The 'Silva-Snyder-Smoker'

When I left for Sri Lanka this summer, I was expecting to collect a summer's worth of baseline data on elephant damage at farms around the park. I dedicated a lot of time to internet research in the months preceding my departure, pouring over journal articles in search of methods for sampling crop damage. Most of the articles only provided vague 'teasers' of a description: "the paddy field was visually surveyed for elephant damage." Others were slightly more promising, "elephant damage to paddy fields was measured by pacing out the damaged area." Yeaaaa, I didn't realize just how unhelpful these articles were until I got here. And I feel I am being generous by using the word unhelpful, useless would be more like it; there may well be detailed articles on measuring damage to rice paddies, but I haven't found a satisfactory one yet. Most of the damage I saw this summer didn't lend itself to being visually estimated or paced out. Instead of encountering large, obvious patches of rice that had been munched on by elephants, more frequently I found 1 to 2 acre paddy fields filled with a plethora of elephant footprints that were hiding under tall stalks of rice - how in the world do you accurately measure that?! As a result, I spent a lot of time this summer fumbling around and trying to figure out what the heck to do!

You may be thinking, 'Well geez Lauren, weren't you out there last year?! Why were things such a surprise for you?' You are right, I was here last year and I, too, was surprised by how unconfident I felt when I gazed upon my first paddy field. At first glance, only a few footprints were visible, which tempted me to think, "Well of course! What a simple task it will be to simply walk from footprint to footprint, and count and measure each individually." That was before I actually stepped into the field and began counting them- turns out there were a lot of them! The next thing I knew, several of the farmers requested that I not walk through the rice (they don't want additional damage). At this point, I began to panic slightly. Ok, so scrap the idea of walking from footprint to footprint, I will hop, or rather leap since they are often spaced quite far apart. What a disappointment that idea turned out to be. Ashani and I spent the better part of one particularly hot, sunny day leaping around to well over 200 footprints. The density of footprints was so great that although we counted a TON of them, we covered less than 1/4 of the field!

But do not fear! It takes more than a few footprints, even if they are massive elephant footprints, to scare off Lauren Snyder! So I went back to the drawing board, rallied all of my creative thought, and conferred with my colleagues. Our first idea was a tad elaborate and in the end turned out to be an epic fail, though I maintain that with the proper tools and some small adjustments it could be successful. We named it 'The Silva-Snyder-Smoker' after its inventors: Dr. Shermin de Silva, Lauren Snyder, and Ashani Smoker. To describe it briefly, the contraption consists of a 1m x 1m quadrat (made from sawed-off tree branches held together by twisty ties and twine) that is suspended from a 50m length of plastic rope (as you can see, we used only the highest quality supplies (actually those were the highest quality supplies available in Sri Lanka)). Attached firmly to the rope and centered over the quadrat is my digital camera. The idea was for Ashani and I to walk along parallel bundts (raised mud walkways that crisscross the paddy fields) with the quadrat/camera suspended over the rice between us. One of us would draw in the quadrat, set the camera on timer, and then position the camera over the desired area by letting out or taking in rope - thus there would be no need for us to walk through the rice. In theory, it seemed a fantastic idea...in practice not so much.
It is such an outrageous looking contraption that we had a crowd of farmers following us as made our way to one of the paddies for our inaugural trial. It was evident from the very beginning that this idea would not work. For one, we had not taken into account that we might encounter natural obstacles, such as trees, along the bundts, which would inhibit our progress. One unfortunate sapling was unceremoniously removed by a farmer with a machete. We also found that the rope was not sturdy enough to support the quadrat - we were unable to pull the rope taught, so the whole thing sagged to the ground . A well intentioned farmer ran out to the middle of the field to support the rope with a stick, but this defeated the entire purpose of the contraption - to stay out of the field! In the end, the device was an epic fail, but it was heartening to see how motivated the farmers were to help us succeed.

Since the "Silva-Snyder-Smoker," we have developed a couple slightly less outrageous methods for collecting data, but unfortunately they are not nearly as entertaining so I won't bother talking about them right now. Fortunately for me, I have 8 months to figure out how I am going to tackle these issues next year. I'm thinking the fun's really going to begin when I start coming out in the monsoon season...