GPS saves elephants from slaughter

— -- The call came last week from Kenyan Wildlife Services. Mountain Bull had to die. The adult elephant living near Mount Kenya had absconded from his reserve home to pillage villagers' crops with a posse of other male tuskers. Outraged by the elephants eating their livelihood, a regular occurrence in the last two years, impoverished locals wanted the elephants tracked down and killed.

"Hold on, hold on, we asked them, don't shoot that one," says biologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants, a conservation research group based outside Kenya's Samburu National Reserve. Mountain Bull was one of theirs, one of 20 elephants in the region collared with global positioning systems. The researchers track the pachyderm's whereabouts both for science and for salvation, hoping to find ways to let elephants better coexist with people across Africa. Africa was home to 1.3 million elephants three decades ago, but the losses to the ivory trade since have cut that number roughly in half. Kenya, for example, saw its elephant population plummet 85% from 1973 to 1989, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Now it looked like Mountain Bull was going to join the statistics, unless Douglas-Hamilton and his colleagues could use their research to plead his case. "We were surprised to hear he had been out with the crop raiders," says remote sensing scientist Jake Wall. "We knew he usually stayed in safe places." A look back at their records confirmed that in fact, that Mountain Bull had travelled to the farmer's fields only once in the last two years — the recent night he was spotted in the fields.

"He must have been taken in by some bad friends that night," says Douglas-Hamilton, with a chuckle. Save The Elephants asked for mercy for Mountain Bull, pointing to his mostly untarnished record, and the wildlife managers let him off the hook. "His life was saved by our radio tracking data." The other elephants, regular pillagers of the poor farmer's fields, won't be so lucky.