“Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead, anthropologist

Elephant Tracker, Dr. Mike Loomis

“Today was a great day! Our crew was up at 6:00 a.m., had breakfast, and headed out to locate the elephants. We have seen over 500 elephants today.”

This is a diary entry written by Dr. Mike Loomis, a veterinarian at the North Carolina Zoo. Dr. Loomis is part of a long-term elephant-tracking program in Cameroon where he’s working to ensure that the controls put in place to protect elephants from poaching also help protect people.

During the 1970s, poachers killed more than half of Africa’s elephants to supply the bustling international trade in ivory. Controls on the elephant ivory trade—including the 1990 ivory ban put in place by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)—have helped dramatically reduce poaching and have even helped many elephant populations recover. But countries like Cameroon are now facing a new threat: Their growing elephant populations are beginning to threaten some human populations.

As the elephant populations have slowly grown, the area’s human population has risen rapidly, leading to conflicts. On several occasions, elephants have moved into populated areas while looking for food and water, leading to the destruction of crops and, in some cases, human deaths. The North Carolina Zoological Park has partnered with WWF-Cameroon to help reduce the conflicts by better understanding elephant behavior and raising the public’s awareness about elephants.

As the principal investigator of the research project, Dr. Loomis is on hand to help anesthetize the elephants, place satellite and radio tracking collars on them, and keep the world up to date on the research by providing diary entries, audio recordings, and video footage through the North Carolina Zoo Web site, <www.nczoo.org>. He’s trying to better understand elephant behaviors (especially where and how the animals migrate) to help create better plans to manage them. Dr. Loomis’s diary entries reveal that he’s facing a variety of challenges from illness to damaged equipment to lost elephants—all part of the job when your work is tracking elephants.