Elephant Ivory Project: Explorers Finally Find Ample Elephant Dung, Begin Journey Home

By Andy Maser; Photographs by Andy Maser and Trip Jennings, Elephant Ivory Project, EP Films

We were recovering at our Obenge base camp when we heard the strange screams. “Pardon Papa! Pardon Papa!” over and over again, with a sound like bamboo being chopped down prompting each yell. Effrin, a local guide, pointed to the corner of camp and explained in half French, half English that Major Guy was whipping a 16-year-old boy for raping an 11-year-old girl earlier that day in the village. It was a wakeup call, just in case we needed one—we were still in Congo, where you should always expect anything.

Elephant Ivory Project: Young Explorers Face Poachers, Bush Meat, and No Sign of Elephants

Riding a motorbike through the savannah

By Trip Jennings and Kyle Dickman; Photographs by Terese Hart and the Bonobo in Congo Project

There was a shootout. Andy and I weren’t there, but we learned through satellite text messages that Colonel Gui and his soldiers from the Congolese army ran into the bandits somewhere between Kisangani and Obenge—likely the brothers of Colonel Toms, a convicted war criminal and poacher. A gunfight ensued. One poacher was injured and two others were apprehended. Colonel Gui, with his prisoners in tow, is still coming to Obenge to root out poachers in the region. We should see them tomorrow. I got the news during a four-day sampling hike through TL2 with Andy and the scientist John Hart.

But let me back up. After Kisangani, which is from where I last blogged, we flew to Kindu, a town on the border of the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2. It's the region Elephant Ivory Project leader Samuel Wasser wants elephant dung samples from most (read the previous posts to understand why). From Kindu, the three of us spent two days on the back of motorbikes, riding dirt paths notched into the jungle and savannah. These paths are arteries out of the bush. We saw locals pushing bicycles loaded with everything from pineapples to bush meat in the form of monkeys and okapi, a striped cousin of the giraffe. At the Lomami River, we loaded into motorized pirogues for a supposed two-day trip north to Obenge, the Hart’s research camp in the northern part of the proposed Lomami National Park. John stopped at every riverside village—about a dozen—to explain what the national park meant for the locals.

Elephant Ivory Project: Explorers Begin Jungle Motorcycle Trek to Collect Elephant Dung—and Confront Enraged Poacher

By Trip Jennings and Kyle Dickman; Photographs courtesy Kyle Dickman, Skip Brown, and Terese Hart

We just arrived this morning and I already want to leave Kisangani, a city of 700,000 in the center of Congo’s jungle. A cholera outbreak started in the city last week and left 27 dead—200 more cases have been reported. Andy and I are with Terese and John Hart, conservationists who have been working in the DRC for 30 years. They’ve agreed to help us plan our mission. But the question of where to start sampling elephant dung isn’t simple. The region Dr. Wasser wants us to sample most, the proposed Lomami National Park in the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2, has become even more dangerous.

The Harts, who have been a driving force behind the creation of Lomani National Park, had just received a letter from the one of their TL2-based supporters. It warned them of a man who is calling himself Moses and planting burning crosses—death threats—in the front yards of people who support the creation of Lomami National Park. President Kabila is expected to approve the park this year. That declaration could crack down on poachers operating in the region, which is why Moses opposes any additional protections to TL2.

"There’s so much conflict in the country that we don't know how many elephants are left in some of DRC’s biggest protected areas," says Dr. Samuel Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology. “One thing we do know is African elephant numbers are dropping, and a lot of ivory is coming from the Congo.” Samples from TL2 will help Wasser locate and stop poachers operating around the country.

So we’re going in. The expedition is far and away the most complicated of my life. I’ve never needed a military escort.


Officials burning a poacher's camp

Elephant Ivory Project: Young Explorers in DRC Continue Quest to Stop Elephant Poachers

By Kyle Dickman and Trip Jennings; Photographs by Andy Maser

It's been a fortunate few days. We arrived in Kinshasa on Monday exhausted from 36 hours of transit and found the Congo just as hot as we left it two years ago. On Tuesday morning, we met with Dr. Teresa Hart, a 30-year veteran of conservation in the DRC. Teresa first came to the country as a Peace Corp volunteer in 1974. She’s now in her tenth year studying bonobos, an ape found only in the DRC, in a 25,000-square mile block of forest known as TL2. The region's an elephant sanctuary on paper but animals are disappearing there faster than ever.

Explorers Depart For DRC to Fight Elephant Poaching--One Vial of Scat at Time

By Kyle Dickman and Trip Jennings

Today, I'm packing. After two years in the works, we’re kicking off the Elephant Ivory Project in earnest on Sunday morning when Andy Maser and I fly to Kinshasha, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a case of collection vials and the goal of saving a species. Here’s the back story.

A couple of years ago, I met Dr. Samuel Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington and an expert on African elephants, at a meeting for National Geographic Explorers in Seattle, Washington. Wasser has been working on a project for a decade that compares DNA sampled from seized elephant ivory to reference DNA sampled from wild elephant scat in Africa. (Just a reminder: the trade of elephant ivory has been banned internationally since 1989.) With this information, Wasser is able to determine where elephants with a DNA makeup similar to that found in the seized ivory live. Because individual elephants from the same population have many similar genes, and because poachers tend to repeatedly target specific populations, Wasser’s study is a valuable conservation tool. The information allows willing governments and NGOs to direct anti-poaching units to threatened herds, thus stopping the trade before the animals are killed.

Adventurers of the Year Update: Trip Jennings's Elephant Ivory Project Goes Local

Photograph by Rachel Meyer

We first met kayaker and filmmaker Trip Jennings after his expedition to find unrun rivers in Papua New Guinea made him a 2007 Adventurer of the Year. Since then, he has traveled the world over, from Tibet to Brazil, making adventure films about rivers in peril. His latest project, though, involves the grandest of terrestrial creatures—elephants. To follow up on his National Geogoraphic Channel-funded expedition last year, Jennings and his team will continue their work to combat elephant poaching in January 2011. Here, learn about a local event to support the cause.

The Elephant Ivory Project team got some homegrown support last Friday at Go Wild: A Night of Fashion + Celebration to Save Elephants. Portland’s fashion community joined forces with conservation groups and advocates to organize a wild couture fashion show featuring local, eco designers in an effort to save wild African elephants from the illegal ivory trade.

National Geographic Explorers Andy Maser and Trip Jennings of EP Films are embarking in January on a forensic biology expedition to the remote jungle of the Democratic Republic of Congo to help the Center for Conservation Biology complete their elephant DNA map of Africa. The goal: send resources to poaching hot spots and save wild elephants from the illegal ivory trade and capture provocative media to bring this important issue home.

"To make people care, you've got to give them a way to engage on a local level and this fashion show accomplished just that—local designers, models and members of the community came out in full force to support this project. It makes you realize that this isn't just about saving elephants, this is about building dynamic, conscious, and empowered communities here in Portland, in Congo and across the globe," said Emily Nuchols of Under Solen Media, a Portland-based firm that organized the event.

Poachers are killing elephants for their ivory at a rate of 10 percent per year—that means that in just a few years, wild elephant populations may not exist anymore.

“It’s shocking to realize that on average 105 elephants are killed by poachers every single day, but it’s not hopeless. Twenty years ago, with a global upwelling of support, the ivory trade was stopped—nearly overnight. We can do that again. And this event brought us one step closer to doing so," Trip Jennings of EP Films said. "Thanks to everyone who made this night a success.”

Learn more here: http://elephantivoryproject.org/

Expedition Mekong: Kayakers Help Scientists Save Fish, Big and Small

 
Text and photographs by Kyle Dickman.

I'm at Khone Falls on the Mekong River in Laos with filmmaker-kayaker Trip Jennings (above, center) and Zeb Hogan (below), the host of the National Geographic Channel's Monster Fish show and an expert on the region's fishes. 

 
We're trying to figure out how a proposed dam at the falls, one of the world's most productive fisheries, will affect migratory fish that range from pinky-sized carp to 500-pound catfish--Southeast Asia's whiskered equivalent of salmon. (Follow their progress here.)

At Khone Falls, the river divides into hundreds of different channels and drops off a 60-foot cascading waterfall. Which channels fish use to migrate depends on the size of the waterfall. Basically, the bigger the vertical drop, the fewer fish use the channel to migrate.
   

 
We've outfitted Trip's kayak with a depth-finder and a GPS to map water velocity, depth, and gradient. We're hoping to figure out what the migration parameters are for different species of fish (as in, big fish migrate up this channel because the water velocity is less than 20 mph, or whatever the case may be). What we find, will tell us if other channels share the same characteristics as Don Sahong, the site of the proposed dam. Don Sahong is hypothesized to be used most by migratory fishes because of its relatively mild whitewater.
  

We've been at Khone Falls for four days now. The first two days we rode mopeds past water buffalo and monasteries to scout waterfalls. On Sunday, we decided to run Somphamit Falls, a difficult stair-stepping 60-foot drop with fish traps lining the banks. Trip fired it up, recorded the data, and sent it to Sea Floor Systems, the California-based company who designed the system we're using to process the data.


The fish traps suggest fish use Somphamit Falls as a migratory channel, but the data will show us whether they're making it past the waterfall in dry season or being turned back. Does this channel share some of the same characteristics as Don Sahong? I'll let you know what we find out.

This expedition was funded in part by the National Geographic Expeditions Council.

Kayaking Bolivia: Tracking Climate Change Where Carbon Emissions Are Low

Text and photographs by Andy Maser, a National Geographic Young Explorers grant recipient and Epicocity Project team member

We’ve spent one week in Bolivia now, and already we’ve completed a fantastic first descent, discussed effects of climate change with Bolivia’s chief hydrologist, and partied the night away with locals in La Paz. I’m high in the Bolivian Andes with explorer-filmmaker Trip Jennings on a monthlong expedition that combines elements of adventure, science, and adaptation in an environment on the brink of environmental crisis.

The glaciers perched high atop the 22,000-plus-foot peaks surrounding the Bolivian cities of La Paz and El Alto have followed a natural pattern of growing and shrinking since humans have inhabited the region. This cycle ensures that farmers have water for crops and cities have the water they need to operate. Global climate change has thrown this cycle off, though, and now Bolivia’s glaciers are shrinking much more rapidly than they can regenerate. This is a critically important problem because millions of people depend on meltwater from these glaciers for daily use. Bolivian farmers have already begun to notice that less water is flowing from the mountains—an unfortunate turn of events for a country that produces a comparatively tiny amount of carbon emissions.

Continue reading this story and see photos >>

The ADVENTURE Top 10: Best Waterfall Kayaking Runs in U.S. (with Video)

Text by Andrea Minarcek. Read previous ADVENTURE Top 10 lists.

Last week, kayaker Pedro Olivia crushed the previous world-record run (108 feet high) and careened across the lip of Brazil’s 127-foot Salto Belo falls. Now, we’d never attempt anything that epic, but watching the stunning footage (below) of Olivia’s run did inspire us to want to break out our paddles and find a falls of our own.

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So we turned to filmmaker and pro kayaker Trip Jennings, one of our 2008 Adventurers of the Year, for a little guidance. The guy knows his stuff: He’s claimed first descents on rivers in North America, South America, and Asia. And in 2006, he nabbed a world-record paddle of his own by kayaking over a 101-foot waterfall in Oregon.

We enlisted Jennings to draft a Top 10 of the best waterfall runs in the U.S., right before he left for a paddling expedition in Bolivia. Stay tuned for what he finds there….  In the meantime, grab a paddle and get started on Jennings’s life-list paddle list.

“I chose these runs not because they are the baddest, tallest, or hardest,” he explains, “but because they are the classics that have been run hundreds and thousands of times. For aspiring Class V junkies, this is the list to print out, post above your bed, dream about at night, and check them off one by one—then post photos on Facebook when you run them. I rated them based on two very subjective factors: First how classic they are, and second, how much I like them.”  

See the ADVENTURE Top 10: Best Waterfall Kayaking Runs >>

Kayakers Find Big Water on China’s Salween River

Filed April 28 by Kyle Dickman
Photographs by Adam Mills Elliott

It's been a phenomenal week of kayaking for the Epicocity crew on southwest China's Salween River. Himalayan snowmelt left the Salween swollen with rapids that were the biggest and most exciting we've paddled over the past two months.

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Read previous stories about this expedition>>