According to monitoring with tracking collars by the Mount Elgon Foundation (MEF), last year at least 60 elephants crossed from Kenya into the Ugandan side of Mount Elgon, a vast volcanic mountain that straddles the border, returning to a part of their natural range where they’ve not been seen for over 40 years. MEF funds community projects aimed at reducing forest degradation and raising awareness of environmental issues, as well as a team of 18 community scouts on the Kenyan side of the mountain, part of the East African Wild Life Society’s Mount Elgon Elephant Project. MEF’s chair, Chris Powles, told Mongabay that back in 2022, scouts tracked four elephants crossing the Suam river, which marks the border between the two countries. Drone footage of elephants on the Ugandan side of Mount Elgon. Image courtesy of UWA. In an email interview, Powles said a number of factors could explain the elephants’ return, though it’s impossible to say for certain what’s prompted them to reestablish themselves. “[These] include the growth of the elephant population on the Kenya side, the increasing human pressure on the Kenya side, the relative safety for them on the Uganda side as it is all national park (unlike in Kenya),” he wrote. “And, maybe, the elephants alive from the time when others of them were killed in Uganda have now died naturally and so their memory of what happened in Uganda may have passed.” In the late 1970s and 80s, elephants in Uganda and other parts of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.