This week, the Think Elephants research team in
the Golden Triangle, Thailand, are joined by their 5th group of
Earthwatch volunteers.
Earthwatch is an organization whose mission is to ‘engage people worldwide in scientific field research and education in order to promote the
understanding and action necessary for a sustainable environment’. Pleasingly,
since this
May, 5 groups of volunteers have come
out to assist us with our research and important educational work. Volunteers help us conduct our behavioral experiments which are aimed at
fostering a better understanding of how elephants see their physical and social
worlds. The volunteers also help us in our community outreach and international
education initiatives which are aimed at bringing elephants—both physically and
virtually—to others in Thailand and around the
world.
Currently,
with this help from our volunteers, we are investigating how elephants navigate
their world, conducting different tasks to test the elephants’ sense
modalities. We are also developing a behavior ethogram with
which the Earthwatchers have been providing assistance. It’s always a great
experience to watch the elephants in the electric fence area exhibiting a
diverse range of behavior and making an array of vocalizations, all of which
are important and are recorded by the volunteers.
Here, Earthwatchers are observing three of our young elephants for our behavior ethogram
One of the aims of TEI is to promote English language
learning, using elephants as the central focus. Since Team 3 of Earthwatch, we have been visiting a
local school called Wang Lao and teaching the kids English. The kids love the lessons, and
the Earthwatchers enjoy them even more! The kids are really gaining a lot and have
come a long way since the first lesson we taught. Each
group has been focusing on elephant and human anatomy and has been trying to
find novel ways of teaching these topics, one of these being the ‘elephant
hokey pokey’! The kids have also learnt, and now frequently sing, the `heads
shoulders knees and toes song’.
TEI want to educate kids and get them excited and passionate
about conservation and research. We want to inspire the general public and the next
generation of government officials and conservationists. Without doubt, these English
lessons for the local kids, with which the volunteers lend their assistance,
are really crucial.
Our volunteers come from all over the world and from a
variety of backgrounds. Their contributions so far have been invaluable. For
example, we have had teachers with innovative ideas for our education
curriculum, and have been great at engaging the kids in a variety of ways, and
engineers who have provided inspirational ideas for our experiment designs. We
even used an idea from one volunteer and developed it into an experiment for
the elephants and, of course, all our volunteers are elephant enthusiasts who
have worked really hard and made a significant contribution to the team. Each
team so far as been very different from each other and each has made its own
distinctive contribution to our projects.
The awful reality is that elephants are endangered. The more
we understand their behavior, the more we can do to protect them in the wild.
If you want to make a difference by helping us learn more about elephants,
teaching the next generation and spreading the message of elephant science and
conservation, why not come and volunteer with us! To learn more about our Earthwatch
project, please visit the following website.
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