A herd of wild elephants migrates hundreds of kilometers through populated areas in China. The billion people follow the trek as if spellbound. Does a solar storm let the animals run around without a goal?
Kunming (dpa) – Who knows what drives the wild elephants? The whole of China has been puzzling over a herd of pachyderms that has set out on an odyssey north for weeks.
Why did you leave the subtropical forests of your nature reserve in Xishuangbanna on the southwest border with Laos and Myanmar? They have already covered more than 500 kilometers. On the way they devastated fields, plundered crops, and crossed roads through villages and towns. Several hundred incidents were counted. The damage is estimated at the equivalent of more than one million euros.
The “insanely sweet” and “cute” elephants are the stars in social networks. Drones film the herd from the air as they cuddle up with their young calves, lie lined up between trees on the ground and sleep peacefully. China’s media keep billions of people informed every day, sending breaking news on mobile phones: “Wild elephant herd stops on the way north, while lonely male remains”, informed the renowned business magazine “Caixin” on Monday with a quick push message as if stock trading had been halted would.
The herd was waiting in Yimen, “on Saturday longer called for the male,” which is 16 kilometers away, says Professor Chen Mingyong from Yunnan University there. “Then the lone elephant moved in the direction of the group.” The protected Asian elephants are social and have a sense of family, it is said. They have been on their way for more than a year. Most recently they even threatened to invade the seven million metropolis of Kunming. It would fit in with the 15th World Species Conservation Conference (Cop15), which is supposed to meet in the capital of Yunnan Province – but not until October.
It is also joked that the elephants, like the communist revolutionaries once did in the 1930s, went on a “long march” to perhaps attend the party’s 100th birthday celebrations in Beijing on July 1st. The densely populated north is definitely a wrong path. So, is the lead elephant inexperienced or confused? Xie Can of China’s Academy of Sciences, an expert on geomagnetic fields, believes something happened to the elephants’ innate migratory instinct. “It could be that a magnetic storm, triggered by unusual solar activity, triggered the instinct,” he is quoted as saying.
As is so often the case, however, it is more the human being to blame. The nature reserve in Xishuangbanna has shrunk by 40 percent, reports Professor Zhang Li from the Pedagogical University in Beijing. Agriculture and settlements are displacing the forest. Better protection of elephants – also from poachers – has increased their numbers in China from 180 in the 1980s to 300 today.
“On the one hand we have a growing population, on the other hand the suitable habitat is decreasing,” the ecology professor describes the dilemma in a TV interview. “This is a classic conflict between species protection and the development of the rural economy.” In his view, it is “the key factor why elephants emigrate from their homeland”. So it should be very difficult to get the elephants to return.
The large animals that can become aggressive when they feel threatened are described as stressed anyway. Because of the hype. Hundreds of onlookers gather when their arrival is expected. Missiles with cameras circling overhead. A crisis team with 300 helpers has been following every step for weeks. Information on where the animals are is given to village committees in real time. Roads are then blocked with trucks or garbage trucks in order to keep them away.
The clever elephants have long since learned that more nutritious food is easier to find in agriculture than in the forests of their reserve, where they mostly only eat small plants, as experts describe. Villagers therefore lure them away from their fields and settlements with tons of food such as sugar cane, bananas, corn and other grains. The animals, which can eat 200 to 300 kilograms a day, find food again and again quite easily on their migration – and thus move further away from their natural way of life.
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