Elephant offs cam

"Here are the photos of naughty elephant. Destroyed a trap-camera."

That was UMA's terse message received last night with photo attachements from the Rakhine Yoma.

The trainees from the camera trapping course just completed their first elephant survey.

The elephant appears to be a young adult makna (pronounced muck-na) or tuskless male.

He almost walked past the cam, but must have seen the infrared flash, which isn't a flash at all -- just a dim and momentary red light.

I'm assuming that's what caught its attention.

He did a double take and reached out to the camera.

The infrared flash doesn't freeze action, thus the blurry image.  

He started to move on, but changed his mind.

And the last clear photo was up close and personal. After that he "offed" the camera. 

UMA confided that our jungle man, Ye Myint had staked the camera to a sapling. 

That's a "no-no", especially in elephant country.

Lesson learned. 

When in elephant county lash your camera to "a beeeg tree" and make sure the spiked camera protector is clamped on tight.

Elephant examines camera trap

Thanks to wildlife photographer Bruce Kekule for sending me the link to this interesting footage of a teenage tusker reacting to a trail camera.

After its initial back-stepping hesitation (Whoa, what the..?") it satisfies its curiosity with trunk and foot.

Bruce warned me about those puny camera mounts made of sticks I wrote about the other day.

He said they wouldn't last long with elephants in Thailand.

I assured him that the cams in the Rakhine Yoma are now chained to trees and sporting metal protectors.

With trappers of the bamboo rat

Proud trapper with his quarry. 

"U Chris!" called my friends as I lounged on the bamboo deck writing notes.

"Pway!"

I roused myself and grabbed my camera.

A Chin boy had just arrived with his dinner.

A silky-furred buck-toothed pway or lesser bamboo rat (Cannomy badius) dangled from his bamboo garrote trap.

Yes, while you were receiving my California posts during the past three weeks, the codger was spending his days East of Suez, not far from where  "the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay".

I was in Myanmar giving a camera trapping training course for  Indo-Myanmar Conservation and the Friends of Wildlife, a local grassroots NGO formed by my close friend, UMA. The Denver Zoological Society defrayed my travel costs, because the course was preparation for an elephant survey.

The class of 15 included protected area staff from Rakhine Yoma Elephant Sanctuary, a few local school teachers, and members of the Chin community living in the Rakhine Yoma.

A Chin village in the Rakhine Yoma was our base, and from it we descended daily into a patchwork of deciduous evergreen forest and bamboo brake to check our cameras.

Yoma means mountain range, and the Rakhine (formerly Arakan) Yoma is a coastal range, actually the tail of the Himalayas.

North of here and 70 years ago Japan's Imperial Army routed the 14th Army, and remnants of the war are still to be found.

General William Slim wrote about these hills in his WW II chronicle Defeat into Victory,  

"Flying over them you can realize what an obstacle they are to vision, but you cannot really appreciate what an obstacle they are to movement."

They are not much of an obstacle to the people who live here, but they travel lightly.

No 65 lb packs, or even water bottles.

Just a dah or long knife.

They know how to tough it.

The makeup is thanaka --  made from the bark of Murraya exotica. 

And when a hungry boy catches a bamboo rat, he doesn't need mom or dad to skin it or cook it for him.

He does it himself and roasts it to perfection. 

Commentary: trained bears and tame killers

The fate of the show-biz grizzly bear that killed a professional animal handler yesterday is undecided. The 5-year-old 700 lb bear unexpectedly lunged and killed the handler with a neck bite. Two other trainers used pepper spray to get it under control. OSHA and California Fish & Game are investigating, and animal advocates and private citizens are voicing opinions.

Captive animal managers, and I am talking about people like me who have worked in zoos, know that hand-reared birds and mammals can be dangerous, and far more so than those reared and socialized with members of their own species. The reason is that they are extremely tame, which means they are unafraid of people. People take chances with tame animals that they would never take with wild animals.

A few observations.

First, neck biting is a normal pattern of behavior among bears, and for that matter carnivores in general. It may draw blood, but it is not usually fatal. The force of the bite depends on context, as most pet owners know. Play bites are restrained, threat bites hurt, and serious bites cause injury or death. (I should also add that bears have thick hides. The neck skin in particular evolved into a dermal shield to protect vital organs against jaws.)

Second, a fine line separates play fighting and fighting. Rough-and-tumble play among siblings often turns into a fight. We've seen it in dogs, cats, and our own children. It's the same with bears.

So wrestling with tame bears has inherent risks. The only thing protecting a man is his ability to read its moods, and the bear's self restraint. There's a terrific imbalance in size, strength, speed, and reflexes.

But oh, how we love our cockeyed fantasies. Then someone gets hurt or killed. We don't buy into that fate and Kismet stuff, however. We want to fix the problem, and there is no shortage of expert solutions, from revenge to legislation.

The interesting thing to me is that in more fatalistic societies, homicidal animals like the occasional domestic elephant are not condemned to death. As my old Indian friend Doc Krishnamurthy used to say, "Human life is our cheapest commodity".

When an elephant kills its mahout in Sri Lanka and India, new mahouts clamor to take over. I co-advised a masters student who studied the macho phenomenon among Sri Lankan mahouts, and she found that 34% of mahouts said they would prefer a killer elephant to a non-killer. Why? Because they would gain status among their peers, and because the elephants' owners would be less likely to interefere with their work.

Whether spectators or performers, naked apes are the same everywhere. As long as there are bears, snakes and elephants, there will be bear trainers, snake handlers, and mahouts who think they can defy a unique fate.

And you know what? Most of the time they do.


Reference

Godagama, W.K. 1996. An ethno-zoological study of domesticated elephants in Sri Lanka. Masters Thesis, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.