Caught! Night raiders who can’t be fenced out
A 11-month study by research scientist D.G. Ashoka Ranjeewa in a village bordering the Uda Walawe NP reveals interesting behavioural patterns and intellect of elephants. Kumudini Hettiarachchi reports
They came, they saw, they conquered, sometimes through the use of tools, and roamed freely and leisurely in the villages for many hours, before heading back into the National Park (NP). The electric fence drawn right around the Uda Walawe NP seemed like child’s play for 35 majestic bull-elephants and their intellect. Their modus operandi was ingenious.
The tasty morsels in the villages across the electric fence were tempting. How could they resist the paddy, banana, coconut, mango, manioc, papaya and vegetables, even though the villagers had toiled to cultivate them and were fiercely protective, yelling at them from tree-huts, bombarding them with aliwedi, lighting up the area with powerful electric torches or huge bonfires and even erecting electric fences.
“The crop-raiders came anyway,” says research scientist D.G. Ashoka Ranjeewa who has been studying wild elephant behaviour at the Uda Walawe NP for a long time and ventured into the electric fenceelephant equation in a ‘first’ such research in the country.
These bull-elephants dubbed ‘problem elephants’ who breached the electric fence, acted alone or in small groups of two to nine. They consisted of 21 mature adults (above 25 years old), five young adults (between 20 and 25 years old) and nine sub-adults (around 10-20 years old). In Ashoka’s research he never came across any cow elephants and their babies roaming the villages.
The bull-elephants would come to the electric fence and the ‘popular’ method of exit through it was either pushing down the fence-posts with their legs or butting them down with their heads. “This would disable the wires carrying the current and allow them to walk across,” says Ashoka, pointing out that they also knew that the posts were free of electricity. The other entry-points the elephants used were the same openings that the villagers used but forgot to put up the spiral wires as night descended.
It was as the evening shadows lengthened from dusk to night, anytime between 6-9 p.m. that these giants of the wild walked into the villages from the NP, restricting the humble men, women and children to their homes and changing their lives. They