Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Surveying elephants is hard, risky work. Dedicated biologists have been doing this challenging task across Africa for decades.

In Southern Africa, people live alongside elephants, but not always peacefully. The growing reports of human-elephant conflict have triggered calls for elephant culls in some countries, like Zimbabwe.

This story originally published in the September 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine. See more digitized stories from our archives here. The biologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton is walking up on an ...

Surveying elephants is hard, risky work. Dedicated biologists have been doing this challenging task across Africa for decades. Systematic surveying started in the late 1960s but has been sporadic, as ...

George Wittemyer receives funding from the U.S.A. National Science Foundation and Save the Elephants, a Kenya based non-profit organization. He is a professor at Colorado State University and serves ...