THE IVORY TRADE,
After a five-year hiatus, National Geographic Channel’s venerable “Explorer” documentary series relaunches with an investigation of the illegal ivory trade in Africa.
In “Explorer’s” new episode “Warlords of Ivory,” premiering tonight at 8, National Geographic Fellow, correspondent and veteran of the wildlife trafficking wars Bryan Christy tracks the path of ivory from the site of the kill to ivory carvers.
Ivory poaching is welldocumented. Some 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year for their tusks, and thousands of men and women are attacked, raped and murdered in the maelstrom of destruction. But “Warlords” takes the investigation a few steps further, illustrating how the ivory is stripped from the carcasses by increasingly militarized poachers, then transported across Africa to be traded for money and ammunition that is then used to sustain campaigns of crime and terrorism.
The key component of the investigation are artificial tusks implanted with a tracking device that enabled Christy and his team to follow their path through the marketplace to ivory carvers.
“One of the world’s best taxidermists, George Dante, makes this tusk for me,” said Christy, who also wrote National Geographic magazine’s September cover story, “Tracking Ivory.”
“It’s a combination of things. A very heavy resin. We experimented with a lot of different materials, and the weight has to be exactly right. These things are very dense, but basically it’s a resin. It’s painted with the same acrylic that NASCAR cars are painted with so that it can be thrown around. And the tracker inside was designed by a guy named Quintin Kermeen. ... Quinton does radio collars for all kinds of species. ... Quinton came up with a tracker you can embed in a python and follow it through the Everglades to see where exactly pythons are. It was sort of a dream-team scenario and then let’s do it.”
Not only did the weight of the tusk have to be right, so did the size. If it was too big, it would have to be cut down to be transported, which would reveal that it’s a fake.
Christy explained, “You want it to fit in a backpack, because probably the most popular way of moving ... right after the poaching incident, is it’s going to be put in a backpack, the guy gets on a motorbike and goes to the local consolidator. It’s a lot of anticipating. We’ve been on this project for a few years, so I know a lot of techniques in the field. I’ve spent time with ivory dealers. I’ve spent time with ivory carvers, and I know what they’re looking for. So it’s all anticipating, ‘OK, I want it to get all the way to the carver. So what does it need to look like to get there?’ ”
At this writing, Christy and his team had tracked their ersatz tusks through three countries, all the while fearing the transmitters would be discovered and destroyed once the tusk was cut into. And at several steps along the way, they thought their fears had been realized when the radio signal was lost. But the signal so far has reappeared.
“Our estimated battery life goes into the fall,” Christy said. “At some point, it will stop talking and in fact ... once it goes past its last battery date, we’ll know, OK, the battery has died. But in the interim, you don’t know.”