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October 18, 2021

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‘Guardians’ recall saga of migrating elephants

Zhang Sijie, 33, a fireman with the Yunnan Forest Fire Brigade, came face-to-face with an elephant this year.

Zhang and fellow officers were tasked with monitoring and guarding a herd of elephants that had left rainforests in Yunnan Province and were migrating northwards.

Previously he had only seen elephants on TV. But in Gaoliangdi Village in Kunming’s Jinning District, he came across one only 10 meters away.

“For about 10 seconds, I could clearly see its face, the wrinkles on its skin and even the eyelashes,” Zhang told Shanghai Daily. “I held my breath and the only sound I could hear was my heartbeat. After the elephant judged that I wouldn’t cause any hurt, it left.”

Many people who care about wild animals will remember that some months ago, a herd of wild elephants made a long trek northward from rainforest to urban areas in Yunnan with Kunming their destination.

The elephants and their “guardians” in Yunnan became a focus of the whole world.

This week, the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) in Kunming opened with the debut of a short documentary “Elephants’ Journey in Yunnan.”

The documentary explains how the number of wild elephants has doubled in the past three decades in Yunnan, and how the Yunnanese co-exist with them.

During the Leaders’ Summit of the COP15, President Xi Jinping said in keynote speech delivered via video link that the story of the northward travel and return of the elephants shows the vivid results of China’s endeavor to protect wild animals.

On the night of May 24, a group of “unexpected guests” arrived at Eshan County in central Yunnan. A herd of Asian elephants, which lives in the tropical rainforests of southern Yunnan, left its habitat in the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve and marched northward toward populated countryside.

On their journey, a baby elephant was born, and two elephants returned home halfway. Sometimes the herd entered villagers and stopped by villagers’ houses for food.

Since the wild elephants are sensitive and could attack, the Yunnan government set up a response team to track the herd day and night and evacuate residents to ensure the safety of both humans and elephants.

However, keeping an eye on an elephant herd is hard work.

Yang Xiangyu, 31, also from the Yunnan Forest Fire Brigade, recalled that he was dispatched to Eshan on May 27.

“At that time, I thought it would just be an emergency task to locate the elephant herd, and we could be back within a week,” he told Shanghai Daily.

“But later I came to know that it’s a tough job and would take a long time.”

None of the firemen left the team and were all very willing to protect both the elephants and the people along their track, said Yang.

“We are used to monitoring forest fires and where the fire will spread,” Yang said. “How it will develop can be judged by factors like the terrain and the intensity of fire.

“But we’ve never monitored wild living animals. Where the elephants would go and how the journey would unfold was uncertain for us."

So they had to study the behavior of Asian elephants from experts and then judged the possible route based on the distribution of land, water sources and mountains.

From the practice, they've collected lots of experience on how to monitor the herd.

Their monitoring work lasted for 116 days, which tracked the herd for nearly 1,300 kilometers, covering 10 districts in four cities.

Sometimes it could be really difficult. The elephants usually sleep in the day and move at night so the firemen had their busiest work in the night hours, which required them to keep a clear mind.

The firemen could only sleep for three or four hours a day, and once a team had to keep up its monitoring work for as long as 26 hours straight.




 

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