Ryan Helcoski: Today I'm going to take you in the field with me as we search for an elephant carcass in South Africa. Now this particular search took place towards the end of November, which is late spring for us here. The temperature climbs daily past 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's hot enough that most animals, including the lions, buffalo, zebra, kudu, elephants and many others, rest in the shade while cicadas drone endlessly in the trees.
Through the bush as we hike, we navigate through thick grasses, tiny shrubs and stunted trees, keeping an eye out for wildlife, both to observe and because, well, there are large animals like lions here, and we do have to be mindful as we near the carcass site. This one is a female that died in 2023. We find bones scattered throughout the scene. Some we know, were dragged away by hyenas, while others were taken away by fellow elephants that revisit the graves of their fallen kin.
It takes a while, but finally, emerging from the bush and in the sweltering heat, no less, the grave site opens before us.
So we just got to the site. We are now trying to determine the center. There's bones scattered everywhere. You can still smell the body. We're going to start to look for the tail and see if we could determine where she died.
At the periphery of the clearing, the grass is lush, the flowers are in bloom, and the trees are green and teeming with insect life. However, at the center of the carcass site, soil is bare, littered with bones and old gut contents, dung from visiting elephants and tail hairs from the deceased. It is here that we unload our equipment and determine the center of the carcass site. Desmond decides it should be named Sireni, meaning graveyard in Songa, which is also the name of a nearby bush camp.
After marking our position and recording a description of the location, we lay transects in the cardinal and inter-cardinal direction. And then we walk those transects, mapping and weighing the location of any bones and dung that we pass scapula.
After we finish mapping, we then set some camera traps and mark the location of the skull. Finally, we pack up and head back to the main trail for now, that's all we'll do, but this is just one part of the whole. We'll return in 2025 to remap the bone fields, measure dung and check the camera traps, to get an idea of how the bones move around these sites and who's moving them in doing so, we hope to learn more about the ecological impact of elephant carcasses. What we'll find, we don't yet know which is part of the reason I'm here in the first place, but I'll explain a bit more next week.
