ELEPHANT CORRIDORS

Tanzania is home to approximately 64,000 elephants, and as the planet’s largest land mammal, their survival depends on their ability to migrate hundreds of miles to varying seasonal habitat ranges, and to reach other populations of elephants to ensure genetic diversity for the species. Elephants migrate using specific routes that are embedded in elephant history and span generations.

An elephant corridor can take the shape of a narrow, streamlined linkage between habitat zones, or it can be a wide movement area with elephants dispersed across the landscape. Today, the integrity of these historic corridors is threatened by land intensive farming, and the development of villages, roads, railways and power lines. This fragmentation of habitat breaks up the key connectivity routes for elephants, forcing them into confined protected areas and village land, and often resulting in increased human-elephant conflict.

Elephants are exceptional navigators. The matriarchs have decades of experience and a mental map of migratory routes that they pass down to the next generation. They are also highly adaptable, which is critical to their survival in an ever changing landscape.

The 3km-wide migration corridor bisects Upper Kitete village, and has up to 100 elephants at any given time. They move through the thin forested strip in their family herds, climbing down the steep escarpment at night to reach the Selela salt lake below, before returning to the forest at dawn.

Each herd is respectful of another, and every care is taken to follow the safest routes through the corridor. However, venturing onto farmland on either side is inevitable.

In Northern Tanzania, just three elephant corridors remain from an original nine, which now under increasing pressures from a crowded landscape of developed towns, rural villages, and tarmac roads that cater for the thousands of tourists who visit the National Parks and world-famous Serengeti, which makes up the ‘Northern Circuit’.

The Upper Kitete corridor, where our project is based, is an essential migratory route for the elephants and a biodiverse habitat range linking the Ngorongoro Crater with Selela forest below the escarpment. It bisects Upper Kitete Village, with farms cultivated on the east and west side. The local communities depend on its natural resources for the collection of firewood, water and medicinal plants, which can lead to deforestation and fragmentation.

The valley below the escarpment was once forested but due to cattle crazing and human activity, is now a semi-arid landscape with tree clusters. The elephant’s route to Lake Manyara National Park is compromised, and needs a community-wide effort to restore it to its original state.

Wild Survivors and community members scan the escarpment and valley below discussing elephant tracks and villager routes to local markets which overlap habitat areas.