To Count Elephants In The Forest, Look Down
Imagine you're flying in a two-seater plane over Africa, and, in an effort to see how elephants are faring, your job is to count all the ones you see. Over the savannah, that's easy. But how do you peer into the forests, where all you see is treetops?
For years, the zoologists who tried to do this just guessed. But in the late 1980s, conservationist Richard Barnes devised a method to take an elephant census in the densest of forests.
To do this, he recruited young scientists. Winnie Kiiru had just finished grad school in biology and returned to her native Kenya. She was told to tie a piece of twine around her waist and walk through the forest in a straight line, with the twine trailing behind.
"And you'd walk in a straight line. It didn't matter whether there was a river, a ravine, stinging nettles, buffalo, whatever. You just kept going," Kiiru says.
Just to the north and just to the south of her were other young scientists also trailing their twine through the brush, literally slicing the forest into samples. What Kiiru and the others were counting was not elephants — they move around a lot and tend to hide — but rather, a different kind of evidence: poop.
The poop serves as a kind of clock, a way of tracking the elephants in space and time. It allowed Barnes to build a model of elephants' numbers and movement through the forest.
13.7: Cosmos And Culture
When Animals Mourn: Seeing That Grief Is Not Uniquely Human