Wildlife Conservation Botswana Project #46827

The male elephants of the Makgadikgadi

by Elephants for Africa

Project Report | Feb 22, 2025
Uncovering Elephant Secrets in Botswana

By Stephanie Kong | Managing Director

How elephants are identified using ear marks

Dear fellow elephant enthusiasts,

At Elephants for Africa, we are incredibly grateful for the generosity of our donors, whose support makes our research possible. Your contributions are helping us uncover the hidden stories of the unique elephant populations in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park and its surrounding areas in Botswana—a crucial hotspot for elephant activity with a predominantly male population that has remained largely understudied.

Since our founder began her PhD in 2007, we have been dedicated to understanding male elephant sociality. Our ongoing research sheds light on their movements, associations, and survival strategies, helping us make informed conservation decisions that benefit both elephants and the local communities.

To investigate elephant identification and social behaviour, our researchers employ photo-identification combined with the mark-recapture method, a widely used technique in ecological studies. This non-invasive approach allows us to track individual elephants over time, gaining valuable insights into their movement patterns and social associations. Each elephant is catalogued based on key characteristics such as sex, age, and unique physical features. Once an individual is recorded in our database, future sightings can be linked to past observations, enabling us to analyse site preference and social interactions over time.

Our research has revealed a striking finding: bull elephants spend on average, three times more time outside national parks and protected areas than within them, putting both the elephants and local communities at increased risk. Furthermore, while most bull elephants form short-term social bonds, some maintain long-term companions, highlighting the complexity of their social structures. This highlights the urgent need for conservation efforts to address the challenges of elephant movement beyond protected areas.

Understanding these movement patterns and social dynamics is critical for effective conservation and human-wildlife conflict mitigation. By studying how elephants navigate their environment and form relationships, we can better inform strategies to protect them while supporting the communities that share their landscapes.

Every research question investigated brings us one step closer to finding sustainable solutions to the challenges facing elephants and their ecosystems. None of this would be possible without your generosity. Your support empowers us to continue expanding our knowledge of the natural world and working towards a future where elephants and people can coexist.

From all of us at Elephants for Africa, thank you for believing in our mission and making a difference.

Researchers photographing elephants in the field

The bull elephants of the Makgadikgadi

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Nov 6, 2024
Elephant Highways and Hidden Gems

By Stephanie Kong | Managing Director

Camera traps being prepared for deployment

Dear Fellow Elephant Enthusiasts,

We are incredibly grateful for your generous contributions to our elephant research program. Thanks to your continued support, we’ve been able to continue our efforts in deploying camera traps across the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park and surrounding community lands. These traps are helping us gain crucial insights into elephant movements and habitat use in this unique region.

One of the most significant findings in recent years has been the increase in the number of female elephants in the area. When we first arrived in 2012, there were no females in this region. By 2014, we began seeing the first signs—tracks along the riverbed. Initially, the females were elusive, with only occasional spoor marking their presence, suggesting they came to the river at night. But today, we’re observing breeding herds regularly venturing down to the riverbed during the day, though they remain skittish.

This behavioural change is exciting and raises many questions about how elephants are adapting to their environment and how human activities may be influencing their patterns. Our research, supported by camera traps, continues to focus on elephant usage of the “elephant highways” along the western boundary of the MPNP and the impact of the re-erection of the fence in the area.

What’s more, the camera traps are revealing not only elephants but also an array of other species using these pathways. Some of the rarer species we’ve documented include aardvark, African wild dogs, and brown hyenas, offering us valuable insights into the wider ecosystem and its more elusive inhabitants.

We are excited to continue analysing this data and look forward to sharing more findings with you. Your contributions are making a lasting impact on elephant conservation and biodiversity research in Botswana, and we cannot thank you enough.

EfA Research Assistant deploying a camera trap

A bull elephant using an elephant highway

Fresh tracks help us decide where to place cameras

An elusive brown hyena captured on a camera trap

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Jul 10, 2024
What are these male elephants up to?.....

By Dr Kate Evans | Founder, CEO and PI

Collared male drinking by our research camp

Dear GlobalGiving Community,

We hope this message finds you well and in good spirits. It's time for an update on the male elephants of Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. First and foremost, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your generous support of our research objectives in Botswana. Your contributions allow us to continue tracking the movements of our collared elephants and understanding the environmental challenges they face in an ever-changing world. Despite recent difficulties, knowing that you and others support and champion our cause lightens our load..

You may remember from the last report that one of the collared elephants had died, and we recovered the collar, since then another elephant dropped his collar. We found the collar with the webbing broken in two….this webbing is tough, and it is very rare for it to split; perhaps the intense heat weakened it somewhat, but still, it would have taken quite some force to break it! How did this happen? We will never know for sure; my best guess is that he was in a fight; he was in his prime after all – perhaps there was competition for a mate? The only other potential scenario is that he got it caught on a tree or something– the latter is unlikely as we take great care when we fit them to lessen the likelihood of doing this, but not impossible. Either way, we have two collars now, not on the elephants we had put them on, which is frustrating. We would love to have a full data set of 10 male elephants for at least 2 years, but that is one of the many challenges of fieldwork. I recently collected them from camp and took them to the manufacturers in South Africa, where they will be refurbished for us; meaning we will soon be able to get our hands on the accelerometer data, which will help us interpret behaviours. Exciting stuff.

We are planning, permission and funding permitting, to re-collar the males that still have their collars early next year. Then we can select two others to collar with the refurbished collars, taking our collared male elephants back up to 10.

Once again, we extend our heartfelt thanks to you for your support. Your contributions enable us to continue our research and conservation efforts for the long-term conservation of this majestic and vital species.

With many thanks and appreciation,
The Elephants for Africa team

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