Bonjour!

My name is Bobbi Estabrook. I work on behalf of the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) in the Cornell University Bioacoustics Research Program. Over the next couple of months, I will be in the Republic of Congo and will monitor Africa forest elephants. The research will take place at a forest clearing, Mbeli bai, located within Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in northern Congo. From there, I will monitor elephants during the day and night using both acoustic recording devices and thermal imaging technology.

Here is a brief synopsis of how this project should work: Eight acoustic recorders will be set up around the perimeter of the bai (the “acoustic array”) and will record continuously for thirty days. Those recordings will eventually allow us to locate the source of a vocalizing individual within the array, at which point we hope to ID the individual and determine if it is a male, female, juvenile, adult, etc, using thermal imaging technology. A thermal camera will be used during the study to capture both day and, more importantly, nighttime activity of the elephants in the bai. With this technology, we will hopefully be able to count the number of elephants in the bai at a given time and ID individuals based on physical features picked up by the thermal camera. Overall, this information will give us a better understanding of how the elephants use forest clearing, when they tend to visit the clearing, and who within their subpopulation, tend to frequent the bai most often. This study will also allow us to strengthen our use of acoustic monitoring as well as explore the potential benefits of thermal imaging in a conservation context.

I hope to see a lot of elephants and gorillas at Mbeli Bai. Mbeli bai is monitored by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and I am lucky enough to be collaborating with them on this project. The acoustic recordings collected during this study will contain the recorded vocalizations of nearly any vocalizing species in the area, including western lowland gorillas; a keystone species that WCS-Congo focuses most of their conservation efforts on. I will train some of their members on sound analysis during my stay at Mbeli, so I’m pretty excited to be able to help them out.

I will try and keep you posted as much as possible as things progress. I will surely take many photographs and a few videos during my travels and observation shifts, so I look forward to sharing those with you. I hope you are all well!

Bonne continuation,
-Bobbi