whispering like dried parchment.
An old bull in Botswana.
Conservation groups have been adding GPS tracking beacons inside the tusks of elephants and rhinos, secured smoothly from sight with dentistry paste. Besides jailing some poachers, and tracking some of the elephant’s wild wanderings (see below), they found a surprising benefit – a map of land mine locations.
One of the elephants stepped on a land mine in Angola, and it was a traumatic sight for the herd. They learned to associate the smell of land mines with danger and to pass this knowledge on. So when the herd migrates, they stop and purposely walk around land mines that they smell. By overlying their myriad GPS tracks on satellite imagery, the trackers can deduce land mine locations in open places.
Leave a Reply