Sometimes it takes a VIP visit (learning more about the Galieng eles)

By John Roberts 6 May 2008 05:27:00

The other day, by one of the sheer coincidences that governs these things, the same day we were both featured in the Washington Post, Khun Lek and her team from the Elephant Nature Park found time to come and visit the Foundation and Anantara camps.

    I've been down there several times, enjoyed it and, each time, extended an invitation for a reciprocal visit.  But Lek's a busy lady carrying the cause of Thai elephants internationally and so her visit was long overdue.  As with all these things it was work as Lek is helping Alex Godfrey of the Newcastle University (UK) and Naresuan University (Phitsanoluk, Thailand) to compile as complete a picture of the demographics (or technically, I suppose eleographics) of the domestic elephant population of Northern Thailand.

    A set of figures also long overdue; as early as 1997 Richard Lair and the FAO were pointing to the lack of baseline data in helping conserve and manage the domestic population.

    So Alex has left us a list of questions for all our mahouts - a project given to Mor Cherry as the closest thing we have to a resident academic nowadays.  Interestingly this is the second MSc we have helped on in the past few weeks, the first from Dr Lorraine Moore of the University of Manchester being perhaps more truly demographic in dealing with elephant people - a set of fun interviews in which we learned much about the folks who have been living with us for a time.

    But back to eles, Lek was able to supply us with two pieces of much more juicy news - first some good news about Boun Na, it turns out that the calf that we have always believed to be, kind of oddly, with a Japanese family in Chiang Mai is actually a famous young bull called Jungle Boy living at Lek's place, having been bought by the family and placed there.

    Secondly, and perhaps more interesting to those who don't look Boun Na daily in the eye or get to visit Jungle Boy on a regular basis, our very own Phu Ki, it seems is a superstar - we have known for a long time that some of the elephant shots from Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow Exhibition were taken at Lek's place - scrubbing through the website as I have been doing I think I also recognise Pinnewalla and, perhaps, Angkor? - but it is an excellent artistic website without a back button so you only get one chance at a lot of shots so who can really tell?

    Well, it turns out that when Mr Colbert needed a tusker who could pose (oh, and don't we know he can pose) Phu Ki was bought in as a stunt double for his brother who lives permanently at Lek's - so I searched the website (http://www.ashesandsnow.org/) and I think I found at least one picture.

    You have to hang the boss and your computer department's bandwidth usage monitoring, go into the enhanced experience and then spend a couple of worthwhile hours poking around amidst the art (I did this on the elephant camp wireless on a rainy Sunday afternoon - it is, after all, what Sunday afternoons are for).  Of all the tuskers up there, we found one shot of him; he's the boy half sitting down in an endless, inch-deep, placid lake - there may well be others as we only saw about half the shots up there.

    So, good luck, let the elephant pictures be your reason to be there and treat a pic of Phu Ki as a bonus if you find him!

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