Lately, we have developed a little bit of a routine at the park, which for the most includes many of the same things week after week, such as data collection on elephant activity budgets, nearest neighbor info, herd activity data etc. However, every once in a while, we have the opportunity to get involved in something a little different, like feeding three of our elephants little plastic beads in an attempt to see how long it takes them to pass through their digestive system.

Of course there are many variables that could affect this study, which means we may have to do it on a few occasions in order to get reliable results, but hey, who would not want to do this one again. So, onto the project.

Materials needed: 20 oranges halved, creating 40 pieces. 30 plastic beads in 3 different colors resulting in 10 beads in each of the three colors.

Our test subjects:  Harry, Shungu and Mashudu

Object of the exercise: Feed each of the three elephants 10 orange halves studded with one color set of beads for a midnight snack and wait to see when they come out the following day. I can only imagine how lucky these three felt in the middle of the night being fed highly prized oranges for a snack... You may have noticed that there are 10 orange halves left over... those went bead free to Tosha, who's pen happens to be in between our test subjects and she would have been most unhappy and highly agitated had she not received treats as well... So, to keep the peace, our big moody girl was fed as well.

So, 6:30 this morning, Lana and I show up all ready for our day of dung digging. Elephants have notoriously bad digestive systems, and thus we did not expect that we would see the first bead within at least 8 hours of ingesting it. Now, this process is nothing like the simple act of collecting a dung sample and requires one to painstakingly comb through every square inch of ejected dung, which, when it comes to Harry, is allot of dung.  We spent the entire day from 6:30 am to 6:00 pm, sifting through a mountain of dung only to recover 2 measly beads.

Tomorrow will be a new day with new dung and hopefully far more beads.