by Charlotte Regan

International Intern

Hi everybody! My name is Charlotte and after finishing my BSc in Zoology at the University of Southampton I've been lucky enough to join the wonderful team of Save the Elephants for six weeks.

After a bumpy flight past Mt Kenya and clambering up a bridge partially destroyed by the November floods I made it to the research camp which was to be my home for the next four weeks. The reserve is absolutely stunning and there are so many elephants around at the moment! I'm very literally in elephant heaven! I was woken on my first night by the amazing sound of elephants wandering through the camp and I've been able to watch juveniles playing down at the river, chuckle at the tiny calves as they wobble alongside mum and witness two huge bulls come right down to camp just after breakfast!

The work has also been incredible! I've been helping Dr Lucy King and Dr Joseph Soltis on their ongoing work investigating the reactions of elephants to different threats. This has involved playing resting herds Turkana voice recordings and making videos of their reactions. These playback experiments have got off to a great start with the herds showing really marked reactions. Hopefully further trials continue to follow the trend!

I've also been lucky enough to be involved in two collaring operations! One of a female from the Royals family, Annabelle and another female Jerusalem from the Biblical towns. I was so impressed by how quickly they were carried out, the first taking only fifteen minutes! In this time me and Fraizer (a previous Kenyan intern) were involved in taking various body measurements such as the length of her tusks and size of her feet while the collar was fitted. After my old lecturer jokingly telling me to pet an elephant for him I guess I can now say I did it in one way or another. The collar deployed on Annabelle has a really advanced bit of technology within it known as an accelerometer. The hopes are that it can continuously provide information on her three dimensional movements which could prove vital in combating poaching. She's part of a small pilot project  to gauge whether accelerometers may prove useful as anti-poaching devices. We've started recording data from the collar whilst videoing her movements to see if they match and are waiting with baited breath to see the quality of the data it provides but so far it's looking pretty good!

Sorry that this post is so long! There's just so much to tell. My first week has been brilliant and I can't wait to enjoy the rest of my time here. Hopefully I'll be able to write about some of what I get up to in further posts!

Thanks for reading,

Charlotte X