Elephants Patrol Border Between Man and Beast

SUMATRA, Indonesia, Dec. 11, 2007— -- It's called the Flying Squad: Four elephants and a baby named Nella. Its mission? To patrol the increasingly contentious boundary between man and wild elephants on the edge of the Tesso Nilo National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia.

"An elephant will smash a motorcycle in one fell swoop. But [a] bull elephant going head-to-head with another bull elephant, that's a different story," explains Adam Tomasek, from the World Wildlife Fund. "In a way, they are the first responders."

When they meet a wild elephant that's threatening a village and they can't scare it away, the male elephants in the Flying Squad have to stand, lock tusks and fight, trying to drive the wild elephants away from crops before people take action.

"Without a Flying Squad, lots of times the only option is to set out traps, to set out poison," said Tomasek.

The park was once home to 1,600 wild elephants. Now there are only 200 left, and the Flying Squad is trying to save them.

The squad members work hard, and they're well looked after. Their handlers, or Mahoots, make them a giant brownie once a week, and they enjoy two baths a day, when the males practice for the rough-and-tumble of patrol.

The males fight and the females … well, let's just say that baby Nella's father was a wild elephant. Ria, another female on the Flying Squad, is pregnant, and the father is a wild elephant.

Local villages have had trouble with elephants destroying crops, or simply backing into houses. One local resident, Nur, was asleep at home with her husband and young son, when an elephant destroyed her home.

"In many of the houses damaged by the elephants, usually the elephants enter the kitchen," said Syamsidar, a local World Wildlife Fund representative who goes by one name. The family fled.

Just outside the Flying Squad's area of operations was one man, a palm oil farmer named Idris, who didn't run when confronted by six wild elephants attacking his trees last week.