Collaring of animals for research

Wildlife biologists and veterinarians have to keep them abreast with the developments in technology. We employ radio collars to study the animal movements. These collars have been very helpful in monitoring animal movements. The data derived from this is applied by the park managers to manage the animals. For example, elephants are known to migrate along corridors and being associated with human-wildlife conflicts. Once the data is downloaded, maps are drawn and it’s easy to explain to anyone how these animals move. A practical example is giving data on poaching. One elephant that had been collared, showed no movements upon downloading of the data, and this raised an alarm, and people were sent to the ground to find out what was happening. Just to find a carcass, with the collar but minus the tusks. This tells the management to boost on security and surveillance in such areas.

This lion moves from Lewa into Samburu. Lions are also involved in conflicts and we put collars in order to track their movements. The rangers are trained on how to use the receivers and report back to office whenever they see or pick signals of the collared animals

Collaring of elephants

The vet was involved in collaring of 4 elephants in Marsabit National park. The KWS researcher and Save the elephant team employed GSM collars on elephants in order to understand their enviroments. The data collected is very useful for management planning. For example we can easily tell the elaphant migratory corridors buy seeing how these animals move

The terrain in Marsabit is inaccessible using a vehicle hence we darted the animals from a helicopter. Use of a chopper for darting is very expensive, but the value of the data collected outruns the cost.

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