@jasperdoest

A baby elephant walks with its family on one of many paths that generations of forest elephants have cut through the rainforest, leading from tree to fruit-bearing tree. Elephants pass on the knowledge of what to forage, where to find it, and when it’s likely to be ripe. Forest elephants have an extraordinary low birth rate: they don’t reach sexual maturity until the age of 23 and only give birth every 5 or 6 years. If they are getting poorer quality food due to a decreased production in fruit, then the population’s ability to recover will be compromised, even with good protection. In order to tell this story, I needed to visualise the role of the elephants in their natural habitat. And the only way to do that in such a dense forest was by using camera trap systems. Based on the information the scientists provided, we asked National Geographic’s photo engineer Tom O’Brien (@mechanicalphoto) to build us elephant proof camera traps that would allow us an intimate peak into the elephants’ elusive lives in the forest. Tom put a tremendous amount of effort into this and even visited a zoo to learn about elephants…seriously hardcore and I really love him for that. Eventually Tom sent over 1100lbs (close to 500kg) of custom designed camera trapping gear to Gabon for me to install in the forest. It took a while before we started to get results, but once we started to understand their behaviour, our efforts started to pay off. Equipment photo: @thiessenphoto & @beckythale. PS. There’s only 30 minutes between me placing the camera trap and the elephants walking by in the video.