where an ingenious task utilizing “electronic camera traps” is under method to produce a special brochure of “elephant ID cards” for the location’s much-diminished population of pachyderms.
Pruthu Fernando, chairman of the Sri Lanka-based Centre for Conservation and Research, informed Al Jazeera that unlike human society where age and experience give a degree of regard, amongst elephants it is size and body mass that chooses their social hierarchy.
Fernando, who is a consultant to the United States-based Humane Society International (HSI), stated that when elephants reach the age of puberty, at around 10 years of age, they wander from the near-constant care of their moms to sign up with other male elephants in social groups.
That is why Bien Dong and Dinh Quan had actually buddied up and how an image of the 2 rotating towards a waterhole was captured by movement sensing unit cams in April. The electronic cameras become part of an elephant preservation job led by HSI’s Vietnam chapter and regional authorities in southern Dong Nai province.
“This is the only task in Vietnam when it pertains to elephants, which offers elephant ID cards for each person,” Nguyen Thi Mai, senior wildlife program supervisor at HSI Vietnam, informed Al Jazeera.
“No one else has actually done this,” Mai stated of the 60 “cam traps” running in the Dong Nai sanctuary, which lies around 2 hours’ drive from Vietnam’s company capital Ho Chi Minh City.
The cams, discreetly connected to the trunks of trees along tracks that animals utilize to pass through the forest, have sensing units that trigger when big mammals, like Bien Dong and Dinh Quan, go by.
Images from the video cameras are then put together to produce a brochure of the park’s private elephants utilizing attributes such as age, sex, physical characteristics and their basic condition as a way to track their motion and feeding practices, and monitor their health and healing times if they have actually been hurt or ill.
The HSI information assembled to produce the special “elephant ID cards” includes more than 16,000 images gathered throughout roughly 400 days of video camera tracking from June 2022 onwards.
Analysis of the photographic information appears to reveal that there are at least 27 elephants in the sanctuary, a considerable boost from the previous price quote of 14 pachyderms that were believed to form the overall population.
The information likewise shows that the herd of 27 remains in great condition with a typical health index score greater than elephants discovered in Sri Lanka, a nation with a considerably bigger elephant population and where they live in 60 percent of the nation’s overall acreage.
Professionals warn, nevertheless, that more in-depth information requires to be gathered to supplement the cam traps in Cat Tien to figure out the accurate size of the elephant population.
That is no basic job.
HSI’s senior program supervisor Mai has more than 15 years’ experience dealing with wildlife in Vietnam, however even she has actually not yet seen any of Cat Tien’s evasive elephants in the wild, regardless of operating in the Dong Nai area for 4 years.
Images from the video camera traps are the closest that Mai has actually pertained to getting familiarized with the animals in their natural environment.
While video camera traps concentrated on carefully recognizing elephants are brand-new to Vietnam, they have actually been utilized in other nations around the globe, such as Thailand, India and Tanzania, in addition to in other places in Vietnam, however mainly to keep an eye on wild animals at big.
The significance of producing private identity profiles for Vietnam’s elephants is highlighted by the circumstance nationally, where as couple of as 130 elephants are still thought to be living wild, a remarkable drop from an approximated 2,000 animals believed to stroll the countryside in the early 1980s.
That implies that here in Dong Nai province, Dinh Quan and Bien Dong are amongst Vietnam’s 2nd biggest herd of elephants, simply behind Dak Lak province in the nation’s main highlands area, which has the biggest population.
Vietnam’s preservation efforts are restricted by resources and knowledge, so the HSI video camera traps assist fill an understanding space about elephants while likewise training regional authorities in their usage, Tran Thi Hoa, the nationwide organizer of Vietnam’s elephant preservation program, informed a workshop on promoting human-elephant coexistence.
High up on the coexistence and preservation program is the problem of defense, in regards to safeguarding elephants and rural neighborhoods that share the very same environments where elephants like to stroll.
Elephants in Nghe An province and Dak Lak in the Central Highlands move worldwide throughout Vietnam’s remote borders with part of Laos and Cambodia. On the other hand, elephants in Dong Nai move internally within Vietnam.
One approach utilized in your area to avoid elephants from stomping out of the national forest and sanctuary is electrical fencing– a topic that some Vietnamese and global professionals were divided on at last week’s workshop.
Dispute in between elephants and locals living near the secured forests of Cat Tien has actually been reported on by regional media throughout the years, with whimsical headings such as, “The entire commune lost food and sleep since the Ong Bo knocked on the door.”
Ong Bo, which equates as Mr Bo, is a considerate label residents utilize to describe elephants who have actually visited their towns trying to find delicious crops and developing mischief.
To avoid those undesirable check outs and to likewise keep people out of where the elephants stroll, a 75km-long solar-powered electrical fence confines part of the reserve.
Tran Dai Nang, a ranger who works for the Dong Nai Forest Protection Department, stated there have actually been numerous disputes reported in between regional individuals and the pachyderms in 3 communes alone in the province, according to studies performed from 2020 to mid-2023.
In nearly half of those human versus mammal disputes, individuals included shouted at the intruding elephants, made loud sounds to shoo the elephants away, and in many cases, utilized brilliant lights to terrify the animals while others tossed sharp items, and some notified forest rangers to act.
The least-used method was to calmly speak with the elephants and urge them to leave.
Elephants require a particular quantity of area therefore do human beings to perform the needs of daily life, stated Nang, the forest ranger.
Citizens require to comprehend that when elephants “pertain to go to” their fields and other locations, they are not going to damage them, he stated.
“They are just concerning socialize with us. It is going to need a lot of time to accomplish” that understanding, he included.
On top of decreased home due to the decrease and deterioration of natural forests in Vietnam, human and elephant disputes emerge– as in lots of other nations– from other manufactured causes: infringement on forest environments, bad management of disputes when they do emerge in between people and mammals, and elephant populations not being thought about in land-use preparation.
Previously this year, Vietnam’s federal government chose not to enable the building and construction of a highway through the Dong Nai Biosphere Reserve following opposition from the Dong Nai provincial federal government in the middle of issues over the impacts on the area’s biodiversity.
There might likewise be other indications of wish for reconciliation in between the worlds of people and elephants in Vietnam.
A research study released in 2022 discovered that individuals living around the Dong Nai Biosphere Reserve wish to exist together with their elephant neighbours.
HSI’s program supervisor Mai stated she hopes the images produced by the cam traps will offer the elephants identities, which will offer a much better understanding of their “requirements and routines” and how they are impacted by human behaviours.
The elephants require their voices heard, stated Mai, including, “They can speak and reveal their viewpoint.”